8. The Serpent And The Rainbow (Wes Craven 1988)
Anthropologist Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman) is sent to Haiti by a pharmaceutical company to look for a drug that could aid in anesthesia. During his search, he hears stories about a man being poisoned, dying and buried only to rise as a zombie. Alan investigates how the resurrection could have happened, endangering himself in the process. Instead of having a swarm, this film goes back to the roots of the term "zombie". Zombie is a Haitian Creole word which is a re-animated corpse. The myth of the zombie surfaced in the 1700s when the slaves in Haiti were being converted to Catholicism. Slaves had to practice Voodoo in secret. Stories of dark magic were started in order to discredit the religion; raising the dead was one of the worst. The film is more about the fear of something exotic and different than having your brains eaten by the undead. An interesting movie because this came out after zombie movies were an established genre. It purposely takes a look at the history of Zombies and integrates it into contemporary society.