Cursed Films

It's kind of an interesting question,

was this film cursed?

To take a Hollywood film set to Haiti

in the immediate wake of the revolution

was incredibly courageous.

That world of Haiti can be very intimidating.

Famously people either are repelled by Haiti

or they become absolute obsessives about Haiti.

And I certainly was in the latter category.

I became almost to a fault an evangelist for Voodoo.

My name's Wade Davis, I'm a Professor of Anthropology

at the University of British Columbia,

and a writer.

Now, this began as a kind of serendipitous assignment.

My great professor, Richard Evans Schultes,

was very interested in this rumored existence

of a folk poison in Haiti

that was said to bring on a state of apparent death

so profound, it could fool a physician.

So he casually asked me if I was interested

in going down to the island nation of Haiti,

and searching for the formula of the drug

reputedly implicated in this business of making zombies.

And naturally, I said yes.

Zombies, the living dead,

have for years been the staple ingredient

of second-rate horror movies.

But is there any truth behind the Hollywood fantasies?

A couple of years ago, "Newsnight" took a look

behind the cinema clichés,

and found that on the West Indian island of Haiti,

truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

- What drove the whole story was the discovery

by a man called Lamarque Douyon,

of the case of Clairvius Narcisse.

This is 62 years old Clairvius Narcisse.

He's looking at the grave in which he was buried

19 years ago.

The funeral was attended by all his family and friends.

- He heard everything, when he was put in the coffin,

when he was put in the grave.

And he was showing you... - A scar here.

- A scar here, it was a nail from his coffin.

So these lines of evidence led Douyon

to go public, saying he had found the first

verifiable instance of the living dead.

And what he meant by that is he had found an individual

who, by all accounts, had been pronounced dead,

and turned back up into the realm of the living.

These powders, of which I have somewhere, uh...

this poison doesn't make a zombie.

The question is, can this poison make someone appear

to be dead?

It's a whole plethora of ingredients:

Bufo marinus, the Caribbean toad,

with these big parotid glands

with the cardioactive steroids in them,

a number of toxic plants,

broken glass,

also um, human remains for magical reasons.

And the most powerful neurotoxin found on Earth.

It's called tetrodotoxin.

It comes from the viscera and the skin of a couple

of different genera of puffer fish, if you will,

which includes the legendary fugu fish,

which is prepared by specially licensed chefs

who are said in the West to eliminate the toxin.

One of the things that I was completely unprepared for

was how this would all kind of explode

over the American media.

So I walked off the street to a literary agent in London,

and secured a-a book advance.

And I used the book advance to finish the research,

but then I had to write a book.

And that's how "The Serpent and the Rainbow"

was actually written.

The book really did attempt to take a phenomena,

the Haitian zombie, that had been used

in an explicitly racist way

to denigrate a people and their religion,

and it tried to make sense out of it.

And I think David Ladd, the producer, really got that.

And I think that was every bit his intention.

My name is David Ladd.

I was the producer of "The Serpent and the Rainbow."

What I saw as a commercial appeal was

the reality that zombies actually exist.

I mean, zombies have been fodder

for films for years, and years, and years.

But the fact that they actually exist

was fascinating to me.

And the lead character was a real life,

honest-to-God Indiana Jones.

He was the real deal.

- My favorite director at that time was Peter Weir.

And I thought that "The Year of Living Dangerously"

was a really remarkable template

for what I had actually experienced in Haiti.

All of a sudden Wes popped up and said,

"Gee, I'd really like to do this."

And we couldn't resist.

Wes was the hottest genre director in the business.

And you know, zombies, Wes Craven,

who could pass on that?

Wade was both grateful and horrified.

How can you do this?

This is a serious piece of work.

- No, I'm not at all a horror film fan.

I really have no relationship to the genre whatsoever.

- Well, I suppose I do now, you know.

Wes was very keen to move out

of the horror genre at the time,

and I remember Wes saying to me, sincerely,

that he thought "The Serpent and the Rainbow"

would be his sort of ticket out in a way.

My father was like a-kind of renaissance man.

He didn't set out to be a horror director.

I think that he was excited to...

kind of leave horror a little bit.

But I think that horror did allow him to work out

some of his demons from childhood.

He basically didn't have a father.

His father left him when he was very, very young,

and died when he was five.

His mother, Caroline, my grandmother,

was constantly trying to get my father

to stop making these terrible, awful movies you're making.

In "The Last House," "Hills have Eyes" era,

he was a madman. You know, that's it.

And people thought he should be locked up.

I thought it was awesome that he was making these films.

In those days,

when you said you did those kind of movies,

people would make little comments like,

"I never watch those."

So he was a little bit insecure about that.

Well, when I first met Wes, I had an interview with him.

Two days before the interview,

I watched "Nightmare on Elm Street,"

and it was so scary.

And the night before, I watched "The Last House on the Left,"

and that was a little daunting.

But then when I met him,

he was so nice and charming,

and he gave me a job as his assistant on "Deadly Friend."

They sent us the book "The Serpent and the Rainbow."

What a story! You know, zombies and Haiti and...

This was a big studio movie.

Then we just started casting.

Bill, at the time, did a movie for my brother

called "Spaceballs,"

which was how I was introduced to him.

And I thought, Bill looks a lot like Wade Davis.

Barf!

- And so we brought him in, and Wes fell in love with him.

And from that point on, the part was his.

That was the third movie

that I was a part of.

The first one, a small part, didn't shoot very long on it.

The second one,

a magnum opus, "Spaceballs,"

which was quite exotic.

But "The Serpent and the Rainbow"

took it all to another level.

And I thought,

Is this is what my life is gonna be like?

And it's only now that I realize, no,

that never happened again.

Never had quite the experience as we did

on "The Serpent and the Rainbow."

After I did "Mona Lisa"

in 1986,

my agent mentioned about this film,

"The Serpent and the Rainbow."

And of course the whole, you know,

Voodoo for a Black person,

how Hollywood has interpreted Voodoo in the past

as being these savages.

So I wanted to get this right.

A blonde captain

in the darkness of Voodoo land!

- Where do we get this idea of Voodoo being

a black magic cult?

It largely comes from the fact that the U.S. Marine Corps

occupied Haiti in the 1920s and stayed for 20 years.

During the era of Jim Crow,

segregation in the South,

many of the Marines were from the South,

and everybody above the rank of sergeant

got a book contract.

And the books had names like "Cannibal Cousins,"

and "Black Bagdad,"

"Voodoo Fire in Haiti,"

"A Puritan in Voodoo-Land,"

"The Magic Island,"

and all this pulp fiction that gave rise to the RKO movies.

- She's making Voodoo. - She's making Voo do what?

Voodoo!

- I do? - Not "you do," Voodoo!

- "Zombies on Broadway," "Zombies of the Stratosphere,"