The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) is Wes Craven's attempt to do something horror rarely does honestly: take a real cultural practice, set it against a real political atrocity, and let the horror emerge from the collision. The result is the most disquieting film Craven ever made, and one that still doesn't get its due.
What the film is, and where it comes from
The screenplay, written by Richard Maxwell and Adam Rodman, draws from ethnobotanist Wade Davis's 1985 non-fiction book of the same name. Davis travelled to Haiti in 1982 to investigate claims that a man named Clairvius Narcisse had been pharmacologically paralysed, declared dead, buried, and later returned to his village years after his supposed death. Davis believed a specific powder, containing tetrodotoxin among other compounds, could produce a death-like state. The book is contested science. The film is uncontested nightmare fuel.
Bill Pullman plays Dennis Alan, a Harvard ethnobotanist hired by a Boston pharmaceutical company to obtain the zombie powder. He arrives in Haiti under the Duvalier regime, where the Tonton Macoute secret police function as a genuine terror apparatus. Dr. Louis Celine (Paul Winfield) and the voodoo practitioner Marielle Duchamp (Cathy Tyson) try to help him. Dargent Peytraud (Zakes Mokae), the Tonton Macoute's sorcerer-enforcer, does not.
Craven's most political horror film
Craven rarely made horror with a clear political address. The Serpent and the Rainbow is the exception. The Duvalier regime's Tonton Macoute used genuine intimidation and violence to maintain control, and Craven doesn't abstract this into fantasy. Peytraud isn't coded as supernatural evil as decoration. He's a state torturer who also practices voodoo, and the film refuses to separate those two things. The power he wields over bodies, living and dead, is continuous with the political power he enforces by day.
This grounding is what lifts the film above the exploitative zombie pictures that preceded it. It doesn't treat Haiti as an exotic backdrop for American dread. It treats Haiti as a place with specific history, specific people, and a specific horror that has nothing to do with Hollywood's voodoo clichés. That Craven pulls this off while still delivering visceral shocks says something about the discipline the film required.
Zakes Mokae, and why Peytraud works
Zakes Mokae's performance is the axis around which everything turns. Peytraud is never camp, never melodramatic. He's quiet, specific, and utterly convincing as a man who knows exactly what he can do to another person's body and mind. The scene in which he threatens Alan during interrogation is more frightening than the film's most elaborate nightmare sequences. Mokae plays it with the flat certainty of someone who has never needed to raise his voice. It's a masterclass in screen menace, and it's almost never discussed when people talk about great horror performances.
Bill Pullman, by contrast, plays the outsider well without being especially interesting. Alan is deliberately porous, an audience surrogate who absorbs the world of the film rather than shaping it. What Pullman does well is physical vulnerability. When Alan is buried alive, and when the powder begins to take effect, Pullman's body does the acting. It's an underrated piece of committed physical performance.
The nightmare sequences: ambitious and imperfect
Craven seeds the film with dream sequences: jaguar visions, flaming coffins, dismembered brides, the usual symbolic menagerie. Some work. Some don't. The film's weakest passages are the ones where it tips fully into surrealism, because the surrealism is less striking than the documentary-adjacent realism that frames it. The real Haiti, the real architecture of political fear, the real ethnobotanical mystery at the film's centre, all of that is stranger than anything Craven invented to decorate it.
The buried-alive sequence is the film's single most effective set piece. Craven films it from inside the coffin, in tight close-up, with almost no score. It's the moment where the pharmacological premise stops being an intellectual curiosity and becomes a physical actuality. You feel the dirt. You feel the paralysis. The film earns that scene.
How it fits in 1988
Craven had spent the previous four years redefining horror with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), which gave horror its most inventive premise of the decade and a villain who lived in dreams. The Serpent and the Rainbow is the opposite move: outward rather than inward, documentary rather than surreal, political rather than psychological. It didn't perform as well commercially, and it isn't remembered with the same fondness. It's the better film in several respects.
Universal Pictures released it in February 1988, a graveyard slot that probably cost it a wider audience. Critics were mixed. The film sits awkwardly between exploitation and art-horror, which is probably where it belongs. It shares that uncomfortable position with Candyman (1992), another horror film willing to put racial and political violence in the foreground without flinching, and to ask what it means for a white outsider to enter that space.
The real Wade Davis controversy
Davis's original book drew serious academic criticism, particularly from pharmacologist C.V. Guinet and anthropologist Roland Littlewood, who disputed both the tetrodotoxin hypothesis and Davis's methodology. The film wisely doesn't litigate this. It takes the central image, a person pharmacologically immobilised and buried while conscious, and uses it as a horror premise without insisting on its scientific validity. This is the right call. The uncertainty about whether it's real makes it more frightening, not less.
The Serpent and the Rainbow has been unavailable in decent quality for too long. It deserves reappraisal. As a piece of late-1980s horror filmmaking with genuine political ambition, a mesmerising central villain, and one sequence that will stay with you for days, it earns its place in the conversation about what Craven could do when he worked outside the genre's comfort zone.
Verdict
Flawed, ambitious, and seriously underrated. The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) is Wes Craven at his most disciplined and most uncomfortable. Zakes Mokae gives one of horror's great unacknowledged performances. The buried-alive sequence is worth the price of admission alone. Don't let the February 1988 release slot fool you. This one mattered.