Writing about the film this chapter focuses on, John Kenneth Muir states, “When viewed in the context of Craven's film career, The Serpent and The Rainbow is a bit of an anomaly as it does not focus either on the American middle class or the destruction of the family.” How right he was. A thematic break from Craven's earlier work but also arguably a stylistic shift, the film is kinetic and vibrant with the aesthetics of third world adventure and intrigue, at a time in which America's own geopolitical location and lineage was rarely addressed or discussed in the mainstream arena

The opening alone is worth summarizing for its nightmarish provocation. The screen floods with red. The image pulls out of this saturation to reveal it is the painted membrane of a coffin. The camera swirls round the casket as it is tended to by a dockside worker, polishing its lid, preparing it for use. A caption informs the setting: “Haiti, 1978.” A tall, threatening figure sporting a gun intercepts the coffin and takes it for his own, his men carrying it off on a boat further down the coast. That evening, the figure re-emerges with a torch and a firearm, perhaps a militarized manifestation of the popular voodoo bogeyman, the incarnation of death. He leads a procession at which the coffin is the main attraction. It is set on fire and paraded through the streets, beneath a large billboard featuring the visages of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”), then Haitian President in 1978, before being dumped outside a building.

A hospital. Inside, a patient has just been declared dead. When he is subsequently buried, the interred camera records a tear coursing down his cheek, his eyes twitching slowly open. Screen douses black.

Bookended by the coffin, the movement of the opening section of Wes Craven's 1988 film could be seen as a cyclical one, a metaphysical lurch that swirls amongst a funerary ritual, culminating with a cremation and then a return to earth. It is an out-of-body experience that does not return to the anatomy but stays proximate, an interred camera and an interred man, both conscious, both watching.