Have You Ever Watched: The Serpent and the Rainbow
This is the thirteenth in a recurring series I will be doing highlighting obscure, unknown, forgotten and underrated horror movies. The goal is to bring to light great horror of yesterday and today that is just not on most people’s radar. Just assume spoilers will be included. Enjoy.
The overall goal of this series as stated above is to “highlight obscure, unknown, forgotten and underrated horror movies”. Often, I discuss the upcoming entries with my fellow Horror Bound writers. It just so happens that this time around our Editor in Chief, Charlotte, was watching today's entry for the very first time and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to bring in a guest writer to provide some input on this underrated classic. Also while I was discussing this film with my fellow writers I learned about a phenomenon I was not aware of. ZOMBIE FATIGUE.
Now I am not one to video game nor have I been known to watch TV series, so this reality escaped me. Thinking of recent movies I can't think of many brain eater films. Sure there is World War Z, Zombieland and Anna and the Apocalypse but I didn't think this was enough to cause anyone fatigue. It doesn’t happen often, but I was wrong, dead wrong. Well, perhaps undead wrong. Unbeknownst to me there is this entire world of Zombie everything. Mobile video games like Plants vs Zombies and console games like Call of Duty have zombie add-ons or as the kids call em’ DLCs. Marvel comics has a complete arc of Zombie Avengers and DC has a whole series called DCeased for their zombie lineup. AMC has 2 hour long weekly shows dedicated to flesh eaters, SyFy had one, the CW even got in on the action with iZombie. I even heard a rumor that the main plot point for the final two seasons of Game of Thrones had something to do with zombies or zombie dragons. As a person who loves horror, but mainly focuses on movies, this was a shock to me. One crude google search of the recent zombie stuff was enough to give me a zombie fatigue. Who knew there was so much interest in these undead ghouls??
The thing about zombies is that it wasn't always like this. Now I don't just mean the overwhelming horde of zombie related content, I mean the bodies of the living dead returning from the grave to wreak havoc on the living. Zombies, as I covered in my write up for White Zombie, started off as Vodou slaves to a powerful Vodou master. This is how zombies started in the 1930's and how they existed in horror history until George Romero released Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Zombies remain these undead corpses feasting on the living until Wes Craven brought the zombie genre back to its origins with the 1988 classic The Serpent and the Rainbow.
Have You Ever Watched The Serpent and The Rainbow? No? OMG let me & Charlotte tell you about it.
Hey everyone, Charlotte taking over! This was my first time watching S&R, mainly because of what Bud was speaking about – I have MAJOR zombie fatigue. Just seeing “this is about a post apocalyptic zombie world…” makes me want to scream and throw my computer in the trash. Which is why I’d never seen this flick, despite being a big Wes Craven fan.
But here’s the difference – this isn’t a bunch of white people surviving a post apocalyptic world having sex and killing each other while zombies randomly wander into the background. This story is inspired by a nonfiction book of the same name written by Wade Davis, who wrote about his real life experiences travelling to Haiti. It stars Bill Pullman and Cathy Tyson. The difference to me is that in this story, it’s not about zombies, it’s about Vodou and the horror of Big Corporations exploiting other cultures and the violence of an unchecked political party. The Walking Dead could never. Don’t @ me.
Dennis Alan is sent to investigate a drug used to create zombies by using Haitian Vodou. This big scary corporate drug company wants to do what so many of them do, create cheap drugs and sell for a crap tone of money. So, Alan heads off to Haiti and is assisted by Doctor Marielle Duchamp who shows him a man named Christophe who has seemingly come back from the dead.
There’s a man name Mozart who seems to be the drug creator and there’s this scary rebellion police force watching called Tonton Macoutes. There’s also a leader called Peytraud who is doing everything he can to stop Alan and retain his power over the community.
What’s special about this flick is how serious everything is taken and how genuine it all feels. We’re not seeing cheesy and over the top zombie and Vodou practices. And in fact, a lot of this story is based off of real experiences/stories. There’s also the political element, this is set during the real-life chaos of government upheaval. Comparing the real-life horror of the Haitian government at the time and the supernatural element of the zombies brings something special to the story.
Craven and his team were supposed to film for 30 days but after 11 days they were put onto a plane to go home. In 1987 Haiti was in the midst of a revolution and the country was impoverished. The military agreed to keep an eye on the team and they had to work with religious leaders to ensure everything was okay. It wasn’t.
Apparently by day one Richard Maxwell (the co-screenwriter) went into hysteria and didn’t recover until days after he returned home, and on day two everyone got sick. There were bombings, riots, extras throwing stones and asking for more money. By day 11 they all left and relocated to the Dominican Republic to finish the film.
So, yeah, the movie feels fucking real.
It also just makes it even more incredible that such a beautiful and haunting film was pulled off in these insane conditions.
Overall, it was a great first-time watch – wonderful performances by everyone involved and a beautiful piece of film by the incredible Wes Craven. It hasn’t cured my zombie fatigue, but it didn’t aggravate it either.
If you like this series and would like to catch up, check the archives here and feel free to follow along with Bud on Letterboxd
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