Cursed Cinema: Wes Craven’s ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’

The spooky season is right around the corner. What better time to dredge the depths of the web for an alleged true legend of high strangeness?

Today’s chilling tale comes to us from an internet hamster.

Despite Hollywood’s avowed dedication to representation and diversity, only one major motion picture was ever shot in Haiti. Production of Wes Craven’s 1988 The Serpent and the Rainbow was a debacle and perhaps the only movie that was both ironically and unironically cursed. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/i4DVEDvWhE

— H*A*M (@heyyallitsHam) September 12, 2024

And this story of preteernatural–and all to human–horror concerns one of my favorite horror flicks, and my favorite Wes Craven film, ever.

The film was based on a nonfiction work of the same name, written by Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis. Davis hypothesized that there was a pharmacological explanation to the origin of zombies. An unnamed drug company funded several trips to Haiti so Davis could investigate.

Just to be clear, that’s not the plot of the movie, that’s the story of how Davis’s book came about. A pharma company funded his research because they were interested in making money….from turning people into zombies.

But success would continue to elude Big Pharma until the twenty-first century.

Photo: Debate

Davis met a man in Haiti named Clairvirus Narcissee. He claimed to have been turned into a zombie by his brother through Voodoo ritual. After a family argument Narcissee became sick to the point everyone thought he was dead. Narcissee claims to have awoken from his own coffin.

Davis theorized that Narcisse’s condition was caused by a poison cocktail that included blowfish venom and local flora. He claimed that these ingredients provided the origin for what came to be known as zombies in popular culture.

Davis’s research has subsequently been called into question by researchers, who have been unable to replicate the results of Narcisse’s zombification in a controlled setting, but director Wes Craven thought the story would make for riveting cinema and adapted Davis’s story.

Turning a nonfiction academic book into a voodoo horror movie comes second only to basing a slasher flick on newspaper reports of people dying in their dreams as the most Wes Craven idea ever.

Craven cast Bill Pullman as the main character, a fictionalized version of Davis. He also decided the production would be filmed on location in Haiti for 30 days. Filming there was such a disaster the production only remained in the country for a week and a half.

The first ill portent was when Craven and producer David Ladd visited Haiti to scout locations. They were invited to a voodoo ritual. A live pig was slaughtered. The pig’s blood was drained into a bucket and passed around for attendants to drink. Ladd and Craven declined.

Refusing to drink pig’s blood was seen as a breach of Voodoo etiquette. A woman walked up to Craven, who was drinking wine at the time, took his wine glass from him, and began to eat the glass.

Oddly this incident only made Craven more enthusiastic about shooting in Haiti. What could be a more authentic location to shoot a horror movie about voodoo?

After paying off local authorities protection money, local religious leaders cast a voodoo “protection spell” over the cast and crew as they began the shoot. It apparently didn’t work.

Falling for the old fake protection spell racket.

Suckers.

The Serpent shoot claimed its first victim on day 1 of shooting. Screenwriter Richard Maxwell decided to meet with a local witch doctor to do firsthand research of the country’s esoteric practices. After the meeting he returned to his hotel room feeling disoriented.

Maxwell was there to put the finishing touches on the third act of the screenplay, but after his voodoo conference he didn’t write another word. Craven found him naked and disheveled on his hotel room floor days later. Maxwell has no memory of what happened to him in Haiti.

Note: Voodoo Conference would make an excellent name for a 1990s ska band or a yuppie craft beer.

Other cast and crew also began to experience strange hallucinations. Bill Pullman thought he saw a green cow with televisions for eyes. Many of the crew became deathly ill by day 2 of shooting. Some believed the maladies were the result of supernatural hi-jinks.

Despite the violent illness and hallucinations of his cast and crew, Craven attempted to remain optimistic about the shoot. Then the film’s extras turned on him, “renegotiating” their fee to appear in the film by surrounding him and pelting him with rocks mid shoot.

Craven conferred with his producers then told the Haitians he would meet their increased demands, but they were actually plotting escape from the country.

The following day, the cast and crew pretended to shoot a scene from the runway of the Port-au-Prince airfield. Then the cast and crew boarded the production’s airplane and left Haiti. They had been in the country 11 days.

“OK, we need all you extras to go stand at the far end of the runway. Me and the rest of the cast and crew will take the plane up for a quick aerial shot of you on the ground. Then we’ll circle back, land again, and hand out paychecks. We promise.”

“I almost died down there [in Haiti], and I experienced a lot of strange things. So, when I came through it all, not only alive, but healthy, I decided to begin taking my life a bit easier,” said Craven.

The cast and crew eventually relocated to the Dominican Republic, where they finished the film without incident. The saga of The Serpent and the Rainbow marks the first, and last time any major director attempted to make a movie in Haiti.

The sorcery vs chemistry debate surrounding the zombie phenomenon can be thought of as a false dichotomy peculiar to the Modernist mind.

In Greek, the same word is used for both disciplines.

Just ask all the weirdos who go on Joe Rogan and swear that taking hippie party drugs put them in touch with primordial trickster spirits.

Modernists’ inability to see that the involvement of drugs in some occult phenomena doesn’t rule out said phenomena having mystical dimensions or significance.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not condonig people going out and getting high as part of some stoner vision quest for dodgy spiritual experience.

The divinely sanctioned means of applying spiritual wisdom to daily life have been revealed to us and codified in no uncertain terms. Jumping the guard rail and delving into the abyss beyond invites serious risks.

In the vast majority of cases, those who turn to sorcery out of an alleged desire to gain spiritual wisdom are really seeking worldly knowledge, power, and control. And Sacred Scripture reserves some of its severest words for those seeking preternatural means to achieve mundane ends.

It does seem like an infernal irony that Modernists and New Agers form the ends of a sorcery horseshoe.

Especially since Modernism is the real zombie plague.

So what was the curse of The Serpent and the Rainbow?

• A case of demonic oppression
• LA bourgeoisie getting in too deep while sampling the local supplements
• unscrupulous third-worlders taking advantage of naïve Hollywood types?

Is it too much to ask for all three?

The deep lore of Tolkien meets the brutal struggle of Glen Cook in the dark fantasy prelude to the acclaimed Soul Cycle.

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Originally published here.