In 1985, after a successful research in Amazonas, Dr. Dennis Alan from Harvard is invited by the president of a Boston pharmaceutics industry, Andrew Cassedy, to travel to Haiti to investigate the case of a man named Christophe that died in 1978 and has apparently returned to life. Andrew wants samples of the voodoo drug that was used in Christophe to be tested with the intention of producing a powerful anesthetic. Dr. Alan travels to meet Dr. Marielle Duchamp that is treating Christophe and arrives in Haiti in a period of revolution. Soon Alan is threatened by the chief of the feared Tonton Macuse Dargent Peytraud, who is a torturer and powerful witch. Alan learns that death is not the end in the beginning of his journey to hell.

CRITIC REVIEWS FOR THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW

• “Genuinely frightening.”- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
• “[Craven] seems wiser and more story-conscious – but thankfully still full of the same surprises.”- Desson Thomson, Washington Post
• “Offers a few good scares but gets bogged down in special effects.”- Variety Staff, Variety
• “Unfortunately, the political parallel between the ideological repression of Baby Doc's regime and the stultifying effects of the zombifying fluid is only sketchily developed, leaving us with a series of striking but isolated set pieces.”- Derek Adams, Time Out
• “The Serpent and the Rainbow has a screenplay that often breaks its spell.”- Janet Maslin, New York Times
• “Take a powerful, revealing nonfiction book, sift through it for its most cliche'd elements and turn it into a terror film and you've got The Serpent and the Rainbow.”- Richard Harrington, Washington Post