31 Days of Des' Horror Favourites: #24 The Serpent and the Rainbow

Why I like it: A realistic zombie movie? Oh yeah!

Wes Craven’s 1988 film The Serpent and the Rainbow had an American anthropologist (Bill Pullman) going to Haiti in search of a powder rumoured to turn people into zombies.

While zombies have been used as political allegory (See: George Romero films. No, really, see them!), never before have they been used as political allegory in such a real manner. It is set in the reign Haiti’s own brutal dictator Duvalier and seems as though it is even a true story. In one way or another, I’m sure it is.

Again, curiosity damn near kills the cat when Pullman gets dosed with the Voodoo powder and becomes a zombie walking the streets of Port Au Prince. Zakes Mokae plays Dargent Peytraud a very chilling Haitian villain sanctioned by the government to do damn near anything he wants.

Its ending is a little soft but the genuine scares and the buried alive scene alone makes for another rare Wes Craven film with balls.

Check these out:
-White Zombie-Another Voodoo zombie movie starring Bela Lugosi.
-Romero’s Dead series-Great Zombie movies one and all. Well, except for Land of the Dead. That was rather mediocre.
-The Vanishing-For another buried alive scenario.