Movie Monthly - The Serpent and The Rainbow

Edited by Robert Beach

August of this year, the world of horror lost one of its last great legends when Wes Craven, creator of Nightmare on Elm Street and co-creator of Scream, passed away at the age of 76. Craven was one of the greatest masters of horror to ever grace the screen, standing tall in the genre beyond his two major corporate successes. 

He first broke onto the horror scene with the harshly uncompromising Last House on the Left followed by the ugly, grindhouse classic The Hills have Eyes. I’ve also previously discussed his very enjoyable B movie horror/action Swamp Thing flick that helped give us Vertigo Comics. Today, we’re talking about yet another amazing installment in one of the most impressive horror filmography ever seen: Serpent and the Rainbow.

 

As I stated last week, The Month of the Zombie is playing a little fast and loose with the concept of zombies. I’m not limiting this to simply the walking dead. Basically anything I consider to be a zombie is getting a spot in this month’s theme. In fact, I don’t think any of the movies will feature zombies in the classical Romero-esque sense of the term. The Serpent and the Rainbow is easily one of the best zombie films you’ll ever watch, but they aren’t the living dead type of zombie; these are voodoo zombies. 

The film is loosely based on the alleged real life experiences of ethno-botanist Wade Davis who had traveled to Haiti in effort to learn more about the local legends of people having returned from death as zombies. While Davis’s accounts were thoroughly grounded in the realities of science, Craven couples them with his unique sense of heightened reality and dream-like logic to create a uniquely surreal folk horror zombie film.

The basic plot is fairly in line with Davis’s own history as the lead character Dennis Alan, an ethno-botanist and anthropologist contracted by a pharmaceutical company to visit Haiti in search of the secrets of the zombie. However, the corporation isn’t actually seeking a return from death as they more or less know that voodoo zombies aren’t the resurrected dead. Instead, they’re after the unique chemical compounds that are used to slow the human metabolism to the point that the body appears physically dead. 

The idea is that the company wants the zombie drug to try and create a super-anesthetic for mass production. From there, most of the film revolves around Alan’s adventures in Haiti. As he runs a foul of the Tonton Macoute, the Haitian death squad, he interacts with the various locals to gain the voodoo secret. 

What’s odd about Serpent and the Rainbow is despite being the most surrealistic film Craven has ever made (no small feat), it’s also one of his most narratively centered and cohesive films. A lot of the time Craven makes films in a very free-form approach with very little self-editing to be found, hence why a lot of his movies have tonal issues. That’s why even Craven’s groundbreaking films have peculiar elements that don’t really flow together, like the bumbling comic relief sheriff in Last House on the Left or the homemade booby trap battle at the end of Nightmare on Elm Street. 

To be clear, this same unrestricted approach to storytelling is what makes those films as evocative and enduring as they are; it helps them tap into something primal in all of us. The mitigation also lends keeps it from spilling over into outright absurdity. There’s a reason Craven films like he does. He just went wild like in Shocker or was completely reigned in like in Cursed, which both are thoroughly forgotten.

In the case of Serpent and the Rainbow, it’s got easily the best balance between Craven’s dream-like surrealism and classical conceits of story structure and pacing. A big part of this is the subject matter and geographical structuring of the film while the hallucinations and drug nightmares are built right into the narrative DNA of the story. The story setting in Haiti helps literalize the transition among the boundaries of normal reality, here in the states, and the freer flowing and unrestrained space of surrealism that Haiti represents. This comes from both Alan’s indoctrination into the local secrets of the Haitian people and the real dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier that still gripped the nation at the time the story was set. 

A big part of the central visual metaphor of Serpent and the Rainbow is how much life under a dictatorship is tantamount to a living nightmare and Craven does a good job balancing the real life atrocities of the Duvalier regime with his horror imagery.  The death squads are terrifying but the story provides no safe havens in Haiti as the creepy shadow of voodoo looms over the whole country.  Craven does a good job blending the boundaries of reality through voodoo, as it’s all at once a folk custom, a more advanced technique than modern science, and a quasi-mystical religious practice. 

All of this adds up to a film that’s very much about blurring the borders of distinction and categorization that tend to define our lives. Visually, the story is all about blending the lines between reality and a dream-like subconscious view of the world. In a narrative sense, most of the story revolves around tearing down the strict rule of the Duvalier regime. Meanwhile, the voodoo elements are about blurring the definition of what voodoo is among the cultural, the mystical, and the scientific. 

Even the genre artifice of the film falls into this category, its grounding in real world events effectively blurs the line between the comforting fiction of horror and the terrifying reality. In a lot of ways, Serpent and the Rainbow is sort of like a microcosm of how Wes Craven approached filmmaking, accepting there doesn’t need to be a direct conflict between the restrictions of logic and the freedom of inspiration. Check it out for a dream-like zombie experience you won’t get anywhere else. 

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