With yet another Scream sequel looming as I write this, remembrance of the iconic filmmaker who started and conceived it all overwhelms me. Wes Craven (1939-2015) left an indelible legacy that could effortlessly fill an entire section in the horror hall of fame all by itself. From revered cult classics like The Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes to successful groundbreakers such as Scream and A Nightmare On Elm Street – franchises that would grow into household names, not just in horror but in pop culture in general – Craven ranks among the greatest of greats on whose shoulders many a horror filmmaker has stood, and still stands to this day.
Browsing through his portfolio it’s not hard to discern Craven’s filmmaking development arch. Starting with edgy indies, he would soon expand his scope, a desire he already harbored when developing ‘Hills’ until his then-producer Peter Locke, made it clear that he was keen on seeing the underground success of ‘Last House’ repeated. Craven was running on financial fumes at the time, and this would momentarily force him to back down on his creative ambitions. But already budding in Swamp Thing, his unique blend of assertive horror with satire, humor and play on clichés would come to full fruition in ‘Nightmare’, later in his career adding self-referencing metafiction into the mix in his Scream sequels.
The Serpent And The Rainbow is a bit of an outlier in Craven’s body of work. While still successful, albeit moderately, at the box office, it never made the name for itself that many of his other titles would, and even the advent of home media couldn’t change that. The movie contains one of his frequent and oft-explored motifs – the netherworld between dream and reality – and features a popular theme – zombies – but also distinctly differs in style from what many have to come expect from him, with its tone more leaning into that of a pseudo-documentary. In this article, I will try to make sense of why I think the movie holds a unique place to this day, not just in Craven’s legacy but in the horror genre as a whole.
The Serpent And The Rainbow follows the exploits of Dr. Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman, Independence Day, Lost Highway), an anthropologist who travels the globe in search of medicinal herbs that might benefit mankind. After an ominous burial sequence in what we would eventually find out to have taken place in Haiti, the movie starts off with Dennis’ field trip into the Peruvian Amazon basin, where he has a drug-induced premonition when visiting a local tribe. After he comes to, he finds the village deserted and his helicopter pilot killed. But he’s guided his way out of the jungle by a jaguar and eventually finds his way back to Boston.
Back home, his mentor Dr. Earl Schoonbacher (Michael Gough, Batman Forever, Sleepy Hollow) arranges a meeting with big pharma mogul Dr. Andrew Cassedy (Pail Guilfoyle, Air Force One, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) who shows Dennis the original medical death certificate of Christophe Durand (Conrad Roberts, The Mosquito Coast), a Haitian resident, along with his photograph of later date proving that he’s somehow still very much alive. Cassedy suspects an as yet unknown drug to be involved and sees an opportunity to develop a better anesthetic. So he tasks Dennis to go to Haiti, find out what’s at play, and come back with the drug.
After initially scoffing at the idea of resurrection and ‘zombification’, Dennis accepts Cassedy’s engagement and off to Haiti he goes, one of the poorest countries in the world amidst the throes of ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier’s dictatorship and the reign of terror by his secret police, the feared Tonton Macoutes. Arrived in Port-au-Prince, he meets up with Dr. Marielle Duchamp (Cathy Tyson, Priest, Band Of Gold), an elegant Haitian doctor running a needy local clinic for the mentally challenged and it is here, around 15 minutes in, where the movie gets to the meat of its story.
Dennis’ attempts to find Christophe puts him at odds with and in the crosshairs of the ruthless Captain Dargent Peytraud (Zakes Mokae, Cry Freedom, Dust Devil), who runs the Haitian secret police. Aside from violence, Peytraud also appears to draw power from black magic. Dennis finds some protection from Lucien Celine (Paul Winfield, Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, The Terminator), a Vodou priest and his tenuous ally. His quest will ultimately lead Dennis to a showy scam artist named Louis Mozart (Brent Jennings, Moneyball, All American), who surprisingly also appears to possess deep knowledge of the drug that Dennis is after, when his antics are exposed. But getting safely back to Boston will prove to be problematic, with revolution brewing in Haiti and Peytraud hot on his heels, also spiritually.
The Serpent And The Rainbow was penned by Richard Maxwell and Adam Rodman and inspired by the eponymous book by real-life anthropologist Wade Davis, published in 1985. In his book, Davis details his research into the process of making zombies in Haiti by investigating the case of Clairvius Narcisse, a Haitian man who was purportedly zombified and subsequently enslaved, and on whom the movie’s persona Christophe is based. The book furthermore intricately details the composition of the ‘zombie drug’, involving a mixture of puffer fish, dried toad, sea worms, various other ingredients and additives, and an intricate system of Vodou rituals.
The crux of Davis’ findings was that ‘zombification’ is a chemically induced near-death experience, followed up by keeping the ‘resurrected zombie’ compliant by drugging him or her with devil’s trumpet, a weed containing a hallucinogenic alkaloid. The whole phenomenon is furthermore amplified by religious conviction and fear. Scientific validity of Davis’ research and resultant findings have been contested and remain controversial, though not conclusively refuted, to this day. Criticism from the academic community was mainly directed against presumed insufficient scientific quality of his research, i.e. inadequate peer group testing and experiment verification, consistency of chemical tests on base material, and so on; accusations that Davis in turn contradicted.
Craven’s movie incorporates and follows Davis’ findings quite closely, particularly with the process Louis Mozart takes us through in the movie, barring a few dramatic liberties. Given his proclivity for dream worlds, Craven weaves quite a bit of metaphysical, or magical if you will, subtext into the proceedings. Interestingly, filmmaker Richard Stanley (Dust Devil, Color Out Of Space) made a documentary for BBC in 2000, broadcast in 2002, about the magical aspects of the zombie phenomenon in Haiti called The White Darkness. He went in as level-headed as possible, but his experiences there seem to retroactively, and likely incidentally, support Craven’s adaptations.
What sets The Serpent And The Rainbow apart from almost every other zombie film ever made since Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), is that it takes its subject matter completely serious. Vodou is treated respectfully as the predominant syncretic religion in real-life Haiti. Rites and processions are authentic and locations are real; the movie was shot on location in Haiti and Hispaniolan neighbor Dominican Republic. Possession is not an evil entity randomly inhabiting someone’s faculties, but a religious experience, a state of ecstasy and an inherent way of life. Zombies are nothing like the cannibalistic undead that we’ve come to expect from pop culture, but ordinary living people who’ve been robbed of their free will, and who’re now condemned to face and serve the bokor in their darkest dreams.
But Craven also knows that his movie is first and foremost a feature film, and neither a full-fledged dramatized documentary nor a social or religious commentary. This led him and his writers to insert a few dramatic subplots, unfortunately not all of which work equally well. The biggest problem here lies with the character Marielle, who serves as Dennis’ Haitian guide (so far so good), develops into his love interest (um, bit of a cheap fix but okay I guess) and ends up being the driving force behind Dennis’ impetuous return to Haiti, knowingly putting his own life in grave danger. But getting mindlessly pussy-whipped hardly constitutes a credible motive for the weathered world traveler Dennis is portrayed as. Cathy Tyson’s portrayal of Marielle is also problematic. She’s a capable actress and doing her best, but her accent shifts from half-hearted Creole-ish to distinctly British in a hurry, and some accent training – or casting a real Haitian actress – would’ve worked wonders for Marielle’s believability as a Haitian.
But in the film’s grand scheme of things, these are near-negligible gripes. Bill Pullman, then still up-and-coming as an actor, is at the movie’s front and center and he carries the movie well. His character Dennis is someone we get to know and root for as a sympathetic and relatable guy, even though he’s supposed to be Bostonian with a perplexing Texas drawl – but I just touched on the lack of a dialect coach already. As a horror movie, The Serpent And The Rainbow works like a charm with its pervasively ominous atmosphere, both politically and spiritually, with evil and danger constantly lurking around every corner throughout the movie. And it has a couple of effective jump scares to boot before that was even a thing. Needless to say, everything is done with practical effects, and effectively so.
I realize that I’ve been consistently labeling this movie as a zombie movie, and to a degree, it certainly is, although one very dissimilar to – and more reality-based than – the ones we’re used to seeing and expecting them to be. But it’s also a ‘voodoo movie’ if that’s a term, or Vodou as it’s more accurately named here. To me personally, the movie leans more into being akin to Angel Heart (1987) in terms of atmosphere and approach, even though they tell an entirely different story, and the differences between voodoo in Louisiana and Haitian Vodou are no less significant. But watch both movies back to back – makes an awesome bill anyway – and perhaps you’ll see what I mean.
The Serpent And The Rainbow still holds up surprisingly well today, nearly 40 years later, albeit also for tragic reasons. The situation in Haiti sadly hasn’t really changed since the time when this movie takes place, and if anything it’s only gotten worse. The ruthless Duvalier dynasty may be long gone but local crime lords and their gangs have taken over the reign of terror from the Tonton Macoutes with their kidnappings, shootings and executions. The country remains riddled with corruption, anarchy, gang violence, disease epidemics, deforestation, no functional central government, and has been pummeled into shambles by several natural disasters, earthquakes and hurricanes, that it’s still nowhere near anything resembling recovery from. This sad and mortifying reality eerily (and unintendedly) helps The Serpent And The Rainbow retain its actuality.
In conclusion, The Serpent And The Rainbow is a one-of-a-kind and criminally underrated movie, not only within Wes Craven’s own formidable body of work but also within the entire horror genre. It’s a uniquely engrossing, eerie, scary, fascinating and highly recommended viewing experience whose 98-minutes runtime will fly by.