September 8, 2015 • 48 mins
With the recent passing of horror director Wes Craven, it seems appropriate to cover the science behind his 1988 film "The Serpent and the Rainbow." Join Robert and Christian for a discussion of Haitian folklore, zombie powder and the challenges of filmmaking.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamm. Hi, I'm Christian Seger. Last
week we lost several key individuals. Oliver Sacks died, Wayne
Dyer also passed away. Yeah, I wasn't familiar with that
(00:23):
until you sent it to me. Yeah, as I was
inundated with stuff about Oliver Sacks rightly so, and when
we posted that on our social media accounts, it kind
of went I guess the kids call it viral. Yeah.
But then rule of three, which really a thing. It's
all about our observation of events happening. But in this
case we did get a big number three. Yeah. Unfortunately,
(00:46):
Wes Craven passed away on I believe it was Sunday night,
probably Sunday afternoon his time. But I was unaware of this,
as probably most of the public was. But he was
battling with Can's sorry had um brain cancer? Yeah, brain
cancer um yeah, which yeah, I don't think that had
been a public knowledge yet. But yeah, well it's really unfortunate,
(01:09):
um because you know, as as many of you out there, no, Robert,
Joe and I are are big horror fans. We grew
up watching Les Craven movies. I'd say that they were
probably more than a little responsible for my weird idea
of how high school was going to go. Yeah, yeah that,
Like even if you didn't see any of the Craving films,
(01:30):
and I have to admit for a long time I
didn't see them, but even then, you'd go into the
video stores and there's Freddy Krueger on the wall, like,
you know, a thousand feet high. Like the cultural residence
of his work was just unavoidable. In the the eighties
and nineties, everybody knows who Freddie Krueger is, even if
they've never seen any of the Nightmare in Elm Street movies.
(01:50):
I would I would have to think, right, they at
least know that he's that guy from those slasher movies. Yeah,
he's an American cultural ion, arguably an international cultural icon. Yeah,
I agree. In fact, when I lived in Singapore as
a kid, that was when I saw The Nightmare in
Elm Street three D addition and it was very big
over there. Oh, I thought you're gonna because I know
there are various like there's an Indian, Oh is there
(02:11):
there's like an iteration film. Yeah. No, we used to
buy bootleg versions over there. Uh, and that was I
had the three D one. So I'm looking through his filmography.
I kept seeing films that, oh I never saw that,
but it was everywhere, and I feel like I feel
like I've seen it. Other times it would be a film,
you know, like Swamp Thing, where I enjoyed it as
(02:33):
a kid, but later on I realized there was more
to the comics. So I don't know that I really
love any particularly So I don't know that I actually
am in love with any particular West Cravean film, but
my world wouldn't be the same without. Yeah, I felt
the same way exactly that he definitely put a stamp
on the horror genre. But at the same time, I
(02:55):
don't know that I except for the movie we're gonna
talk about today, which I have a personal fascination with,
I don't know necessarily that any of his movies were
classics for me. You know, My Maory in Elm Street
is a interesting story, uh, and and clearly grabbed the
attention of the world when it came out, and however
(03:16):
many sequels there were, But I don't know that I
would put it in like my top ten horror movies
of all time, you know, Um, and I generally anger
the world by saying that I actually liked the remake
more than I like the remake too. Yeah. I saw
that in the theater and I thought it was pretty
well done. Um and uh. I laughed out loud at
the kid wearing the Joy Division shirt. That was the
(03:38):
only part in the movie where I think, I, like,
I broke character from watching a horror movie. There's just like,
you know, this teenager. When was that movie like two
thousand thirteen or something like that. It was relatively recent,
and this kid was wearing a Joy Division shirt to
signify how Gothy and and and Darky was. Well, you know,
(03:58):
I don't know, I thought it bought it, Yeah, but
I would buy it if it was set in the
seventies or eighties and he was wearing a Joy Division. Yeah.
I don't know. I don't really know how much how
into Joy Division that could be me as well? Right
that with all these biopics about Ian Curtis and stuff,
maybe they're a lot more popular than I think they're.
You know, it turned out though that Craven, you know,
(04:18):
there's a lot more to him than just the horror films. Yeah,
he's a fascinating guy. Yeah. He earned a master's in
philosophy and writing from John Hopkins, uh and after a
brief stints in academia, he returned to the movie industry.
He started out as a sound editor. I think he
worked under pseudonym on an adult picture more than one,
that was what I was reading. Yeah, apparently he did
(04:40):
a lot of work in a pornography. I think mostly
as like a sound editor, maybe doing some directing work.
But I believe that there's a documentary about the infamous
Deep Throat movie and he had some involvement with that,
though he won't reveal what it was, but probably on
the technical side. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, but yeah, fascinating guy.
(05:01):
He I mean, he worked his way up the ladder
in academia, taught for a while, uh, and then just
dropped everything because he had an opportunity for to do film.
And you know, you see why after you look at
the bulk of work for his career. I mean he
really put his all into it. Yeah, twenty nine films
that he directed. That's not getting into stuff that he produced.
(05:22):
But yeah, I mean he was a successful filmmaker. And
that's I mean, it's especially commercially like even the film
we're gonna talk about today, despite some of the problems had,
you know, it worked with the critics and it brought
in a profit. Yeah, certainly. And he Um, you know,
especially when you think about like I think it was
like sort of the seventies was when he was doing
that work with adult films. And then his first real
(05:45):
like horror film was Last Tough on the Left, I believe,
And that is a movie, first of all, that is
a movie that is I think would probably be in
most people's top five top fifty horror movies of all
time it least in terms of the gruesome impact that
it had on the industry and so kind of an
(06:06):
infamous video nasty huh. And he just came right out
of the gate with that and then was so successful.
He just rolled into making one successful movie after another.
You know. Um, Last House on the Left, that is
a movie that really is upsetting to watch. Um, I
as a horror fan, UM, sort of forced myself to
(06:27):
watch both that and the movie. I spit on your
grave that they're both two films that I know. I
know what's up in him, and I just not my
It is not for me either, but I felt like
I should understand why it wasn't for me. And they
are really really difficult to watch. But um, I'm I
(06:49):
have not seen it. But the remake of Last House
on the Left came out a couple of years ago,
and I'm kind of curious about that because it had
this very strange cast for the plot of the movie,
people who you wouldn't expect to do that kind of thing, Like, um,
the kid from Breaking Bad was was in Um, what's
his name, Aaron Something. I can't remember his name now,
(07:11):
but um, and uh, Garrett Dilla Hunt, you know that guy,
he's in it as well, and Ricky lind Home And
I was just like, wow, this is the strangest group
of people to put together to remake this utterly like
trashy horror film, you know. Um, so I'm curious about it.
(07:32):
Another one that I've always really thought it was kind
of funny is Deadly Blessing. Have you ever seen that one?
I don't think I've seen this thing. I read about it.
It's another one of his early ones. It's I can't
remember if they're Quakers or Amish or if it's just
like a fictional version of of that kind of religious community.
But there it's a horror film set within that kind
(07:53):
of community, probably early eighties, um, and it's just utterly
bizarre and kind of silly in some spaces. I think
that's something you could say about almost all of West
Craven's films, is that they have a sort of sense
of self awareness that is making fun of themselves. Of course,
(08:14):
he also directed What Music of the Heart? I haven't
seen that? Yeah, yeah, that and that one that one
actually had an Academy Award nomination? Is that right? Wow?
Meryl Street I believe was nominated for it. And that
was a serious film about you know, about music and
school and kids and all. Um. I don't think he
ever got to make one about bird conservation, but that
was of course one of his big passions in life too.
(08:36):
It's interesting, yeah, define that actually conservation lines up with
a lot of horror guys. Did you know that the
writer Robert Aikman was a big conservationist in England. Yeah,
he's an interesting character. So. But but related to this, uh,
In order to get into kind of the space for
talking about the science behind Serpent and the Rainbow today,
I really I've never seen Wes Craven's People Into the Stairs,
(09:01):
So I watched it last night, and man, I wish
I had seen that at a younger age. It. Um,
it's kind of like the perfect like intro to horror
for a kid. It's very much just like a dark
fairy tale. Yeah, there's you know, there's more going on
and meets the eye. Your parents are not who they seen,
(09:21):
you know, and there's a there's a gump living in
the basement, you know that your standard stuff. There's all
kinds of crazy stuff in it, but it's basically a
kid's film with like occasional over the top violence thrown
into it. Uh structure. Yeah, yeah, essentially I loved it. Um.
But yeah, I hope that you know, um, I guess
(09:43):
with his passing that he gets a little bit more
attention for some of the movies like that that he
was really invested in. You know, that was one of
the ones that he wrote and directed and kind of
shepherded all the way along. That's the one that I
seem to recall that the mother and father and that
are are supposedly patterned on Ronald and Nancy Reagan. So
there's like is there some at least mild political um
(10:05):
statement to view. I could see that. I could see
that for sure. Yeah. Yeah, it's fantastic out there. If
you haven't seen it, I recommended, uh, you know, even
if you're not into you know, really gory horror movies.
It's not particularly gruesome in that way. It's especially by
today's standards. I'd say it was. It's about as scary
as a modern day Doctor Who episode. Um, but it
(10:27):
is grim for sure. But um, today we're going to
talk about this movie that he came out with the
n And when I saw the trailer for this on
actually like the commercial for it when I was a
little kid, the commercial alone scared the pants off of me.
I was so terrified of this movie. And it's called
The Serpent and the Rainbow, and it's based on an
(10:50):
academic book by a guy named Wade Davis. And so
we thought, with West Craven passing away, we wanted to
do some kind of tribute to him. But also the
science behind Wade Davis's uh anthropological look at Haitian society
and Voodo culture UH is just fascinating and there's interesting
(11:13):
stuff going on with the biological and chemical science in there.
But there's also some really interesting stuff going on with
the battles in academia over this work as well. Yeah,
I mean, just right off the bat, it's it may
strike some people with weird. It certainly did me when
I first read about it, that you have an academic
publication and it's adapted into a horror movie and the
(11:35):
title is the same, because I mean, that's uh and
that's telling and we'll get into that. So should we
do like a breakdown of what this movie is about first? Yeah? Yeah, okay,
let me see if I can, if I can summarize
this and you help me out along. It's been fifteen
years since I've seen it taught on TNT Monster Vision
with Joe Bob Britty. Oh yeah, well I saw it
(11:56):
more recently than that. I rewatched it when I was
on Netflix last year. But so, The Serpent in the
Rainbow is a very loose fictional adaptation of Wade Davis's
trip to Haiti to investigate what's known as zombie powder. Basically,
the idea here was that um so that the idea
(12:20):
was that a medical company supposedly approached Wade Davis about
using said zombie powder as like almost like a anesthetic
I guess when performing surgeries. Yeah, and and uh, we
have the details on that that we'll we'll we'll get
into later, but yeah, it has potential medical application, and
(12:41):
the film itself kind of goes way beyond that in
that the character who's supposed to be based on Wade Davis,
I don't think they even call him that in the movie.
I think he has like a totally different name. He
gets enmeshed in both the Haitian Revolution and this kind
of like very stereotypical, a kind of culturally insensitive depiction
(13:02):
of voodoo UM in which people are being buried alive
and then brought back from the dead as these sort
of mindless slaves. Yeah. I mean, especially in the time
period um voodoo is an in Haitian culture in general
is just right for for exploitation. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,
like I think of James Bond, was it The Living Daylight? Yeah,
(13:26):
I think it was either that or a Thunderball, But yeah, yeah, exactly,
this is the air. Yeah. The depictions of voodoo culture
that we grew up with were very insensitive com to
kind of kind of what I don't think a movie
like that could get made today. Um, but I do
still just because of the time I grew up in
(13:46):
I sort of had this personal affinity for it because
it scared me so badly. Um it really. I mean again,
I was just came out in eight, so I was eleven. Uh.
Probably wasn't the target audience for this, but you know, uh,
it really got its hooks into me, you know, And
I've always held it up as one of those movies
over the years that can just even now, it's kind
(14:09):
of silly when you rewatch it. The stuff isn't actually
all that scary, but there's something about it that still
resonates with And it was a major studio relief. So
even if you didn't see it in the theater and
you weren't the target audience, you definitely saw the advertisements
and you were a TV watching household, and if you
went to the video store it was a thousand. It
was prominent. Yeah. So okay, let's you know, we've talked
(14:29):
a lot about West Craven. I know our audience is
probably more interested in the science of this, so let's
dive into that. So first of all, we're stepping away
from the movie here and we're talking more about Davis's work.
He did a cultural ethnography of the sort of beliefs
around Haitian culture and this zombie folk lore. And we're
(14:49):
talking about zombie without any here zo m b I
that's how it's spelled in that culture. Um, let's let's
dive into that and then we can get into the
research and kind of what he came up with. This
is early eighties. I want to say. Two, here's an
interesting fact um long long before Davis looked into this um. Actually,
(15:11):
Zora Hurston, American folklorist, anthropologist and author of Their Eyes
Were Watching God in nineteen thirty eight, after doing some
work in Haiti and in Jamaica. She was one of
the first who suggest that there could be a material
basis for zombies, for the zombie phenomenon. And so what's
kind of interesting about that is that's before the zombie
(15:33):
horror phenomenon really caught hold of America's interest in the
When did white zombie come out? I am not not
really clear on the time, but the Night of the
Living Dead was the latest sixties early seventies. That's the
one that really yeah, put it in hyper drive. Yeah,
So this is she's kind of taking a look at
the reality of this beyond myth before it's really grabbed
(15:53):
the cultural interest. Davis, on the other hand, he comes
in well after it's entrenched in our culture. In fact,
I mean I would I would say that it's arguable,
like it's not like Davis exposed this culture and he
was the first one to do it, and people told
him what was going on and sent him down there.
He was funded by people. But um, basically the idea
(16:13):
is that Haitian zombies aren't what we think of as
zombies today. Right, So if you're thinking Walking Dead, the
TV show out there, that's not what this is. Uh.
The way that it's considered in this culture is that
they are quote the living dead, which is a little different.
I know it sounds the same at first, but they're
(16:34):
undead slaves and there's a certain kind of vood on
priest that I believe it's pronounced boker um that can
perform this ritual and it it's seen as a sort
of sociological punishment. Actually, um, so in that religion that
there's this concept at least this is how Davis presents it,
(16:55):
that human bodies contain two types of angels. Is what
he calls them. One is the Big Good Angel and
the other is the Little Good Angel. The little Good
Angel is essentially the essence of our individuality, right, it's
your I guess soul uh and Davis actually in his
text referred to it as quote the governing thought, memory,
(17:18):
and sentiments of a person. However, if anything were to
happen to that before you physically die, you might become
a zombie. And that supposedly this ritual is the the
voodoo priest taking the little Good Angel out of you
and enslaving you as such. Yeah, it seems to definitely
(17:41):
play into just humans trying to figure out what's going
on with cognition, what's going on with identity in cases
where say, you know, there's been an injury and an
individual is clearly not in their own head, like what
happened to the person that you were physically you know,
what's the link between the mind and brain? Like? Essentially,
this is the voodon h take on the mind body problem. Absolutely.
(18:05):
In fact, the idea is that when you die, the
big Good Angel is the one that goes to heaven.
The little Good Angel actually like sticks around for a
couple of days, roughly three days, and as such, some
relatives will sit by the grave side of their loved
ones for that many days because they feel like they're
still there and they you know, need to be with
(18:26):
them that part of their personality, the individual part of them.
And that definitely I can see where that would play
into mourning for the dead, because you're you're struck by
this dichotomy of that's the person that I loved and
the person I still love but they're not there, but
they still but I still feel this connection to this
body exactly right. Uh. And so what's really important about
(18:48):
Davis's research is that it's a combination of looking at
the biology that's going on here with this what we're
gonna talk about as zombie powder, as well as the
cultural resonance that's here and how that plays into the society.
So the first thing that's important to understand that he
states is that becoming a zombie is a loss of
(19:09):
individuality that is worse than death. So this is a
punishment that they they use for breaking the largest taboos
of their community. Right, It's a It's also seen as
a form of social control. So maybe you're a criminal,
or maybe a rapist or something like that something that
is affecting the community, right, and so the Voodoo priests
(19:30):
subsequently enslaves you as such to take that problem away
from the community. Yeah, a lot of the stuff that
you you know, seeing a lot of Caribbean cultures and
uh and and and also in the vood and religion
is that, of course you have a mix of of
of African belief systems mingled with some Christian beliefs systems
and uh. Ian davis is follow up book, Passage of Darkness,
(19:54):
The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie. He argues that, Yeah,
getting into what you just just said that it it
ties into a long history of secret societies, uh that
stretched back to the earliest days of slavery, societies that
carried with them more of an emphasis on African beliefs
that carried with them. Uh some of this uh you know,
this folkloric pharmaceutical knowledge. Uh. And this was especially the
(20:18):
case with escaped slaves such as the Maroons who lived
deep in the mountains sort of had their own outsider
culture that they established. And that it's here especially that
you would see zombie powder used as a means of
punishing individuals who who broke with tradition, broke the broke
their their laws, and and of course all punishment, all
(20:39):
capital punishment, is essentially symbolic. But the symbolity of this
is very potent um. It's been an escaped slave culture.
In the same way that you would here it argued
in American culture that capital punishment is a deterrence. You
could argue the same thing here, right that you the
last thing that you would want to do is have
(20:59):
your individual reality taken away from you and be under
the thrall of somebody else. So subsequently that would keep
you from doing bad things. So there's two things I
want to note here before we go on. The first
is that I think that Davis is a really fascinating
individual because of this sort of cross disciplinary approach that
he took to this study. Now I know that that's
(21:22):
part of what tweaked certain scholars the wrong way in
the eighties and made them upset with him, and we'll
talk about that as well, uh, But but I think
that it's an interesting approach and I'm glad that he
did it to at least sort of set a standard
for other people to do the same thing down the road.
But maybe a little more carefully with their methodology. The
(21:44):
second thing is that we have to say that all
that stuff that we just mentioned about voodoo culture, it
has been heavily criticized. At least Davis's interpretation of it
has been as just being a complete misrepresentation, and that
it's something that as a person who just kind of
came in and visited the culture for a number of
(22:06):
years and then went and wrote this book, that he
didn't necessarily understand all the complexities of it. Yeah, I
mean he was he was a young buck jumping out
into the world and uh, and a lot of the
criticisms I was looking at they often referred to him
as in Indiana Jones, and not not in a favorable lights,
saying that like, here's a here's this young rock star
with a crazy hat. He's going out and he thinks
(22:27):
he's doing important academic work, but he's not. He's just,
you know, he's just he's a little reckless, is the idea.
And based on what I was reading about his second
book that I mentioned, the pathogeist darkness, yeah he uh,
he apparently calmed down a lot by that point or
refined himself, became more in keeping with the expectations of
of his academic critics. Yeah, this is a good opportunity
(22:51):
to sort of get into a little bit more about
what happened with Davis in the following years. He's a
fascinating individual. National Geographic has given him the title Explorer
of the Millennium. That's a pretty awesome title. Uh So,
as as you would expect from the title, he's still exploring,
going all around the world. He's an ethnobotanist and an anthropologist.
(23:14):
He's gone everywhere, Polynesia, Tibet. He just does tons of
similar studies to this one that he started off with
in Haiti. And in fact, my understanding is that he's
been working on some kind of four part documentary for
the last couple of years, and uh that showcases various
cultures from around the world and sort of how, um,
(23:34):
how human nature evolves in these different ways. Yeah. Ultimately,
even though the Indiana Jones thing was used as a
as a as a dig at him um early on,
like really, who else has call and he's the Explorer
the Millennium? Well and and and that's the other thing too,
when I think about the Indiana Jones application, right, like
(23:55):
like remember those scenes in the Indiana Jones movies where
he would like go back to the college and he
would be in his stuffy suit and like about to
teach class or whatever, and all the students were fawning
all over him. But like you get the sense that
Davis doesn't really have that part. Davis doesn't like go
back and like climb into a tweed suit and hold
office hours. Maybe he does so. Originally Davis was actually
(24:20):
a Canadian firefighter, but then he moved on and went
to Harvard University. And while he was at Harvard studying,
he would apparently this is ac cording of the research,
he just often visit Columbia, the nation Columbia at the
school and study cocaine and hallucinogen. So you get an
idea of where his interests lie right away. I think
this is like a late seventies uh. In nineteen seventy five,
(24:43):
this was when the sort of quote unquote Serpent and
the Rainbow storyline started to come together. He was funded
by something that was called the Zombie Project, that's it's
real title, via the Botanical Museum at Harvard and the
Americans U, sorry, the American National Science Foundation, and there
were some others in there as well. Um, I think
(25:05):
if I remember correctly correctly from reading some of the research,
that he might have had some private interests in there
as well. Um. Basically, the idea is, like what we
said earlier, they wanted him to go and find out
what was up with this zombie powder so that they
could potentially use it to revolutionize surgery. So Davis goes
(25:26):
down there, and let's see, so he first gets funded
in seventy five and he publicly hypothesizes about zombies in
eighty three. So he's down there for roughly eight years,
back and forth kind of doing research understanding the culture. Uh,
and it's an eighty three that he publishes something and says,
you know what, the zombie thing. It's a real thing.
(25:47):
It's not just a myth, and it can be explained
both by science and cultural analysis. And this is Davis's
idea of how it works. This is how he broke
it down essentially. So it starts it's off with what
we just talked about, the cultural belief in zombies as
part of the culture. Right, you have to be in
that culture and truly believe, you have to have faith
(26:10):
that that will work. And that's how society has run. Yeah,
this ties into a lot of what we've mentioned before
about the paranormal experience. Um, anyone can have these sort
of these strange hallucination experiences or or some sort of
altered state of perception. But then how does how do
you make sense of it? And then that's where you
(26:30):
have to turn to your whatever cultural scripts are available. So,
like the individual who sees lights in the woods, depending
on where you are in time, where you are in
the world, you might interpret Thosese fairies as aliens, as ghosts,
as um or as just people with flashlights looking for
you in the woods. Right, it's whatever narrative is available
to you to understand it. That's what culture is, essentially,
(26:51):
it's how we understand the world. Yeah, so let's put
put yourself in that situation. Then you're a part of
that culture and you have complete faith that voodoo priests
have the ability to make zombies or make you the
living dead. All right, then here comes the biological factor.
So Davis hypothesized that victims were given two types of powder.
(27:16):
The first he called the before powder, and this was
what rendered the victims helpless and paralyzed them. So they
seemed lifeless. Okay, So the idea here is that like
they're given this powder and it seems like they just died,
like their their body slows to a crawl, and their
(27:37):
their neighbors all think and family think of this person
just passed away. Right. Davis collected eight samples of this
particular powder, and he claims that they all contained the
following ingredients human remains, tree frogs, worms, toads, and the
(27:57):
last and this is a really important one for fish.
I feel like the rest of the stuff is more
or less garnish. It's really the puffer fish, I think, um.
And the reason why is because puffer fish contains something
that's called tetro dotoxin. Uh. If you've ever had Japanese
foo goo fish, have you ever had that before? I
have not, but I've watched the Simpsons though they do
(28:20):
it on there. Yeah, I've seen video of people, you know,
like doing it as kind of a dare thing before.
But it's apparently cuisine that's prepared. Uh. This fish also
has tetra to toxin and when you eat it, it
provides a warm, euphoric sensation, but sometimes it can result
in mild paralysis. And I think sometimes it's even worse, right, Yeah,
(28:40):
I mean it's it's a neurotoxin, and researchers have looked
to it as a potential pain management drug to aid
in chemotherapy. According to a two thousand thirteen study from
John Thuer Cancer Center, by blocking the sodium channels, tetro
dotoxin limits the conduction of pain signals to the central
nervous system, offering relief from pain related to damage caused
(29:01):
by chemotherapy. And and so, yeah, it's it's making you
feel less. It making me feel like you're you're fading
out of this world, names your senses. And so I
think Davis's hypothesis was that given enough of this stuff,
but in the appropriate doses, that you would appear to
be dead but not actually die. Yeah, Like it's it's
(29:24):
pretty deadly in the pupper fish because it's it's used
as a deterrent against predators. In that study that I
was just citing, they said it's just a fraction of
the dosage that you would get from eating a popper fish.
So just to show you how powerful just a just
a small amount of it would be potentially enough to
dull the pain. And so this is an interesting little
(29:46):
side note from one of the readings I did about Davis,
but apparently one of his colleagues was the one who
pointed this out to him and said, have you ever
read the end of the James Bond novel Doctor No?
And Davis was like, no, I haven't, and he said, oh, well,
you know, uh spoilers for Dr No, which is what
like fifty sixty years old. But m James Bond gets
stabbed with a blade that's coated in tetra to toxin
(30:09):
and it seems like he dies, but in fact, the
tetra to toxin just makes it seems like makes it
seem like he, uh, he's dead, when he's actually just paralyzed.
The main thing I remember from reading that book is
that Bond fights the giant squid at the end, which
I always level anytime anyone anyone charges that a Bond
film gets a little too silly to say, hey, and
there in the original Doctor notebook he fights a giant.
(30:31):
We certainly should do some science of James Bond down
the road, maybe when what is it Specter? Maybe when
Spector rolls out? Okay, so that's the before powder and
Davis's theory here the after powder. He never collected any
of it. He doesn't know what's in it, but he
from his cultural studies, believes that it's out there and
(30:53):
his belief is that it contains deta. Now, Detera also
is commonly known as the zombies cucumber, and apparently this
is something that was used in West Africa UH to
induce stupors, violent hallucinations, and sometimes death. And the idea
is that slaves brought it over from Africa to Haiti
(31:15):
and that deterro was now grown there and he saw
it as being something that was you know, also used
to sort of continue this appearance of death. Yeah, Deterra
has been used for centuries in various cultures as both
a poison and hallucinogen UH and deteria intoxication typically produces delirium.
So we're looking at a complete inability to differentiate reality
(31:38):
from fantasy. And that's that's frank delirium as UH as
as contrasted to just typical hallucination, UM can cause hyperthermia,
it can cause excessive heart rate, bizarre possibly violent behavior. UM.
It can also result in a painful photophobia that can
last several days and pronounced amnesia is also another commonly
(32:01):
sided effects, so you can easily see how all of
these uh could play into the experience of being the
walking enslave dead right exactly. So you've got the cultural
uh sort of base to this recipe, and then you
add in the tetra to toxin which paralyzes you, and
then you throw in the de toura aspect, which could
(32:22):
potentially be a strong enough hallucinogen to to really confuse you.
Um have you ever played the follow up video games
before that? I think you can get to toura in
that as like an ingredient that you use to make like, um,
like a some kind of healing recipe or something like that.
But if I remember correctly, it also kind of makes
(32:42):
you have hallucinations. I remember getting into the weeds a
bit on the whole recipes for things. Yeah, it's incredibly complicated,
but they've somebody over there has done their research. Uh So. Yeah.
People criticize Davis's research though, they say this is faulty,
and here's why. First of all, the Sky was probably
talking to some unreliable subjects while he was over there,
(33:05):
people who were taking advantage of of his lack of
knowledge and probably spinning stories. For him or just looking
for media attention. Yeah, I mean he's also exploring something
that is essentially magic and fantasy that's tied up in
mythology and folklore, and so there's a lot of gray
area there between reality and fantasy. Yeah, exactly. And there
(33:27):
was a really kind of almost means spirited accusation that
his data was falsified about the tetra to toxin and
that he had purposefully uh exaggerated the levels of tetra
to toxin that were found in the powders that he
brought back from Haiti, and in some cases might might
have even lied. And there's you know, he obviously rejects
(33:51):
those claims, and uh, you know, it's never been proven
or anything, but there's been studies since on on this
particular phenomenon, these powders and whether or not they have
you know, particular effects that could help in medicine. So
I don't know necessarily that I buy that he made
up the tetra to talks and stuff. Yeah, that seems
(34:11):
that maybe going a bit far, especially considering you know,
where his career has gone since then. Like this doesn't
strike me as a as a guy who would have
intentionally done that. Yeah. So, like I said, there's been
other studies. They're pretty interesting. They break down all of
the various components that are in the powders and what
they could do um. But one of the studies that
(34:32):
I read took a very measured look at these components
also discounted the whole zombification aspect. They said, this is
either a combination of um mistaken identity in which like,
somebody actually dies and then they think they see like
their cousin but it's not them or something like that,
or just plain mental illness and that they just there.
(34:54):
Their cultural understanding of mental illnesses is different than ours
and they don't realize how it's affecting the person. But
so far, we don't have that really conclusive study where
someone rounds up a bunch of people who believe in
zombies and then just poisons the hell out of them.
What happened. One of the things that I'm curious about
(35:14):
is I have to admit that, you know, I don't
have a deep understanding of Haitian culture. So I'm curious
if now, almost forty years later, if a lot of
these cultural touchstones still hold residents indeed, and like to
what extent has the balance between the traditional folkloric beliefs
and Catholicism shifted. Um, yeah, it would be interesting to
(35:37):
see a modern revisitation of this topic. Yeah, I think
it would be interesting as well. I suspect, given the
stigma around it, that most graduate students are going to
be advised to avoid it by their by their you know,
faculty mentors. But um, you know, who knows, maybe Davis
will influence somebody else to go do a similar study.
(36:01):
Right now, He's put that zombie thing behind him. He's
mainly known as an ecological campaigner. He's sponsored by National
and Geographic, so you actually tend to see like articles
or kind of essays and stuff like that by him
in in that GEO. He's gone a number of Ted talks,
so he's out there. He travels around. Uh and like
I said earlier, he's working on this multipart documentary about
(36:21):
the diversity of cultures and human belief in the world,
which I think could be amazing. I actually wonder because
the thing I read about said this in I'm wondering
if it's since been finished and I just missed it.
So if it's out there and you've seen it, let
us know, because I'd love to see it. So all right,
so we've laid out sort of the Wade Davis scientific
(36:44):
explanation for the Serpent in the Rainbow how to make
a zombie. Here's your formula, right, uh, and we're we're
doing this in honor of West Craven. I love that movie.
He passed away this week and so this is sort
of in memorium to him. So let's talk about how
this movie was made. Yeah, it's a god, it's a
(37:04):
it's it's a fascinating story. It's hard to find like
any real just definitive sources on it because when you
get into the you know, the troubled history of various films,
unless you have like a clear cut documentary case, such
as with Apocalypse Now, there's just a lot of you know,
almost its own folklore regarding what happened and what went
wrong and what eventually went right. And it is worth
(37:26):
mentioning that ultimately, like this film worked because it was
budgeted at ten million, those seems to have come in
around US about a seven million in the end. You
never hear that anymore right now. I'm not sure if
that was because of budget cuts or Craven just being
really you know on his game, I suspect budget cuts. Uh,
and it was, but even then it was set to
(37:47):
be as big as film to date. So this was
this was a big deal for Crave. And this is
after Nightmare in Elm Street. Yeah. So my two key
sources here, there's a book Tutle West Crave in the
Art of Horror by John Kenneth and the other sources
Joe Bob Briggs, who shared a lot of who introduced
you to the movie in Yeah, and actually he shared
a lot of this. Uh the well, just like the
(38:08):
mythology of the making of this film on a Monster
Vision on TNT back in the U. This is the
late nineties, I believe. And he has all the scripts
for those available on his website, which will link to
on the landing page for this episode. But he, uh,
he laid it out like this. So you have this
guy David Ladd, and he acquires the rights to David's book.
(38:28):
He shows it to West and West Craven loves it.
Not only does he side decide that he wants to
take the gig, he also wants to actually travel to
Haiti and make it even though, according to Briggs, no
American movie had been filmed within the borders of Haiti yet,
if my understanding is correct, at that time, Haiti was
(38:49):
in the middle of a civil war, I believe. So yeah, okay,
so I mean it was it was not a play
when when when Craven said this, a lot of people
were like, I don't know, if you really want to
shoot in Haiti, why don't you shoot in the Dominican public,
And he said, no, we're going through them. I'm in
love with the material. I want to make it authentic
and I care about it. Let's go to Haiti and
do it. All right, I'd like to pause right there,
just I love this movie, but I don't know that
(39:11):
authentic is how I would describe its depiction of Haiti.
There's some pretty over the top cartoonish depictions of the
culture over there. But okay, And so they go to
Haiti and U and it's it's apparently just a kind
of a troubled suit shoot from the get go, because
(39:31):
the crew is constantly either sick from food poisoning and
various problems with food and water, or they're just they're
dealing with just extreme heat. So the environmental concerns are
are pretty rough. It's it's environmentally a pretty rough shoot.
And then they're kind of sandwich between the Haitian military
and the locals for most of it, and they're trying
(39:53):
to to use the locals. There's a scene there, I
believe it's the opening scene with a big funeral procession.
They used two thousand extras Haitian extras. That scene is terrifying.
That's the scene that sticks with me the most at
anything in that movie. We'll see then the authenticity paid off,
but they also, of course had to pay off the
extras and um. According to Briggs, one of the problems
(40:15):
here is that it's you're not dealing with one agent
for all two thousand of these individuals. There are various representatives.
So this guy here, he represents fifty of the extras,
this guy represents a hundred, and all of these different
representatives keep trying to renegotiate the terms, especially as the
shoot continues and they realize, hey, these guys are gonna leave. Um,
(40:37):
let's see if we can, you know, make the most
out of this, because it's the paying gig, but it's
also it's it's gonna go away. Sure, and I would
imagine that bartering is probably a natural part of that
culture too, Yeah, I would imagine so. So they so
each time they bring these up, the representatives bring this
up and occasionally threatened strikes um, the producers raise their
(40:58):
their pay a little bit to keep them hat p um.
And then meanwhile the army is saying the Haitian army
is saying, hey, we can sit in troops. But Craven
and Company really don't like that idea because it's already
kind of a hostile situation. The last thing you need
is you know, potential blood bath. So yeah, for all
the like you know, uh mothers in the eighties and
(41:20):
nineties who are against West Craven and being a horrible
influence on their children, I think that was probably a
wise decision on his way. He wasn't, as I guess, um,
interested in capturing you know, violence for violence's sake. Yeah,
And so they turned on the army. They continue to
(41:40):
deal with these various leaders that are hit him up
for for more cash, and then one day the leaders
come to the product production office and they say they
want more money that night or they're going to riot.
And so this apparently escalates into like a scene where
David Lady acquired the rights and his servings producer on
this He's standing on top of a car talking to everyone,
(42:00):
to the two thousand of these individuals with a bullhorn,
and they all have rocks ready maybe to pummeling with,
and he's urging them. Not Voriety promised them that the
money will will be there, and that's part of the
problem too. They don't have the money. They're having to
ship the money in from Miami so that they can
pay off everybody. Um. And meanwhile they're saying they're realizing,
all right, we've been here a month. This is not working.
(42:22):
Let's get out. So they're trying to get everybody out
of the country to head to the Dominican Republic to
finish the remaining three months of of shooting. UM. So,
do you think that this was just a money issue
or do you think that the Haitian extras that were
involved in this film had any sense of the kind
of exploitation their culture is receiving at the hands of
(42:42):
this film. I have a feeling and it's just kind
of an unbalanced situation. I mean that may have played
into it. I get the I get the impression it
was more of an unbalanced situation with with some some
problems with representation on the part of the locals. Uh
an intention obviously between the government and the Haitian people. Certainly, okay,
(43:06):
so they get most everybody out, but three people had
to stay in the production office essentially just barricaded in
there until every last villager was paid. And even weirder,
and this is like super like I'll say that this
is doubly alleged, but according to John Kenneth, Craven was
nearly forced to drink pigs blood in a voodoo ceremony
(43:29):
to appease the rioting extras. I don't know if I
believe that. I could not find another source to even
mention that, and Joe Bob didn't mention it on Monster Vision,
so I have my doubts. But it sounds a bit
over the top. You'd think that would be a story
that Wes Craven would tout as well, you know, something
he would definitely want to include on the DVD extras. Also,
(43:49):
it seems like they're their main concern was, Hey, we
want to be paid for our work, not so much.
I think the directors should drink pick yeah. Yeah, um,
so they get out of hay Eve a head of
the Dominican Republic. And I also want to point out
that also allegedly you had four individuals who who had
problems with curses or potential um insanity, like one guy
(44:13):
had to be sent back to the States. Apparently it
was raving paranoid for a few days. These were American
production members. Yeah, wow, okay, Yeah, And of course I
don't know to what extent. That's just like you got
food poisoning and you know, you're in a different care
you're in a super stressful situation and you just kind
of snap. Yeah. And Craven has apparently claimed before that
(44:36):
one of the local priests put a curse on him.
But again I don't know to what extent that's just stuff. Yeah,
that's how many horror movies have you heard that about?
I'm sure what's about to come out there? Green Inferno
from by Eli eli Roth. Yeah, that that's a movie
that looks like it has a very similar but probably
modern treatment of of another culture. And I wouldn't be
(44:58):
surprised if eli Roth tells p Pole that he was
cursed by somebody, It would not be surprised that if
he has not been cursed by by some sort of
a voodoo priest in the past, even before he did this. Yeah,
I mean, thumbs up to that video. But but anyway,
so various issues in Haiti, and then they finally get
to the Dominican Republic, and when first of all, they
(45:21):
arrived there and the archbishop shuts down the production for
three days because he says it's he decided it was
sacrilegious to make this kind of a movie on Easter weekend.
And then like a final blow, one of the Dominican
production assistants filed a lawsuit against the producers, and under
Dominican law at the time of the lawsuit was filed
against the foreigner. They arrested the foreigner and they went
(45:42):
to jail to the case went to trial. So the
producers were put under essentially house arrest, and according to
Joe Bob had to spread a little cash to actually
get out of the situation. Now you see why people
want to film in Atlanta so badly. Yeah, so it's
not just the tax breaks, there's no military tribunals are
(46:03):
putting under house rest, I mean, and you know he
didn't have to allectedly had a good crew, he didn't
have to deal with like insane Marlon Brando or anything.
So you hear stories like this, or you watch The
Heart of Darkness, the documentary about Apocalypse now, and it
makes me wonder, like, why does anybody try and make
a film because you're gonna have to go through this
horrendous process and in all an attempt to make some
(46:26):
sort of product that resembles your original intention. Yeah, it's right, exactly.
It's always a matter of compromise. Yeah, that is fascinating.
I have to just imagine that Craven was so passionate
about the material. Uh. I wonder too if Wade Davis
was even part of the production, like if he was
(46:48):
on set at all. I don't think he was. And
I know that he distanced himself from the movie when
it came out, you know, obviously because there's spoilers for
Serpent the Rainbow. But I believe the movie ends with
his care or summoning like a panther spirit or something
like that to beat the voodoo shaman that he's fighting.
I don't even remember remember that. Oh yeah, there's some
real silly stuff that goes on in there that is
(47:10):
clearly has nothing to do with Davis's uh scientific and
anthrop logic studies of Haiti. So there you have it.
The Serpent in the Rainbow, Zombie Powder, a troubled production history,
and uh you know, our tribute to Wes Craven. Yeah,
So I would love to hear from you the listeners,
(47:32):
let us know. You know, did West Craven have a
particular impact on your viewing on your childhood maybe as
he did ours? Or is there something about the story
behind the Serpent in the Rainbow that you know of
that we missed. I know that there's a lot more
out there regarding Davis's research and research that's been done
since then on these particular powders. So I'm curious if
(47:54):
anybody has new information for us that we could share
in a future listener mail episode. Yeah, and should we
do an episod it on the Hills? Have I? That
sounds good. That's another one where I enjoyed the remake
um and wasn't too crazy about the original. I think
he was involved in the remakes, he produced it, yeah,
and I thought that it was pretty solid. So there
(48:15):
you have it. Hey, As usually, you can always check
us out at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mothership. That's where you'll find the landing page
for this episode with all those links we mentioned, links
to the some of the studies as well. You'll find videos.
You'll find blog posts as well as links out to
our various social media accounts. Right you can get in
touch with us on Twitter, Tumbler, and Facebook, and on
(48:36):
all those channels we are blow the Mind. Or you
can just write to us the old fashioned way at
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamm. Hi, I'm Christian Seger. Last
week we lost several key individuals. Oliver Sacks died, Wayne
Dyer also passed away. Yeah, I wasn't familiar with that
(00:23):
until you sent it to me. Yeah, as I was
inundated with stuff about Oliver Sacks rightly so, and when
we posted that on our social media accounts, it kind
of went I guess the kids call it viral. Yeah.
But then rule of three, which really a thing. It's
all about our observation of events happening. But in this
case we did get a big number three. Yeah. Unfortunately,
(00:46):
Wes Craven passed away on I believe it was Sunday night,
probably Sunday afternoon his time. But I was unaware of this,
as probably most of the public was. But he was
battling with Can's sorry had um brain cancer? Yeah, brain
cancer um yeah, which yeah, I don't think that had
been a public knowledge yet. But yeah, well it's really unfortunate,
(01:09):
um because you know, as as many of you out there, no, Robert,
Joe and I are are big horror fans. We grew
up watching Les Craven movies. I'd say that they were
probably more than a little responsible for my weird idea
of how high school was going to go. Yeah, yeah that,
Like even if you didn't see any of the Craving films,
(01:30):
and I have to admit for a long time I
didn't see them, but even then, you'd go into the
video stores and there's Freddy Krueger on the wall, like,
you know, a thousand feet high. Like the cultural residence
of his work was just unavoidable. In the the eighties
and nineties, everybody knows who Freddie Krueger is, even if
they've never seen any of the Nightmare in Elm Street movies.
(01:50):
I would I would have to think, right, they at
least know that he's that guy from those slasher movies. Yeah,
he's an American cultural ion, arguably an international cultural icon. Yeah,
I agree. In fact, when I lived in Singapore as
a kid, that was when I saw The Nightmare in
Elm Street three D addition and it was very big
over there. Oh, I thought you're gonna because I know
there are various like there's an Indian, Oh is there
(02:11):
there's like an iteration film. Yeah. No, we used to
buy bootleg versions over there. Uh, and that was I
had the three D one. So I'm looking through his filmography.
I kept seeing films that, oh I never saw that,
but it was everywhere, and I feel like I feel
like I've seen it. Other times it would be a film,
you know, like Swamp Thing, where I enjoyed it as
(02:33):
a kid, but later on I realized there was more
to the comics. So I don't know that I really
love any particularly So I don't know that I actually
am in love with any particular West Cravean film, but
my world wouldn't be the same without. Yeah, I felt
the same way exactly that he definitely put a stamp
on the horror genre. But at the same time, I
(02:55):
don't know that I except for the movie we're gonna
talk about today, which I have a personal fascination with,
I don't know necessarily that any of his movies were
classics for me. You know, My Maory in Elm Street
is a interesting story, uh, and and clearly grabbed the
attention of the world when it came out, and however
(03:16):
many sequels there were, But I don't know that I
would put it in like my top ten horror movies
of all time, you know, Um, and I generally anger
the world by saying that I actually liked the remake
more than I like the remake too. Yeah. I saw
that in the theater and I thought it was pretty
well done. Um and uh. I laughed out loud at
the kid wearing the Joy Division shirt. That was the
(03:38):
only part in the movie where I think, I, like,
I broke character from watching a horror movie. There's just like,
you know, this teenager. When was that movie like two
thousand thirteen or something like that. It was relatively recent,
and this kid was wearing a Joy Division shirt to
signify how Gothy and and and Darky was. Well, you know,
(03:58):
I don't know, I thought it bought it, Yeah, but
I would buy it if it was set in the
seventies or eighties and he was wearing a Joy Division. Yeah.
I don't know. I don't really know how much how
into Joy Division that could be me as well? Right
that with all these biopics about Ian Curtis and stuff,
maybe they're a lot more popular than I think they're.
You know, it turned out though that Craven, you know,
(04:18):
there's a lot more to him than just the horror films. Yeah,
he's a fascinating guy. Yeah. He earned a master's in
philosophy and writing from John Hopkins, uh and after a
brief stints in academia, he returned to the movie industry.
He started out as a sound editor. I think he
worked under pseudonym on an adult picture more than one,
that was what I was reading. Yeah, apparently he did
(04:40):
a lot of work in a pornography. I think mostly
as like a sound editor, maybe doing some directing work.
But I believe that there's a documentary about the infamous
Deep Throat movie and he had some involvement with that,
though he won't reveal what it was, but probably on
the technical side. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, but yeah, fascinating guy.
(05:01):
He I mean, he worked his way up the ladder
in academia, taught for a while, uh, and then just
dropped everything because he had an opportunity for to do film.
And you know, you see why after you look at
the bulk of work for his career. I mean he
really put his all into it. Yeah, twenty nine films
that he directed. That's not getting into stuff that he produced.
(05:22):
But yeah, I mean he was a successful filmmaker. And
that's I mean, it's especially commercially like even the film
we're gonna talk about today, despite some of the problems had,
you know, it worked with the critics and it brought
in a profit. Yeah, certainly. And he Um, you know,
especially when you think about like I think it was
like sort of the seventies was when he was doing
that work with adult films. And then his first real
(05:45):
like horror film was Last Tough on the Left, I believe,
And that is a movie, first of all, that is
a movie that is I think would probably be in
most people's top five top fifty horror movies of all
time it least in terms of the gruesome impact that
it had on the industry and so kind of an
(06:06):
infamous video nasty huh. And he just came right out
of the gate with that and then was so successful.
He just rolled into making one successful movie after another.
You know. Um, Last House on the Left, that is
a movie that really is upsetting to watch. Um, I
as a horror fan, UM, sort of forced myself to
(06:27):
watch both that and the movie. I spit on your
grave that they're both two films that I know. I
know what's up in him, and I just not my
It is not for me either, but I felt like
I should understand why it wasn't for me. And they
are really really difficult to watch. But um, I'm I
(06:49):
have not seen it. But the remake of Last House
on the Left came out a couple of years ago,
and I'm kind of curious about that because it had
this very strange cast for the plot of the movie,
people who you wouldn't expect to do that kind of thing, Like, um,
the kid from Breaking Bad was was in Um, what's
his name, Aaron Something. I can't remember his name now,
(07:11):
but um, and uh, Garrett Dilla Hunt, you know that guy,
he's in it as well, and Ricky lind Home And
I was just like, wow, this is the strangest group
of people to put together to remake this utterly like
trashy horror film, you know. Um, so I'm curious about it.
(07:32):
Another one that I've always really thought it was kind
of funny is Deadly Blessing. Have you ever seen that one?
I don't think I've seen this thing. I read about it.
It's another one of his early ones. It's I can't
remember if they're Quakers or Amish or if it's just
like a fictional version of of that kind of religious community.
But there it's a horror film set within that kind
(07:53):
of community, probably early eighties, um, and it's just utterly
bizarre and kind of silly in some spaces. I think
that's something you could say about almost all of West
Craven's films, is that they have a sort of sense
of self awareness that is making fun of themselves. Of course,
(08:14):
he also directed What Music of the Heart? I haven't
seen that? Yeah, yeah, that and that one that one
actually had an Academy Award nomination? Is that right? Wow?
Meryl Street I believe was nominated for it. And that
was a serious film about you know, about music and
school and kids and all. Um. I don't think he
ever got to make one about bird conservation, but that
was of course one of his big passions in life too.
(08:36):
It's interesting, yeah, define that actually conservation lines up with
a lot of horror guys. Did you know that the
writer Robert Aikman was a big conservationist in England. Yeah,
he's an interesting character. So. But but related to this, uh,
In order to get into kind of the space for
talking about the science behind Serpent and the Rainbow today,
I really I've never seen Wes Craven's People Into the Stairs,
(09:01):
So I watched it last night, and man, I wish
I had seen that at a younger age. It. Um,
it's kind of like the perfect like intro to horror
for a kid. It's very much just like a dark
fairy tale. Yeah, there's you know, there's more going on
and meets the eye. Your parents are not who they seen,
(09:21):
you know, and there's a there's a gump living in
the basement, you know that your standard stuff. There's all
kinds of crazy stuff in it, but it's basically a
kid's film with like occasional over the top violence thrown
into it. Uh structure. Yeah, yeah, essentially I loved it. Um.
But yeah, I hope that you know, um, I guess
(09:43):
with his passing that he gets a little bit more
attention for some of the movies like that that he
was really invested in. You know, that was one of
the ones that he wrote and directed and kind of
shepherded all the way along. That's the one that I
seem to recall that the mother and father and that
are are supposedly patterned on Ronald and Nancy Reagan. So
there's like is there some at least mild political um
(10:05):
statement to view. I could see that. I could see
that for sure. Yeah. Yeah, it's fantastic out there. If
you haven't seen it, I recommended, uh, you know, even
if you're not into you know, really gory horror movies.
It's not particularly gruesome in that way. It's especially by
today's standards. I'd say it was. It's about as scary
as a modern day Doctor Who episode. Um, but it
(10:27):
is grim for sure. But um, today we're going to
talk about this movie that he came out with the
n And when I saw the trailer for this on
actually like the commercial for it when I was a
little kid, the commercial alone scared the pants off of me.
I was so terrified of this movie. And it's called
The Serpent and the Rainbow, and it's based on an
(10:50):
academic book by a guy named Wade Davis. And so
we thought, with West Craven passing away, we wanted to
do some kind of tribute to him. But also the
science behind Wade Davis's uh anthropological look at Haitian society
and Voodo culture UH is just fascinating and there's interesting
(11:13):
stuff going on with the biological and chemical science in there.
But there's also some really interesting stuff going on with
the battles in academia over this work as well. Yeah,
I mean, just right off the bat, it's it may
strike some people with weird. It certainly did me when
I first read about it, that you have an academic
publication and it's adapted into a horror movie and the
(11:35):
title is the same, because I mean, that's uh and
that's telling and we'll get into that. So should we
do like a breakdown of what this movie is about first? Yeah? Yeah, okay,
let me see if I can, if I can summarize
this and you help me out along. It's been fifteen
years since I've seen it taught on TNT Monster Vision
with Joe Bob Britty. Oh yeah, well I saw it
(11:56):
more recently than that. I rewatched it when I was
on Netflix last year. But so, The Serpent in the
Rainbow is a very loose fictional adaptation of Wade Davis's
trip to Haiti to investigate what's known as zombie powder. Basically,
the idea here was that um so that the idea
(12:20):
was that a medical company supposedly approached Wade Davis about
using said zombie powder as like almost like a anesthetic
I guess when performing surgeries. Yeah, and and uh, we
have the details on that that we'll we'll we'll get
into later, but yeah, it has potential medical application, and
(12:41):
the film itself kind of goes way beyond that in
that the character who's supposed to be based on Wade Davis,
I don't think they even call him that in the movie.
I think he has like a totally different name. He
gets enmeshed in both the Haitian Revolution and this kind
of like very stereotypical, a kind of culturally insensitive depiction
(13:02):
of voodoo UM in which people are being buried alive
and then brought back from the dead as these sort
of mindless slaves. Yeah. I mean, especially in the time
period um voodoo is an in Haitian culture in general
is just right for for exploitation. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,
like I think of James Bond, was it The Living Daylight? Yeah,
(13:26):
I think it was either that or a Thunderball, But yeah, yeah, exactly,
this is the air. Yeah. The depictions of voodoo culture
that we grew up with were very insensitive com to
kind of kind of what I don't think a movie
like that could get made today. Um, but I do
still just because of the time I grew up in
(13:46):
I sort of had this personal affinity for it because
it scared me so badly. Um it really. I mean again,
I was just came out in eight, so I was eleven. Uh.
Probably wasn't the target audience for this, but you know, uh,
it really got its hooks into me, you know, And
I've always held it up as one of those movies
over the years that can just even now, it's kind
(14:09):
of silly when you rewatch it. The stuff isn't actually
all that scary, but there's something about it that still
resonates with And it was a major studio relief. So
even if you didn't see it in the theater and
you weren't the target audience, you definitely saw the advertisements
and you were a TV watching household, and if you
went to the video store it was a thousand. It
was prominent. Yeah. So okay, let's you know, we've talked
(14:29):
a lot about West Craven. I know our audience is
probably more interested in the science of this, so let's
dive into that. So first of all, we're stepping away
from the movie here and we're talking more about Davis's work.
He did a cultural ethnography of the sort of beliefs
around Haitian culture and this zombie folk lore. And we're
(14:49):
talking about zombie without any here zo m b I
that's how it's spelled in that culture. Um, let's let's
dive into that and then we can get into the
research and kind of what he came up with. This
is early eighties. I want to say. Two, here's an
interesting fact um long long before Davis looked into this um. Actually,
(15:11):
Zora Hurston, American folklorist, anthropologist and author of Their Eyes
Were Watching God in nineteen thirty eight, after doing some
work in Haiti and in Jamaica. She was one of
the first who suggest that there could be a material
basis for zombies, for the zombie phenomenon. And so what's
kind of interesting about that is that's before the zombie
(15:33):
horror phenomenon really caught hold of America's interest in the
When did white zombie come out? I am not not
really clear on the time, but the Night of the
Living Dead was the latest sixties early seventies. That's the
one that really yeah, put it in hyper drive. Yeah,
So this is she's kind of taking a look at
the reality of this beyond myth before it's really grabbed
(15:53):
the cultural interest. Davis, on the other hand, he comes
in well after it's entrenched in our culture. In fact,
I mean I would I would say that it's arguable,
like it's not like Davis exposed this culture and he
was the first one to do it, and people told
him what was going on and sent him down there.
He was funded by people. But um, basically the idea
(16:13):
is that Haitian zombies aren't what we think of as
zombies today. Right, So if you're thinking Walking Dead, the
TV show out there, that's not what this is. Uh.
The way that it's considered in this culture is that
they are quote the living dead, which is a little different.
I know it sounds the same at first, but they're
(16:34):
undead slaves and there's a certain kind of vood on
priest that I believe it's pronounced boker um that can
perform this ritual and it it's seen as a sort
of sociological punishment. Actually, um, so in that religion that
there's this concept at least this is how Davis presents it,
(16:55):
that human bodies contain two types of angels. Is what
he calls them. One is the Big Good Angel and
the other is the Little Good Angel. The little Good
Angel is essentially the essence of our individuality, right, it's
your I guess soul uh and Davis actually in his
text referred to it as quote the governing thought, memory,
(17:18):
and sentiments of a person. However, if anything were to
happen to that before you physically die, you might become
a zombie. And that supposedly this ritual is the the
voodoo priest taking the little Good Angel out of you
and enslaving you as such. Yeah, it seems to definitely
(17:41):
play into just humans trying to figure out what's going
on with cognition, what's going on with identity in cases
where say, you know, there's been an injury and an
individual is clearly not in their own head, like what
happened to the person that you were physically you know,
what's the link between the mind and brain? Like? Essentially,
this is the voodon h take on the mind body problem. Absolutely.
(18:05):
In fact, the idea is that when you die, the
big Good Angel is the one that goes to heaven.
The little Good Angel actually like sticks around for a
couple of days, roughly three days, and as such, some
relatives will sit by the grave side of their loved
ones for that many days because they feel like they're
still there and they you know, need to be with
(18:26):
them that part of their personality, the individual part of them.
And that definitely I can see where that would play
into mourning for the dead, because you're you're struck by
this dichotomy of that's the person that I loved and
the person I still love but they're not there, but
they still but I still feel this connection to this
body exactly right. Uh. And so what's really important about
(18:48):
Davis's research is that it's a combination of looking at
the biology that's going on here with this what we're
gonna talk about as zombie powder, as well as the
cultural resonance that's here and how that plays into the society.
So the first thing that's important to understand that he
states is that becoming a zombie is a loss of
(19:09):
individuality that is worse than death. So this is a
punishment that they they use for breaking the largest taboos
of their community. Right, It's a It's also seen as
a form of social control. So maybe you're a criminal,
or maybe a rapist or something like that something that
is affecting the community, right, and so the Voodoo priests
(19:30):
subsequently enslaves you as such to take that problem away
from the community. Yeah, a lot of the stuff that
you you know, seeing a lot of Caribbean cultures and
uh and and and also in the vood and religion
is that, of course you have a mix of of
of African belief systems mingled with some Christian beliefs systems
and uh. Ian davis is follow up book, Passage of Darkness,
(19:54):
The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie. He argues that, Yeah,
getting into what you just just said that it it
ties into a long history of secret societies, uh that
stretched back to the earliest days of slavery, societies that
carried with them more of an emphasis on African beliefs
that carried with them. Uh some of this uh you know,
this folkloric pharmaceutical knowledge. Uh. And this was especially the
(20:18):
case with escaped slaves such as the Maroons who lived
deep in the mountains sort of had their own outsider
culture that they established. And that it's here especially that
you would see zombie powder used as a means of
punishing individuals who who broke with tradition, broke the broke
their their laws, and and of course all punishment, all
(20:39):
capital punishment, is essentially symbolic. But the symbolity of this
is very potent um. It's been an escaped slave culture.
In the same way that you would here it argued
in American culture that capital punishment is a deterrence. You
could argue the same thing here, right that you the
last thing that you would want to do is have
(20:59):
your individual reality taken away from you and be under
the thrall of somebody else. So subsequently that would keep
you from doing bad things. So there's two things I
want to note here before we go on. The first
is that I think that Davis is a really fascinating
individual because of this sort of cross disciplinary approach that
he took to this study. Now I know that that's
(21:22):
part of what tweaked certain scholars the wrong way in
the eighties and made them upset with him, and we'll
talk about that as well, uh, But but I think
that it's an interesting approach and I'm glad that he
did it to at least sort of set a standard
for other people to do the same thing down the road.
But maybe a little more carefully with their methodology. The
(21:44):
second thing is that we have to say that all
that stuff that we just mentioned about voodoo culture, it
has been heavily criticized. At least Davis's interpretation of it
has been as just being a complete misrepresentation, and that
it's something that as a person who just kind of
came in and visited the culture for a number of
(22:06):
years and then went and wrote this book, that he
didn't necessarily understand all the complexities of it. Yeah, I
mean he was he was a young buck jumping out
into the world and uh, and a lot of the
criticisms I was looking at they often referred to him
as in Indiana Jones, and not not in a favorable lights,
saying that like, here's a here's this young rock star
with a crazy hat. He's going out and he thinks
(22:27):
he's doing important academic work, but he's not. He's just,
you know, he's just he's a little reckless, is the idea.
And based on what I was reading about his second
book that I mentioned, the pathogeist darkness, yeah he uh,
he apparently calmed down a lot by that point or
refined himself, became more in keeping with the expectations of
of his academic critics. Yeah, this is a good opportunity
(22:51):
to sort of get into a little bit more about
what happened with Davis in the following years. He's a
fascinating individual. National Geographic has given him the title Explorer
of the Millennium. That's a pretty awesome title. Uh So,
as as you would expect from the title, he's still exploring,
going all around the world. He's an ethnobotanist and an anthropologist.
(23:14):
He's gone everywhere, Polynesia, Tibet. He just does tons of
similar studies to this one that he started off with
in Haiti. And in fact, my understanding is that he's
been working on some kind of four part documentary for
the last couple of years, and uh that showcases various
cultures from around the world and sort of how, um,
(23:34):
how human nature evolves in these different ways. Yeah. Ultimately,
even though the Indiana Jones thing was used as a
as a as a dig at him um early on,
like really, who else has call and he's the Explorer
the Millennium? Well and and and that's the other thing too,
when I think about the Indiana Jones application, right, like
(23:55):
like remember those scenes in the Indiana Jones movies where
he would like go back to the college and he
would be in his stuffy suit and like about to
teach class or whatever, and all the students were fawning
all over him. But like you get the sense that
Davis doesn't really have that part. Davis doesn't like go
back and like climb into a tweed suit and hold
office hours. Maybe he does so. Originally Davis was actually
(24:20):
a Canadian firefighter, but then he moved on and went
to Harvard University. And while he was at Harvard studying,
he would apparently this is ac cording of the research,
he just often visit Columbia, the nation Columbia at the
school and study cocaine and hallucinogen. So you get an
idea of where his interests lie right away. I think
this is like a late seventies uh. In nineteen seventy five,
(24:43):
this was when the sort of quote unquote Serpent and
the Rainbow storyline started to come together. He was funded
by something that was called the Zombie Project, that's it's
real title, via the Botanical Museum at Harvard and the
Americans U, sorry, the American National Science Foundation, and there
were some others in there as well. Um, I think
(25:05):
if I remember correctly correctly from reading some of the research,
that he might have had some private interests in there
as well. Um. Basically, the idea is, like what we
said earlier, they wanted him to go and find out
what was up with this zombie powder so that they
could potentially use it to revolutionize surgery. So Davis goes
(25:26):
down there, and let's see, so he first gets funded
in seventy five and he publicly hypothesizes about zombies in
eighty three. So he's down there for roughly eight years,
back and forth kind of doing research understanding the culture. Uh,
and it's an eighty three that he publishes something and says,
you know what, the zombie thing. It's a real thing.
(25:47):
It's not just a myth, and it can be explained
both by science and cultural analysis. And this is Davis's
idea of how it works. This is how he broke
it down essentially. So it starts it's off with what
we just talked about, the cultural belief in zombies as
part of the culture. Right, you have to be in
that culture and truly believe, you have to have faith
(26:10):
that that will work. And that's how society has run. Yeah,
this ties into a lot of what we've mentioned before
about the paranormal experience. Um, anyone can have these sort
of these strange hallucination experiences or or some sort of
altered state of perception. But then how does how do
you make sense of it? And then that's where you
(26:30):
have to turn to your whatever cultural scripts are available. So,
like the individual who sees lights in the woods, depending
on where you are in time, where you are in
the world, you might interpret Thosese fairies as aliens, as ghosts,
as um or as just people with flashlights looking for
you in the woods. Right, it's whatever narrative is available
to you to understand it. That's what culture is, essentially,
(26:51):
it's how we understand the world. Yeah, so let's put
put yourself in that situation. Then you're a part of
that culture and you have complete faith that voodoo priests
have the ability to make zombies or make you the
living dead. All right, then here comes the biological factor.
So Davis hypothesized that victims were given two types of powder.
(27:16):
The first he called the before powder, and this was
what rendered the victims helpless and paralyzed them. So they
seemed lifeless. Okay, So the idea here is that like
they're given this powder and it seems like they just died,
like their their body slows to a crawl, and their
(27:37):
their neighbors all think and family think of this person
just passed away. Right. Davis collected eight samples of this
particular powder, and he claims that they all contained the
following ingredients human remains, tree frogs, worms, toads, and the
(27:57):
last and this is a really important one for fish.
I feel like the rest of the stuff is more
or less garnish. It's really the puffer fish, I think, um.
And the reason why is because puffer fish contains something
that's called tetro dotoxin. Uh. If you've ever had Japanese
foo goo fish, have you ever had that before? I
have not, but I've watched the Simpsons though they do
(28:20):
it on there. Yeah, I've seen video of people, you know,
like doing it as kind of a dare thing before.
But it's apparently cuisine that's prepared. Uh. This fish also
has tetra to toxin and when you eat it, it
provides a warm, euphoric sensation, but sometimes it can result
in mild paralysis. And I think sometimes it's even worse, right, Yeah,
(28:40):
I mean it's it's a neurotoxin, and researchers have looked
to it as a potential pain management drug to aid
in chemotherapy. According to a two thousand thirteen study from
John Thuer Cancer Center, by blocking the sodium channels, tetro
dotoxin limits the conduction of pain signals to the central
nervous system, offering relief from pain related to damage caused
(29:01):
by chemotherapy. And and so, yeah, it's it's making you
feel less. It making me feel like you're you're fading
out of this world, names your senses. And so I
think Davis's hypothesis was that given enough of this stuff,
but in the appropriate doses, that you would appear to
be dead but not actually die. Yeah, Like it's it's
(29:24):
pretty deadly in the pupper fish because it's it's used
as a deterrent against predators. In that study that I
was just citing, they said it's just a fraction of
the dosage that you would get from eating a popper fish.
So just to show you how powerful just a just
a small amount of it would be potentially enough to
dull the pain. And so this is an interesting little
(29:46):
side note from one of the readings I did about Davis,
but apparently one of his colleagues was the one who
pointed this out to him and said, have you ever
read the end of the James Bond novel Doctor No?
And Davis was like, no, I haven't, and he said, oh, well,
you know, uh spoilers for Dr No, which is what
like fifty sixty years old. But m James Bond gets
stabbed with a blade that's coated in tetra to toxin
(30:09):
and it seems like he dies, but in fact, the
tetra to toxin just makes it seems like makes it
seem like he, uh, he's dead, when he's actually just paralyzed.
The main thing I remember from reading that book is
that Bond fights the giant squid at the end, which
I always level anytime anyone anyone charges that a Bond
film gets a little too silly to say, hey, and
there in the original Doctor notebook he fights a giant.
(30:31):
We certainly should do some science of James Bond down
the road, maybe when what is it Specter? Maybe when
Spector rolls out? Okay, so that's the before powder and
Davis's theory here the after powder. He never collected any
of it. He doesn't know what's in it, but he
from his cultural studies, believes that it's out there and
(30:53):
his belief is that it contains deta. Now, Detera also
is commonly known as the zombies cucumber, and apparently this
is something that was used in West Africa UH to
induce stupors, violent hallucinations, and sometimes death. And the idea
is that slaves brought it over from Africa to Haiti
(31:15):
and that deterro was now grown there and he saw
it as being something that was you know, also used
to sort of continue this appearance of death. Yeah, Deterra
has been used for centuries in various cultures as both
a poison and hallucinogen UH and deteria intoxication typically produces delirium.
So we're looking at a complete inability to differentiate reality
(31:38):
from fantasy. And that's that's frank delirium as UH as
as contrasted to just typical hallucination, UM can cause hyperthermia,
it can cause excessive heart rate, bizarre possibly violent behavior. UM.
It can also result in a painful photophobia that can
last several days and pronounced amnesia is also another commonly
(32:01):
sided effects, so you can easily see how all of
these uh could play into the experience of being the
walking enslave dead right exactly. So you've got the cultural
uh sort of base to this recipe, and then you
add in the tetra to toxin which paralyzes you, and
then you throw in the de toura aspect, which could
(32:22):
potentially be a strong enough hallucinogen to to really confuse you.
Um have you ever played the follow up video games
before that? I think you can get to toura in
that as like an ingredient that you use to make like, um,
like a some kind of healing recipe or something like that.
But if I remember correctly, it also kind of makes
(32:42):
you have hallucinations. I remember getting into the weeds a
bit on the whole recipes for things. Yeah, it's incredibly complicated,
but they've somebody over there has done their research. Uh So. Yeah.
People criticize Davis's research though, they say this is faulty,
and here's why. First of all, the Sky was probably
talking to some unreliable subjects while he was over there,
(33:05):
people who were taking advantage of of his lack of
knowledge and probably spinning stories. For him or just looking
for media attention. Yeah, I mean he's also exploring something
that is essentially magic and fantasy that's tied up in
mythology and folklore, and so there's a lot of gray
area there between reality and fantasy. Yeah, exactly. And there
(33:27):
was a really kind of almost means spirited accusation that
his data was falsified about the tetra to toxin and
that he had purposefully uh exaggerated the levels of tetra
to toxin that were found in the powders that he
brought back from Haiti, and in some cases might might
have even lied. And there's you know, he obviously rejects
(33:51):
those claims, and uh, you know, it's never been proven
or anything, but there's been studies since on on this
particular phenomenon, these powders and whether or not they have
you know, particular effects that could help in medicine. So
I don't know necessarily that I buy that he made
up the tetra to talks and stuff. Yeah, that seems
(34:11):
that maybe going a bit far, especially considering you know,
where his career has gone since then. Like this doesn't
strike me as a as a guy who would have
intentionally done that. Yeah. So, like I said, there's been
other studies. They're pretty interesting. They break down all of
the various components that are in the powders and what
they could do um. But one of the studies that
(34:32):
I read took a very measured look at these components
also discounted the whole zombification aspect. They said, this is
either a combination of um mistaken identity in which like,
somebody actually dies and then they think they see like
their cousin but it's not them or something like that,
or just plain mental illness and that they just there.
(34:54):
Their cultural understanding of mental illnesses is different than ours
and they don't realize how it's affecting the person. But
so far, we don't have that really conclusive study where
someone rounds up a bunch of people who believe in
zombies and then just poisons the hell out of them.
What happened. One of the things that I'm curious about
(35:14):
is I have to admit that, you know, I don't
have a deep understanding of Haitian culture. So I'm curious
if now, almost forty years later, if a lot of
these cultural touchstones still hold residents indeed, and like to
what extent has the balance between the traditional folkloric beliefs
and Catholicism shifted. Um, yeah, it would be interesting to
(35:37):
see a modern revisitation of this topic. Yeah, I think
it would be interesting as well. I suspect, given the
stigma around it, that most graduate students are going to
be advised to avoid it by their by their you know,
faculty mentors. But um, you know, who knows, maybe Davis
will influence somebody else to go do a similar study.
(36:01):
Right now, He's put that zombie thing behind him. He's
mainly known as an ecological campaigner. He's sponsored by National
and Geographic, so you actually tend to see like articles
or kind of essays and stuff like that by him
in in that GEO. He's gone a number of Ted talks,
so he's out there. He travels around. Uh and like
I said earlier, he's working on this multipart documentary about
(36:21):
the diversity of cultures and human belief in the world,
which I think could be amazing. I actually wonder because
the thing I read about said this in I'm wondering
if it's since been finished and I just missed it.
So if it's out there and you've seen it, let
us know, because I'd love to see it. So all right,
so we've laid out sort of the Wade Davis scientific
(36:44):
explanation for the Serpent in the Rainbow how to make
a zombie. Here's your formula, right, uh, and we're we're
doing this in honor of West Craven. I love that movie.
He passed away this week and so this is sort
of in memorium to him. So let's talk about how
this movie was made. Yeah, it's a god, it's a
(37:04):
it's it's a fascinating story. It's hard to find like
any real just definitive sources on it because when you
get into the you know, the troubled history of various films,
unless you have like a clear cut documentary case, such
as with Apocalypse Now, there's just a lot of you know,
almost its own folklore regarding what happened and what went
wrong and what eventually went right. And it is worth
(37:26):
mentioning that ultimately, like this film worked because it was
budgeted at ten million, those seems to have come in
around US about a seven million in the end. You
never hear that anymore right now. I'm not sure if
that was because of budget cuts or Craven just being
really you know on his game, I suspect budget cuts. Uh,
and it was, but even then it was set to
(37:47):
be as big as film to date. So this was
this was a big deal for Crave. And this is
after Nightmare in Elm Street. Yeah. So my two key
sources here, there's a book Tutle West Crave in the
Art of Horror by John Kenneth and the other sources
Joe Bob Briggs, who shared a lot of who introduced
you to the movie in Yeah, and actually he shared
a lot of this. Uh the well, just like the
(38:08):
mythology of the making of this film on a Monster
Vision on TNT back in the U. This is the
late nineties, I believe. And he has all the scripts
for those available on his website, which will link to
on the landing page for this episode. But he, uh,
he laid it out like this. So you have this
guy David Ladd, and he acquires the rights to David's book.
(38:28):
He shows it to West and West Craven loves it.
Not only does he side decide that he wants to
take the gig, he also wants to actually travel to
Haiti and make it even though, according to Briggs, no
American movie had been filmed within the borders of Haiti yet,
if my understanding is correct, at that time, Haiti was
(38:49):
in the middle of a civil war, I believe. So yeah, okay,
so I mean it was it was not a play
when when when Craven said this, a lot of people
were like, I don't know, if you really want to
shoot in Haiti, why don't you shoot in the Dominican public,
And he said, no, we're going through them. I'm in
love with the material. I want to make it authentic
and I care about it. Let's go to Haiti and
do it. All right, I'd like to pause right there,
just I love this movie, but I don't know that
(39:11):
authentic is how I would describe its depiction of Haiti.
There's some pretty over the top cartoonish depictions of the
culture over there. But okay, And so they go to
Haiti and U and it's it's apparently just a kind
of a troubled suit shoot from the get go, because
(39:31):
the crew is constantly either sick from food poisoning and
various problems with food and water, or they're just they're
dealing with just extreme heat. So the environmental concerns are
are pretty rough. It's it's environmentally a pretty rough shoot.
And then they're kind of sandwich between the Haitian military
and the locals for most of it, and they're trying
(39:53):
to to use the locals. There's a scene there, I
believe it's the opening scene with a big funeral procession.
They used two thousand extras Haitian extras. That scene is terrifying.
That's the scene that sticks with me the most at
anything in that movie. We'll see then the authenticity paid off,
but they also, of course had to pay off the
extras and um. According to Briggs, one of the problems
(40:15):
here is that it's you're not dealing with one agent
for all two thousand of these individuals. There are various representatives.
So this guy here, he represents fifty of the extras,
this guy represents a hundred, and all of these different
representatives keep trying to renegotiate the terms, especially as the
shoot continues and they realize, hey, these guys are gonna leave. Um,
(40:37):
let's see if we can, you know, make the most
out of this, because it's the paying gig, but it's
also it's it's gonna go away. Sure, and I would
imagine that bartering is probably a natural part of that
culture too, Yeah, I would imagine so. So they so
each time they bring these up, the representatives bring this
up and occasionally threatened strikes um, the producers raise their
(40:58):
their pay a little bit to keep them hat p um.
And then meanwhile the army is saying the Haitian army
is saying, hey, we can sit in troops. But Craven
and Company really don't like that idea because it's already
kind of a hostile situation. The last thing you need
is you know, potential blood bath. So yeah, for all
the like you know, uh mothers in the eighties and
(41:20):
nineties who are against West Craven and being a horrible
influence on their children, I think that was probably a
wise decision on his way. He wasn't, as I guess, um,
interested in capturing you know, violence for violence's sake. Yeah,
And so they turned on the army. They continue to
(41:40):
deal with these various leaders that are hit him up
for for more cash, and then one day the leaders
come to the product production office and they say they
want more money that night or they're going to riot.
And so this apparently escalates into like a scene where
David Lady acquired the rights and his servings producer on
this He's standing on top of a car talking to everyone,
(42:00):
to the two thousand of these individuals with a bullhorn,
and they all have rocks ready maybe to pummeling with,
and he's urging them. Not Voriety promised them that the
money will will be there, and that's part of the
problem too. They don't have the money. They're having to
ship the money in from Miami so that they can
pay off everybody. Um. And meanwhile they're saying they're realizing,
all right, we've been here a month. This is not working.
(42:22):
Let's get out. So they're trying to get everybody out
of the country to head to the Dominican Republic to
finish the remaining three months of of shooting. UM. So,
do you think that this was just a money issue
or do you think that the Haitian extras that were
involved in this film had any sense of the kind
of exploitation their culture is receiving at the hands of
(42:42):
this film. I have a feeling and it's just kind
of an unbalanced situation. I mean that may have played
into it. I get the I get the impression it
was more of an unbalanced situation with with some some
problems with representation on the part of the locals. Uh
an intention obviously between the government and the Haitian people. Certainly, okay,
(43:06):
so they get most everybody out, but three people had
to stay in the production office essentially just barricaded in
there until every last villager was paid. And even weirder,
and this is like super like I'll say that this
is doubly alleged, but according to John Kenneth, Craven was
nearly forced to drink pigs blood in a voodoo ceremony
(43:29):
to appease the rioting extras. I don't know if I
believe that. I could not find another source to even
mention that, and Joe Bob didn't mention it on Monster Vision,
so I have my doubts. But it sounds a bit
over the top. You'd think that would be a story
that Wes Craven would tout as well, you know, something
he would definitely want to include on the DVD extras. Also,
(43:49):
it seems like they're their main concern was, Hey, we
want to be paid for our work, not so much.
I think the directors should drink pick yeah. Yeah, um,
so they get out of hay Eve a head of
the Dominican Republic. And I also want to point out
that also allegedly you had four individuals who who had
problems with curses or potential um insanity, like one guy
(44:13):
had to be sent back to the States. Apparently it
was raving paranoid for a few days. These were American
production members. Yeah, wow, okay, Yeah, And of course I
don't know to what extent. That's just like you got
food poisoning and you know, you're in a different care
you're in a super stressful situation and you just kind
of snap. Yeah. And Craven has apparently claimed before that
(44:36):
one of the local priests put a curse on him.
But again I don't know to what extent that's just stuff. Yeah,
that's how many horror movies have you heard that about?
I'm sure what's about to come out there? Green Inferno
from by Eli eli Roth. Yeah, that that's a movie
that looks like it has a very similar but probably
modern treatment of of another culture. And I wouldn't be
(44:58):
surprised if eli Roth tells p Pole that he was
cursed by somebody, It would not be surprised that if
he has not been cursed by by some sort of
a voodoo priest in the past, even before he did this. Yeah,
I mean, thumbs up to that video. But but anyway,
so various issues in Haiti, and then they finally get
to the Dominican Republic, and when first of all, they
(45:21):
arrived there and the archbishop shuts down the production for
three days because he says it's he decided it was
sacrilegious to make this kind of a movie on Easter weekend.
And then like a final blow, one of the Dominican
production assistants filed a lawsuit against the producers, and under
Dominican law at the time of the lawsuit was filed
against the foreigner. They arrested the foreigner and they went
(45:42):
to jail to the case went to trial. So the
producers were put under essentially house arrest, and according to
Joe Bob had to spread a little cash to actually
get out of the situation. Now you see why people
want to film in Atlanta so badly. Yeah, so it's
not just the tax breaks, there's no military tribunals are
(46:03):
putting under house rest, I mean, and you know he
didn't have to allectedly had a good crew, he didn't
have to deal with like insane Marlon Brando or anything.
So you hear stories like this, or you watch The
Heart of Darkness, the documentary about Apocalypse now, and it
makes me wonder, like, why does anybody try and make
a film because you're gonna have to go through this
horrendous process and in all an attempt to make some
(46:26):
sort of product that resembles your original intention. Yeah, it's right, exactly.
It's always a matter of compromise. Yeah, that is fascinating.
I have to just imagine that Craven was so passionate
about the material. Uh. I wonder too if Wade Davis
was even part of the production, like if he was
(46:48):
on set at all. I don't think he was. And
I know that he distanced himself from the movie when
it came out, you know, obviously because there's spoilers for
Serpent the Rainbow. But I believe the movie ends with
his care or summoning like a panther spirit or something
like that to beat the voodoo shaman that he's fighting.
I don't even remember remember that. Oh yeah, there's some
real silly stuff that goes on in there that is
(47:10):
clearly has nothing to do with Davis's uh scientific and
anthrop logic studies of Haiti. So there you have it.
The Serpent in the Rainbow, Zombie Powder, a troubled production history,
and uh you know, our tribute to Wes Craven. Yeah,
So I would love to hear from you the listeners,
(47:32):
let us know. You know, did West Craven have a
particular impact on your viewing on your childhood maybe as
he did ours? Or is there something about the story
behind the Serpent in the Rainbow that you know of
that we missed. I know that there's a lot more
out there regarding Davis's research and research that's been done
since then on these particular powders. So I'm curious if
(47:54):
anybody has new information for us that we could share
in a future listener mail episode. Yeah, and should we
do an episod it on the Hills? Have I? That
sounds good. That's another one where I enjoyed the remake
um and wasn't too crazy about the original. I think
he was involved in the remakes, he produced it, yeah,
and I thought that it was pretty solid. So there
(48:15):
you have it. Hey, As usually, you can always check
us out at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mothership. That's where you'll find the landing page
for this episode with all those links we mentioned, links
to the some of the studies as well. You'll find videos.
You'll find blog posts as well as links out to
our various social media accounts. Right you can get in
touch with us on Twitter, Tumbler, and Facebook, and on
(48:36):
all those channels we are blow the Mind. Or you
can just write to us the old fashioned way at
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
how stuff works dot com
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