When Wes Craven’s screenwriter “basically went mad” after being cursed by voodoo magic
Throughout Hollywood history, there have been various supposedly cursed incidents which have occurred on movie sets, adding plenty of mystique to an industry tainted by many dark secrets.
From actors dying tragically in the years after a movie’s release (like Rebel Without A Cause, for example) or endless on-set calamities (Fitzcarraldo comes to mind), some movies are simply shrouded in bizarre and unexplainable activity.
So, when you make a movie about voodoo, you should expect some rather strange happenings to take place, which was the case when Wes Craven helmed the 1988 horror film The Serpent and the Rainbow. Inspired by the book of the same name by anthropologist Wade Davis, who explored his findings on the history of zombies and voodoo, the movie isn’t one of Craven’s most enduring, but it certainly has a great behind-the-scenes story.
Starring Bill Pullman as an anthropologist working at Harvard, the film sees him delve into the world of zombie drugs, but in real life, screenwriter Richard Maxwell found himself pulled deep into a spiral of voodoo, leaving him, as Craven puts it, “mad”. This madness didn’t last forever, but for a few days, he was out for the count, unable to recall what had happened after he had been put under a mysterious drug-induced spell.
When Maxwell was doing rewrites to the third act of the film, he spoke to a voodoo expert who had been a key part of Davis’ research, telling him (according to Craven), “I’d love to be indoctrinated into voodoo sometime.” As you do. His interest in all things spiritual and unexplainable clearly got the better of him, because this request led to a mind-bending trip that sounds like something straight out of a movie.
“The guy, who was a very sly character, said, ‘Then you will be.’ So, somehow, he must have dosed Richard in that visit, because Richard came back and just basically went mad in the course of a week,” Craven explained. Things got crazier when he “locked himself into his room, he stopped wearing clothes, [and] he was telling us he was writing but he couldn’t concentrate.”
What do you do in that situation? Before the crew could even make a decision on how to help Maxwell, things took a turn. “In the morning, we started shooting, I woke up at five in the morning, someone was knocking on the door of my room. He’d come in over the rooftop, and onto my patio, and I opened the door and here’s Richard, dazed and haggard, unshaven. I looked down, all around his feet are cigarette butts which had been there for half the night, and he said, ‘I just wanted to wish you good luck because the voodoo and the producers are in league against me and they’re gonna kill me.’”
The only thing to do was send Maxwell on a plane back home, where his wife met her husband in a state she’d never seen him in before. After four days, he woke up with no recollection of what had happened, with the last thing he remembered being ‘that guy saying, ‘Well, then you will be.’”
So, it seems like Maxwell was drugged against his knowledge with something he definitely shouldn’t have consumed. It wasn’t exactly an unexplainable happening, but a rather cursed experience for the writer nonetheless. That’s surely the last time he’ll try and meddle in voodoo.
