Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow Feels Like a Horror Time Capsule

There are two scenes in Wes Craven’s 1988 horror movie The Serpent and the Rainbow that everybody remembers: Bill Pullman’s character having his groin mangled, and Bill Pullman’s character being buried alive with a tarantula. Those follow you. Other parts of the film are murkier—however a rewatch provides a reminder of how oddly it has aged in 34 years.

Inspired by the best-selling however now-controversial 1985 e book by anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow opens with a title card letting us realize it’s primarily based on a “true story.” This is doubtful for essentially the most half, however the film strives for authenticity in a really “Hollywood in the mid-1980s” kind of method. It offers us an outsider perspective on Haitian tradition (the film’s tackle Haitian tradition, anyway) within the type of nominal Davis stand-in Dr. Dennis Alan (Pullman), who makes a dwelling jetting across the globe to growing nations on behalf of a pharmaceutical firm that sees potential greenback indicators in people cures. After a hallucinogenic expertise with a shaman within the Amazon—through which he has an unsettling imaginative and prescient of a snarling man with a gold tooth and a slew of arms pulling him into the bottom—Dennis accepts his subsequent task, despite the fact that it’s proffered by an exec who asks him, “What do you know about zombification?”

Not rather a lot, because it occurs, however oh boy will he study. In quick order, Dennis is touchdown in Port-au-Prince and befriending his unexpectedly handsome contact, Dr. Marielle Duchamp (Cathy Tyson). Even although it’s very clearly established that Marielle is one among treasured few medical doctors at a desperately overcrowded hospital, she quickly turns into Dennis’ fixed companion above and past what she’s been contracted for—like, romping by means of graveyards at midnight—as he tries to trace down the “zombie powder” his employers hope will revolutionize medical anesthesia (eventually they hook up, after all, since you gotta have a romantic subplot.). That’s the sort of film The Serpent and the Rainbow is: it takes place in a poverty-stricken nation managed by a dictator and his secret police, filled with pressure that implies (appropriately) that it’s teetering on the point of revolution, but in addition filled with distinctive, deeply-held cultural traditions and non secular beliefs—all of which we expertise by means of the filter of Dennis, the middle of every part so far as the movie is anxious.

To his credit score, and the script’s credit score, Dennis reacts to his Haitian Vodou encounters with an inexpensive quantity of chill—although he’s vulnerable to vividly terrible nightmares, in addition to nightmares-inside-nightmares, which account for lots of The Serpent and the Rainbow’s most horrific imagery (no shock there, in a film from the creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street). As characters like Marielle and Vodou priest-slash-nightclub proprietor Lucien (Paul Winfied) are there to indicate us, not each Haitian has sinister designs on our fish-out-of-water protagonist; one other key character is Mozart (Brent Jennings), who at first treats Dennis as a mark earlier than deciding he’ll go forward and share his zombie-powder recipe in any case.

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But there are unhealthy guys, too, mainly Peytraud (Zakes Mokae), a very potent enemy since he’s not solely a strong grasp of black magic—he’s a gold-toothed man glimpsed in Dennis’ visions, which occur properly earlier than they meet in actual life—but in addition the pinnacle of “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s torture-happy secret police. “I don’t want money,” Peytraud declares earlier than inflicting excessive ache on Dennis’ scrotum. “I want to hear you scream!” Later, in a plot growth that’s telegraphed from that first Amazon scene, and closely hinted at all through, he’s the architect of Dennis being dusted with zombie powder and buried alive. With a tarantula.

“Though I came for the powder, I’m getting into something much more,” Dennis muses in one among his many voice-overs, which frequently restate the apparent and normally simply serve to remind us that we’re getting every part from Dennis’ perspective. That’s the largest downside The Serpent and the Rainbow has, watching it in 2022; it’s very a lot a “white guy immerses himself in another culture and discovers how terrifying the Other can be!” journey, traditionally a standard trope in horror that’s fortunately given strategy to extra inclusive tales, particularly now that filmmaking itself has change into way more numerous. Its strategy doesn’t essentially really feel overtly racist or xenophobic, and even outrageously problematic; it simply feels… actually dated. Through Marielle and Lucien it does attempt to set up that “voodoo”—an precise faith that horror has loved exploiting through the years, very a lot within the vein of the “cursed Native American burial ground”—isn’t essentially one thing to be feared. But it’s used as a scare tactic a lot right here, that the takeaway is the other.

Something else that feels dated, however in an wonderful method: the superior sensible results, together with particular results make-up by father-son workforce Lance Anderson and David LeRoy Anderson (a Best Make-Up Oscar winner for The Nutty Professor and Men in Black). Who wants slick CG when you should use fashions and prosthetics to render rotting corpses so realistically? Thanks to that, The Serpent and the Rainbow nonetheless makes for a largely satisfying horror-viewing expertise; it’s additionally fascinating to see a film from Craven—made throughout his post-Nightmare, pre-Scream interval—with a setting so faraway from his typical fare. Should you need to revisit this one your self, or possibly even watch it for the primary time, The Serpent and the Rainbow simply arrived on Shudder, the place it’ll quickly be the main focus of one of many streamer’s upcoming episodes of Cursed Films.

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