Summary
In a kaleidoscope of slapstick superstition, a striving junior clerk—equal parts Faust and Buster Keaton—turns his cramped apartment into a frantic altar of omens: dream-book incantations at dawn, mattress-hurdling exorcisms, salt avalanches that blind the cook, and a horseshoe smuggled like contraband relics. His wife, a pragmatic Penelope in drop-waist silk, watches the domestic carnival with arched brow, urging him to channel mania into one impeccable dinner for the boss. Fate, however, is a prankish dramaturge: ink geysers across gabardine, mirrors fracture into prophetic spider-webs, black cats stalk like furry Greek choruses, and every sidewalk crack becomes a fault-line of destiny. The long-awaited promotion lands—only for the calendar to unveil its final jest: Friday the 13th. In renouncing his pantheon of charms, our hero hurls the iron talisman skyward; it returns like a vengeful boomerang, knocking the employer cold and rewriting triumph into cosmic punchline.
Synopsis
A young business man is on the edge of advancement and eager to take advantage of every token of good luck. He even consults a dream book and jumps over the bed ten times to overcome the evil influence of a bad dream. His wife is nearly distracted by his absurdities, but she tolerates them and suggests that he invite his employer to dine with them. His agitation only increases. He spills salt and throws a lot of it over his shoulder into the eyes of the house servant and thus loses a good cook on the day of the dinner. He finds a horseshoe and hides it in a box near his entrance door, dropping it on a mirror as he does so. He also discovers a four-leaf clover to avert disaster. He is so nervous at the office that he soils his employer's trousers with ink and is given a day off. It is an eventful day. After lunch he walks out with his wife, carefully avoiding stepping on a crack, "for luck you lack." He is delighted to be followed by a black cat and makes a cushion of his coat picking up pins. After all these preparations, and after the dinner, he is offered the desired position and his employer leaves. His wife now shows him it is Friday the 13th. He suddenly decides to give up superstition. He throws the horseshoe out of the door. Calamity. His employer is brought back insensible, hit on the head by a horseshoe.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I watched Hoodooed I spilled coffee on my keyboard—an irony the film would relish. Shot in 1919 and released the following year, this two-reel confection runs barely twenty minutes, yet it compresses the entire pathology of modern superstition into a tumble of sight gags so precise they feel like algebraic equations.
Carter DeHaven—rubber-faced, pencil-thin, always on the balls of his feet—plays the superstitious striver like a man negotiating a minefield of invisible tripwires...."
