The Serpent and the Rainbow
All actors and roles (10)
All team (112)
Short description
A Harvard anthropologist, Dennis Alan, travels to Haiti to track down a powder said to bring the dead back to life. His search draws him into the world of voodoo practice, where a powerful sorcerer guards the secret he is after and where local people live under violent political repression. What begins as fieldwork becomes a personal ordeal for the skeptical scientist.
Wes Craven directed the film, the eleventh of the twenty-five he made in chronological order, arriving between Casebusters and Shocker. Richard Maxwell and Adam Rodman wrote the screenplay. Bill Pullman plays Alan, with Cathy Tyson as Marielle Duchamp, Zakes Mokae as Dargent Peytraud, Paul Winfield as Lucien Celine, Brent Jennings as Louis Mozart and Conrad Roberts as Christophe. The production, backed by Universal Pictures and shot in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, cost about 11 million dollars and returned roughly 20 million worldwide.
Those figures indicate a modest theatrical success for a horror release of its period. On IMDb, voters rate it 6.4 out of 10 across more than 27,000 votes, and on TMDB the score is also 6.4 out of 10, from a much smaller group of 571 votes. A critics' rating of 5.7 out of 10, drawn from 37 reviews, sits close to the audience scores rather than sharply apart from them.
What's left behind the scenes
- Wade Davis, the author of the book the film was based on, stipulated when selling the rights to adapt it that Peter Weir would direct and Mel Gibson would star. However, Wes Craven ultimately directed the film, and Bill Pullman took on the leading role.
- Due to the worsening political situation and civil unrest in Haiti, local authorities warned the film crew that they could not guarantee their safety. As a result, filming was moved to neighboring Dominican Republic.
- The CD with the film's soundtrack is considered one of the most expensive rarities in the field of film music, as only 10 copies of the CD were made; the rest of the soundtrack's run was released on vinyl records.
- The voice of Diamanda Galas was used to create the effects of the creatures in the film.
- The character of Christophe Durand, played by Conrad Roberts, was based on a real person named Clairvius Narcisse, who died in Haiti in 1962, but was later resurrected by a local voodoo practitioner. It turned out that Narcisse had been poisoned with datura, which caused total memory loss. He became a slave on sugarcane plantations. Sixteen years later, he escaped after all the overseers died; he overcame the effects of the datura by consuming salty foods with high bromine content, which served as an antidote.
- The poisonous properties of tetrodotoxin have been known since 1774, when the famous explorer James Cook and his crew tasted a fugu fish dish and fed the remains to pigs. Afterward, the people experienced body numbness and shortness of breath, while the pigs were dead by morning. It was later discovered that the humans had consumed tetrodotoxin in small doses, whereas the pigs were given parts of the fish with a high concentration of tetrodotoxin, which is why they died.
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