The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) – WTF Really Happened to This Horror Movie?

This episode of WTF Really Happened to This Horror Movie was Written and Narrated by Andrew Hatfield, Edited by Mike Conway, Produced by Lance Vlcek and John Fallon, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

“Don’t let them bury me, I’m not dead!”

When we think of zombies, it’s only natural to first go right into everyone’s favorite flesh-eating ghouls that were popularized by George Romero in his genre classic Night of the Living Dead. But the idea of zombies has been around much longer and is actually steeped in fact. Haitian voodoo has claimed to create zombies for hundreds of years and in film, these were represented in some of our earliest horror movies. White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie are two of the more famous ones, but the entire sub-genre has some fascinating watches. Horror legend Wes Craven brought a return to Voodoo zombies in 1988’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (watch it HERE), but did you know that the story is based on true events? Don’t let them bury you as we find out what the f*ck REALLY happened to this horror movie.

In 1985, a book called The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic was published by Simon and Schuster, based on the journey of anthropologist Wade Davis. The book was popular but also criticized for inaccuracies. What could have been a purely scientific study was turned into a non-fiction narrative. The book leans heavily on not only the journey that Davis went through but also the very history of voodoo zombies and the country he visits. Three years later, the film adaptation would come out with The Serpent and the Rainbow that was released on February 5th and would make 19 million on it’s 7 million dollar budget. The movie was directed by horror legend Wes Craven. After rewatching this for the first time in about 20 years, I had forgotten how different it is compared to his other horror movies. It’s not Music of the Heart levels of non-horror, but its much more of an investigative political thriller with some awesomely scary scenes.

The movie is, of course, based on the book by Davis but the screenplay was written by Richard Maxwell and Adam Rodman. Maxwell only had two other movies to his name with The Challenge, starring Scott Glenn and Toshiro Mifune from 1982, and Shadow of China from 1989. He would write and produce a couple TV series after that but not much else. Rodman has even less under his belt, with only a handful of TV movies and episodes before and after this. They both did a great job with the material, even if they made it a much more exciting and supernatural adventure. The movie is directed by the legendary Wes Craven, who is almost certainly best known for the TV movies Chiller from 1985 and Night Visions from 1990. Yep. Nothing else at all. Look, I get bored talking about the same A+ movies from these guys, okay? Oh, also go check out Invitation to Hell.

The cast is also a fun and eclectic group led by everyone’s favorite president, Bill Pullman. Pullman plays the stand-in for Davis named Dennis Alan. It feels like Pullman has been around forever but that’s just due to his roles being iconic. He actually had his first on screen appearance in the TV show Cagney and Lacey before quickly becoming Lone Starr in Space Balls. In addition to being the war hero president in Independence Day, he showed up in other horror fare like Brain Dead and Lake Placid. The supporting cast features Cathy Tyson as the doctor contact, Academy Award nominee Paul Winfield as the nice voodoo priest, and Zakes Moake as the evil doctor and political enforcer.

The movie opens with the ever popular “this movie was inspired by a true story” text as well as a cool and chilling little preamble. In the legends of voodoo, the serpent is the symbol of earth. The rainbow is the symbol of heaven. Between the two, all creatures must live and die. But because he has a soul, man can be trapped in a terrible place where death is only the beginning. We then see a body being stolen by a group of armed men straight out of a funeral, followed by another man being pronounced dead and buried before tears roll down his face. We then get introduced to Bill Pullman’s character of Dennis Alan, who has landed in the Amazon and speaks with a shaman before drinking a potion and getting lost in the forest. His pilot has died but the jaguar spirit he became friends with leads him to safety.

(FACTOMETER: 50%) Dennis Alan is the stand in for the real-life Wade Davis and moving past the first scene for a moment, Davis really was lost in the jungles of Columbia… but he wasn’t alone after his pilot friend was killed, nor did he meet a shaman priest that gave him a hallucinogen that had him play with a Jaguar. Out of his group of fellow travelers, he was the only one who saw it and he claims it led him the right way to civilization, just like the one in the movie. The first part alluded to multiple cases of Zombieism that Davis alludes to in the many historical chapters of his book to better paint the picture of his real life journey

Some time after Dennis makes it home, he is called in to speak to a member of a pharmaceutical company and a professor to see if he will go to Haiti to investigate a possible drug that makes Zombies. They want to use its possible effects for anesthetic purposes and show him the case of Christophe, who was a man that apparently died and was buried before coming back seven years later. He agrees to go with funding and a reward to research both the man and the medicine. When he gets there, he meets Dr. Duchamp who is in charge of the patients and has a very real experience in possession and voodoo. The two go to local nightclub owner and kind priest Lucien Celine who is willing to help them but warns of the local police who are led by an evil man. Alan and Dr. Duchamp find Christophe in a graveyard and talk to him about his death.

(FACTOMETER: 75%) This section is really close to what actually happened. Wade Davis was approached by a pharmaceutical company to go investigate the theoretical drug that could help patients and doctors with surgeries and other procedures. The tale of Christophe is actually based on the real case of Clairvious Narcisse, who was pronounced dead in 1962 but 18 years later found his sister and told her he was brought back to work as a slave. The movie changes more names as well as a few of the importance of the characters Alan meets. Instead of the tough, eventual love interest Dr. Duchamp, the real doctor was Lamarque Douyon. Max Beauvior was turned into Lucien and his daughter Rachel becomes the companion to Wade, though there was no romance between them, merely respect of each other’s curiosity about what is going on. The two did also speak to Narcisse who is what Christoph was based off of.

The movie moves on to Alan coming home to his hotel only to find it ransacked and bloody with an assailant still inside. He and Marielle Duchamp go to see a man who can allegedly make the zombie powder named Mozart. Mozart has a whole party atmosphere with cockfighting, a bar, and plenty of people to enjoy. He presents a goat that he will give the powder to and Alan secretly marks its hoof with a knife to track before watching it die. They leave and go to a ceremony where Dennis has awful dreams with Christoph and an unknown zombie who shoots a snake out of it’s mouth in one of the movie’s best scares. Denis and Muriel make love and, on the way, home, Denis is taken in by the police who warn him to stop his investigation. Lots of screaming in the background as a warning and some really good political dialogue.

(FACTOMETER 25%) Well, there is quite a bit of divergence here, mostly to create a movie plot. Instead of the villainous Petryaud, the real version of this was the far less nefarious Lamarque Douyon. He was mostly another scientist who was attempting to find the proper use for the formula and is the one who found the case of Narcisse. He also warned Davis that it was attempted murder in Haiti to attempt to use the poison on a person. Mozart was based off another man named Marcel Pierre who would actually get famous from the BBC for explaining the zombie potion, something the movie calls back to later. Rachel was 16 when Davis met her, and as I said earlier, there was no romance between the two. She was also the daughter of Max Bouvier but did have a history of ritual possession.

Muriel and Dennis go back to Mozart the next day and he tries to sell them on a different goat from the one they saw die. Alan tricks Mozart, while also calling him a fool, and seems to drink the zombie poison but by slight of hand switched it to something completely harmless. Mozart, impressed, agrees to give him the real ingredients but says Dennis must help him with the entire process. The police take Dennis again but this time there is no warning and they drive a nail into his scrotum. Muriel takes him to nurse back to health and they stay in the jungle while continuing to make the powder. The police now frame him for murder and force him to leave rather than go to prison. Mozart meets him on the plane and gives him the powder in exchange for fame… and his watch.

(FACTOMETER 50%) In a cool case of art imitating life, Wade Davis pulled similar trickery in a badass move to impress Pierre, who also tried to give Davis fake powder. He agreed to show him the real stuff but, just like the movie shows, wanted Davis to help. Many of the ingredients in the film were also the real ones used in the real-life powder, especially tetrodotoxin, which is one of the most powerful on the planet. Instead of an old woman’s skull, the real-life recipe called for the skull of a recently deceased infant. Yikes. On the other side of the truth coin, since Davis was never assaulted or taken by police, the infamous nail through the scrotum was complete fiction as was Dennis Alan being framed for murder.

Back home, Dennis looks over all the ingredients and they run tests on animals while also figuring out possible applications for the drug. Dennis continues to have nightmares and be plagued by what he left behind and at a dinner to celebrate, the wife of the pharmaceutical rep is possessed and attempts to hurt the people at the party. He flies back to Haiti and must evade capture while Mozart is killed, and Muriel will be sacrificed. Lucien tries to protect Dennis but is killed while Dennis is sprayed with the powder. He is pronounced dead and buried alive, only to be rescued by Christoph. Slowly recovering, he goes to save Muriel while the country’s leader flees and a revolution begins. Dennis uses the chaos to sneak in and get past a zombified Lucien and other spirits to confront Peytraud. He and Muriel destroy all the soul canisters, which weakens their enemy before he and Dennis have one final face-off in his mind. Something Lucien warned him about.

(FACTOMETER 25%) Wade left Haiti under far less harrowing circumstances, but he did head back home to Harvard to study the concoction. He also traveled back to the country but again, not because of cross-global possession or because his love interest was in danger. Obviously, everything with Peytraud was fabricated as the man wasn’t real either. When he returned to Haiti, a man named Herard Simon was the one to help him and Rachel make the most complete jar of zombie potion and to understand it better. A good chunk of the book is actually a great history lesson on the region and the beginnings of Zombie culture.

The movie tells a fun story based on the adventures of Wade Davis, but obviously goes much further into an exciting and even more supernatural feel. The book is an easy and great read, even if Davis faced criticism from the scientific community. Fact doesn’t quite match fiction here, but there are a lot of things that were taken close to verbatim. Watch the shudder episode of Cursed Films season 2 on the making of the movie, rewatch the film on Scream Factory’s amazing Blu-ray, and then discover for yourself how much of it was real by checking out the book.

A couple of the previous episodes of WTF Really Happened to This Horror Movie? can be seen below. To check out the other shows we have on the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel, head over to the channel – and subscribe while you’re there!