The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) on Netflix
Anthropologist Dennis Alan is sent to Haiti for a voodoo powder said to revive the dead. Dr. Marielle Duchamp helps him find a man buried alive; the Tonton Macoute warn him off.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.4/1028,807 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes65%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1978 a Haitian man, Christophe, dies in a French missionary clinic, and at his burial his eyes open. Seven years on, Dennis Alan, an anthropologist at Harvard, is gathering rare plants with a shaman in the Amazon, where a potion he drinks gives him a hallucination of a man in a suit among corpses. A Boston drug company hires him to bring back the voodoo preparation said to turn people into zombies, hoping it may serve as a super anesthetic, and sends him to Haiti during a revolution. With Dr. Marielle Duchamp he finds Christophe, alive after burial. Detained by the Tonton Macoute, Alan is told by their commander, Captain Dargent Peytraud, to leave the country.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Filming in Haiti had to be abandoned partway through after the local government told the cast and crew it could no longer guarantee their safety amid political unrest, forcing production to relocate to the Dominican Republic.
- While shooting in Haiti, Wes Craven's crew dealt with illness from contaminated food and water, sewage leaking into the slums and cemeteries used as filming locations, and had to hire a local militia for protection.
- Wes Craven cut his original 184-minute assembly of the film down to a 98-minute release after deciding it ran too long and talky, according to Fangoria magazine.
- The story is loosely based on real ethnobotanist Wade Davis's investigation into Clairvius Narcisse, a Haitian man reportedly poisoned, buried alive, and revived with an herbal concoction to create what was described as a zombie.
