‘The pain I cause you, in the room upstairs, is nothing to the pain I can cause in your own mind…’
I’ve watched a lot of zombie films in recent months due to the fact that I’m working through all the zombie films mentioned on The Evolution of Horror podcast. As previously mentioned, until Night of the Living Dead in 1968, all zombie films featured voodoo and either alluded to or were set in Haiti. The Serpent and the Rainbow is horror master Wes Craven’s attempt to revisit films such as White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie and it’s a lot of fun…
Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman) travels to Haiti after hearing rumours that a drug used by black magic practitioners has the power to bring people back from the dead as mindless zombies. Marielle Duchamp (Cathy Tyson) acts as Pullman’s guide through this strange world while Louis Mozart (Brent Jennings) is the man concocting the potions.
The Serpent and the Rainbow is definitely a throwback but not in a negative sense. Craven and his writing team of Richard Maxwell and Adam Rodman (themselves loosely inspired by real-life ethnobotanist Wade Davis and his claims that he had encountered a zombie whilst spending time in Haiti) eschew the popular horror tropes of the time (this is a world away from the ’80s slasher boom that Craven had helped kick off with A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984) to create something that harks back to the ’30s and ’40s monster movie era whilst still feeling fresh and innovative. While it probably has moments of cultural insensitivity, the Haitian characters are well-drawn and nuanced for the most part and this ensures that The Serpent and the Rainbow remains creepy and captivating throughout. Some of the more nightmarish sequences are expertly shot (taking their cues from the aforementioned Nightmare movies) and Pullman convinces as the fish out of water who acts as a stand-in for the viewer.
This voodoo zombie extravaganza came during a strange period for Craven post-Nightmare but pre-Scream which saw a number of strange and disparate projects come together (Shocker, The People Under the Stairs, Vampire in Brooklyn etc etc) and of those weird and wonderful films, this one is probably the most successful. A strange and unique zombie movie in a genre that is so often dull and predictable.