10. The Serpent And The Rainbow - Clairvus Narcisse's Zombification
I, unknowingly, purchased a copy of The Serpent and The Rainbow (1988) when it was included on one of those Wal-Mart specials (you know, $5 for 8 movies, but they're all on two discs). I had never heard of it before, but I gave it a shot because Bill Pullman was in it and I happen to think he is a lovely actor. From start to finish, I was completely absorbed in this movie. Anthropologist Dennis Alan goes to Haiti in a vain attempt to get a "potion" of sorts that a pharmaceutical company wants to explore as an anesthetic. He ends up getting mixed up with Haitian law enforcement while trying to learn more about a Voodoo practice of turning people into zombies. Of course, they're not the zombies that we are used to (brain eating, slow moving, completely primal self-preservationists), but are servants to the man or woman who turned them into a zombie in the first place. Now, Alan is asked to leave Haiti by the head of defense and, when he refuses, he is framed for a murder and tortured. Even after this, he still carries on with his research and finds a witch doctor who gives him the potion he is looking for and takes it back to America. Upon his return, his wife is murdered by the spirit of the head of Haitian defense, which drives Alan back to Haiti, where he is buried alive and comes back from the dead to avenge his wife's death. Sounds pretty fantastical, no? Well, yes, but also, no. This actually happened. Sort of. A Haitian man named Clairvus Narcisse is famous for one thing. Being a zombie at one point in his life. In the early 1900s, it is said that he was drugged and put into a coma with a combination of toad and pufferfish venom. The coma made his body appear lifeless and therefore he was buried. He was then dug up from the grave, given a strand of nightshade, a plant that is infamous for being highly toxic, to turn him into a "zombie" and was sent to work on a plantation for free, essentially. When the planation owner died and was no longer able to drug Narcisse, he regained his mind and simply went home. To his village, he had been dead for eighteen years. Though he was recognized, it took a lot of convincing on his part to get the villagers to believe he was who he claimed to be. And to think, people went through all of this just for cheap labor!