The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
There's a genuinely fascinating film buried somewhere inside The Serpent and the Rainbow. A story about Vodou as a real instrument of political terror, about a powder that might actually simulate death, about the way colonial power structures exploit spiritual traditions for their own brutal ends. That's rich, unsettling territory. And Wes Craven, to his credit, clearly knows it. He leans into the atmosphere, the dread, the strangeness of Haiti as a setting. For stretches of this film, it works beautifully. Then it doesn't. And that gap between ambition and execution is exactly what keeps this sitting at three stars rather than four.
The premise comes from Wade Davis's non-fiction account of his real-world investigation into a powder allegedly used to induce a death-like state in victims, turning them into compliant, will-less figures. It's compelling stuff, and Craven anchors it to the political reality of Haiti under the Duvalier regime, where the Tonton Macoute used fear, including fear with a supernatural dimension, as a weapon of oppression. That's not window dressing. That's the film's most interesting idea: Vodou not as Hollywood hokum but as a system of belief weaponised by authoritarians. When The Serpent and the Rainbow commits to that angle, it feels like something genuinely different from most horror films of the era.
The dream sequences are where Craven is most fully himself. Disorienting, visceral, crawling with dread, they carry the same surreal menace that made A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) so effective. He understands that the horror of a blurred boundary between sleep and waking is almost impossible to shake, and a handful of sequences here tap into that same unease. There's real craft on display.
The trouble is Bill Pullman. I don't want to be too hard on him because he's a perfectly serviceable actor in the right role, and he'd go on to prove that more than once. But here, as the anthropologist protagonist thrust into this world of spiritual complexity and genuine political danger, he's just not enough. The performance is earnest, I'll give him that, but there's a flatness to it, a lack of presence that the film simply can't afford. When you're asking an audience to follow a character through increasingly bizarre and terrifying circumstances, they need to feel something for him. I never quite did.
The supporting cast fare considerably better. Zakes Mokae brings a coiled menace to his role that Pullman's scenes often lack, and Cathy Tyson offers warmth and intelligence that makes you wish the film were more interested in her perspective. But they're in service of a protagonist who never earns the centre of the story.
I should also admit that this isn't virgin territory. The idea of Vodou and the zombie as cinematic subject has been handled with more poetry elsewhere. I reviewed I Walked with a Zombie and came away thinking that film achieved something more quietly devastating on a fraction of the budget and ambition. Craven is working harder here but not necessarily getting further.
The pacing is another issue. The middle section sags, and the momentum Craven builds in the early going dissipates as the film wrestles with its competing tones. It wants to be a political thriller, a supernatural horror, and a pulpy adventure simultaneously, and while those modes aren't inherently incompatible, the script doesn't find a rhythm that holds them together. The climax goes big on spectacle, and there are images there that stick with you, but the emotional resolution feels thin, resolved by flash rather than feeling.
So where does that leave it? The Serpent and the Rainbow is an interesting film. I mean that sincerely, not as a polite way of damning it. The ideas are worth your time, the atmosphere is frequently excellent, and as a piece of culturally grounded genre filmmaking it's more thoughtful than most of what was coming out of Hollywood horror in the late eighties. But it's uneven, it's led by a performance that can't quite carry the weight, and it covers ground that others have handled more memorably. Worth a watch for Craven devotees, and for anyone interested in how horror can engage with real-world power and belief. Just don't go in expecting it to rank alongside his best work.
Three stars.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1988 | Watched: 2026-05-31
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