The Serpent and the Rainbow

When is a zombie movie not a zombie movie?

Director Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow sees Bill Pullman play a Harvard anthropologist dispatched to Haiti by a pharmaceutical company to investigate the case of a man declared dead, buried, then later found alive. In Haiti, Pullman romances a local doctor played by Cathy Tyson, and runs afoul of a secret police captain played by Zakes Mokae. In between, he learns the secret of zombification is a powder made up of multiple ingredients and “woven together with a net of magic beyond anything we know.”

The first two acts play like a detective story with Pullman seeking to solve the zombie mystery. Instead of gangsters or criminals, the bad guys are the Tonton Macoute, the secret police of dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Pullman’s not a hard-boiled gumshoe. His voice-over narration drips with wonder, not cynicism; and Tyson’s doctor isn’t a femme fatale, but a Haitian guide intended to bridge Pullman’s character to the locales by providing introductions for him, and cultural context for the audience. But the story hits the familiar detective tropes, including the obligatory bit where Pullman’s sapped and wakes up tied up for the bad guy to inflict a little torture. Said torture proves surprisingly non-graphic, however, and staying true to the tropes, doesn’t dissuade Pullman.

Torture sequence aside, the first two acts feature some horrific scenes, such as Pullman getting pulled underground with undead arms groping and clawing at him. But these all come as hallucinations or dreams. Craven shines here, bringing the sort of nightmarish set-pieces that elevated A Nightmare on Elm Street. But unlike that film, these dreams have no narrative stakes.

Then, in the third act, the film tilts into the supernatural, with Mokae possessing a stranger back in Boston and using the unwitting subject to try to kill Pullman. Soon, Pullman is back in Haiti, where he’s dosed with zombie powder and buried alive. He’s rescued and sets out for revenge on Mokae amidst news that Duvalier has fled the country. Pullman tracks down Mokae and the two battle it out. Mokae throws Pullman around the room with superhuman strength until Pullman finds his soul in the form of his spirit animal—a jaguar—who gives him super strength and soon he’s throwing Mokae around and controlling objects with his mind.

This tracks as, up to the third act, the film had hewed reasonably close to its source material, Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis’s account of his journey to Haiti to investigate zombies. But Davis’s book doesn’t have a Hollywood ending, so the screenwriters invented one. They proffer some throwaway lines about how Pullman can “see and do things others cannot” now that he’s been dosed with the zombie powder, and how the battle with Mokae will take place “in his mind,” but these explanations ring hollow. I admit, I laughed out loud at the spirit animal’s appearance, and guffawed again when Mokae, presumed dead, has his genre-obligatory re-appearance via a flying tackle of Pullman.

It’s a curiously uneven film. Though it opens with a title card indicating it’s “Inspired by true events,” it never achieves the grounded realism it strives to project. On the one hand, it shot on location in Haiti and offers a vivid view of Haitian culture. But consider the scene where Pullman and Tyson join a procession into the jungle. At night, the revelers sleep on the jungle floor, surrounded by candles. It’s a pretty visual, but makes no sense once we see Pullman lying on the ground atop the dry—and extremely flammable—leaves. Further straining our suspension of disbelief, Pullman then bolts upright from a nightmare, freshly shaved, looking like he stepped right out of the makeup chair.

Brad Fiedel’s thundering score proves reminiscent of his work on the Terminator franchise, promising something more epic and adventurous than the film delivers. Though energetic, it seems ill-suited to the moodier material.

Still, the nightmare scenes work well. The highlight comes when Pullman hallucinates being buried alive, with the walls of a small beach hut closing in to form a coffin, which fills up with blood as he screams in terror. Terrific scene, but we know it’s a hallucination, so it’s not as scary as it could be. Just like the film—a zombie movie with no zombies.