The wild true story behind ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’
Horror movies that claim to be based on a true story should be treated with a pinch of salt comparable to how heavily any given viewer believes in such supernatural shenanigans. Still, Wes Craven‘s The Serpent and the Rainbow was directly inspired by an account of genuine events.
Of course, with the filmmaker behind The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and A Nightmare on Elm Street calling the shots, it was never going to be a biographical drama. However, the 1988 terror was entrenched a lot more firmly in factual accuracy than its outlandish premise would suggest.
Bill Pullman’s anthropologist, Dennis Alan, travels to Haiti during a period of unrest, where he seeks to study a drug used in voodoo rituals with the ability to turn living subjects into what are effectively zombies. Naturally, the local authorities deem the interloper to be a serious threat should his research ever become widely known, plunging him into a battle against threats emerging from all sides.
The source material came in the form of Wade Davis’ wordy tome The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic, which itself was indebted to his discoveries regarding a Haitian man named Clairvius Narcisse.
Narcisse suggested that he’d been given a combination of various psychoactive drugs – including the paralysing tetrodotoxin and deliriant Datura – which rendered him incapacitated and effectively dead. However, the story among the locals was that he’d been poisoned, buried alive, and revived to convince plenty of people that he was a literal zombie.
There were plenty of sceptics, with many heavily criticising Davis’ research and findings as ludicrous to the point of being fraudulent, and the scorn only intensified when it was announced a splashy feature-length adaptation of his book was being made. Fellow anthropologist Robert Lawless blasted his peer in the Latin American Anthropology Review, saying it was fitting considering the inspiration already “read like the first draft for a Hollywood movie with Davis himself as an Indiana Jones-type hero”.
There were a lot of ethical concerns raised, too, not least of all by Davis exhuming the body of a child to try and discern whether dead human tissue was part of the ‘zombification’ process used by Haitian witch doctors. Great swathes of the scientific community were less than amused that one of their numbers was gaining so much traction and notoriety for researching something most closely associated with horror cinema.
That doesn’t make it any less interesting, though, especially when a genre master like Craven found himself so intoxicated by the research that he decided to use it as the launch pad for one of his more underrated movies, complete with liberal burnishing of the ‘facts’ in the name of entertainment.
