The Serpent and the Rainbow

A Harvard scientist travels to Haiti to find the compound that can render a person apparently dead and then revive them, and is drawn into the politics of the Tonton Macoute and a genuine burial-alive.

Craven adapted Wade Davis's non-fiction book, and the film's best material is grounded: the pharmacology of tetrodotoxin, the social function of zombification as punishment, and Haiti in the last days of the Duvalier regime, where it was partly shot.

Bill Pullman is the scientist and Zakes Mokae is frightening as the secret-police captain who is also a sorcerer.

The nightmare sequences, a bride with a snake, a coffin filling with blood, a nail through a scrotum, are among the most vivid Craven directed.

It is one of his most underrated films and the only one grounded in real anthropology.