References in Popular Culture
While wendigos have been referred to in literature for many decades (most notably in Algernon Blackwood's 1910 story "The Wendigo," which introduced the legend to horror fiction, and in Stephen King's novel Pet Sematary), recently they have become something of a stock character in horror and fantasy films and television, along the lines of werewolves and vampires, usually bearing very little resemblance to the Native American legends. A notable exception is Jean Zimmerman's 2012 novel, The Orphanmaster, which features a plot centered around the Wendigo and Wendigo psychosis.
Creatures based upon the wendigo appear in the movies Wendigo and Ravenous and in episodes of the television series The X-Files, Blood Ties, Charmed, Supernatural, Haven, Grimm and others.
They also appear as characters in a number of computer and video games, including Final Fantasy, The Legend of Dragoon, and the Warcraft Universe, as well as role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Additionally, there is a Marvel Comics character known as "Wendigo".
In one episode of the animated series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, they are portrayed as spirits of disharmony and hatred. The windigos feed off of the hatred between the three feuding tribes of ponies and bring about a deep, cold winter that kills all of their crops and further fuels the hatred. In the end, the windigos are defeated when the assistants to the leaders of the tribes are gathered in a cave, the leaders frozen solid near them and the entrance frozen shut, set aside their differences and find friendship.
They are referenced in music as well: the Cree singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie's song "The Priests of the Golden Bull" asserts that the "money junkies" of the world are Wendigos.
In the Dark Horse comics, B.P.R.D., a hunter named Daryl is turned into a wendigo, and features prominently in the storyline.
Read more about this topic: Wendigo
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The very nursery tales of this generation were the nursery tales of primeval races. They migrate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded into the “tale divine” of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.”
—Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930)