10 Real Life Happy Endings That Became Disturbing Movies

2. The Serpent And The Rainbow (1988)

Wes Craven’s brilliant, lurid tale of zombies and black magic in Haiti is an unjustly forgotten entry in the late horror maestro’s body of work. Bill Pullman and Zakes Mokae are excellent in this tale of an anthropologist facing off against a voodoo priest who commands the Haitian secret police.

Again, the movie itself was based on a true story: the book of the same name by ethnobotanist Wade Davis. The film’s ancillary character of Christophe, the man supposedly buried at the beginning who is later revealed to have zombified, was based on a man glorying in the name of Clairvius Narcisse.

The story goes that, hospitalised in April 1962 with a high fever, Narcisse finally passed away and was buried the next day. However, eighteen years later he reappeared back in his home village, apparently returned to life.

Clairvius’s story was that he’d been awake but paralysed during the funeral, unable to move even as one of the nails driven into the coffin had pierced his face.

It was determined that Narcisse had been given a cocktail of poisons (including tetrodotoxin and bufotoxin) that together would induce a coma. Supposedly, the man who’d done this to him had then recovered Narcisse after his live burial and dosed him with Datura stramonium, a hallucinogenic herb known as ‘the Devil’s snare’, reducing him to a docile servant and putting him to work in the fields.

When the wannabe bokor was murdered by another of his ‘zombie’ slaves, Narcisse finally recovered and was free to return home.