A Spellbinding Way to Make a Movie : Shot in Haiti, ‘Serpent’ Peers Into a Dark, Sensual World

When Wade Davis was in the Amazon, he got lost for 10 days in the jungle. When he went to Haiti, he met a zombie and watched a voodoo priest dig up a dead child and cook its bones as part of the recipe for a deadly poison.

So it hardly seemed like a big deal when a pair of woolly monkeys gave the 34-year-old ethnobotanist and author an odd stare as he strolled around the Los Angeles Zoo the other day.

They had good reason to be suspicious.

“The Indians in the Amazon consider woolly monkeys a great meal, though personally I find their brains a little sweet,” Davis said. “Monkey meat is a little stringy, but it’s good, especially if you’re hungry. The Indians consider the brains the best part, so when they want to be especially polite to a visitor, they cook the head for you.”

But the earnest, soft-spoken Harvard grad (with degrees in anthropology and biology, as well as a Ph.D. in ethnobotany) wasn’t in Los Angeles on a field trip. He was helping promote “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” a new film due out Friday, which is based on his book of the same name about his adventures in Haiti.

Directed by horrormeister Wes Craven (“Nightmare on Elm Street”) and starring Cathy Tyson and Paul Winfield with Bill Pullman as Davis, the film dramatizes the Canadian-born botanist’s startling encounters with a voodoo-poison expert, Haitian secret societies and a man who had been drugged, buried alive and resurrected as a zombie.

Of course, if you want drama, you should have seen what happened on the movie set.

The film was shot for several weeks in Haiti--until a near-riot by 2,000 extras forced the crew to flee to the neighboring Dominican Republic.

“We worried that we’d be torn apart for spare parts,” said Craven.

Even today, 8 months after the film’s 9-week shoot was completed, the producers still sounded a bit shaken.

“I’ve never experienced a film shoot like this,” Craven said. “Haiti is just an extraordinary place--very beautiful and compelling.

“But weird things happen down there. You realized almost immediately that you were in a strange kind of psychic place. It got to a lot of us--I was continually hugging people, trying to give them strength.”

How weird was it?

To better understand his role, Brent Jennings, a young actor cast to play a local voodoo specialist, wanted to meet Marcel Pierre, his real-life counterpart. Eager to make the film as authentic as possible, Davis took Jennings and some crew members to see Marcel at his home.

“Marcel was singing this sweet song, with all these little kids hanging around, doing the chorus, when suddenly he became possessed,” Davis recalled. “It happens all the time down there, but I don’t think our film crew realized that. I remember turning to my girlfriend and saying, ‘This is going to be interesting.’ ”

It was. According to Davis, Marcel was possessed by a particularly violent spirit known as a loa.

“He went crazy. He threw a chair into the brand new production vehicle, heaved a table onto the roof and hurled a machete past my head so hard it broke in half when it hit the wall.

“Marcel even got ahold of me and bit me in the arm, which happens a lot, too. Then, as suddenly as it came, the spirit left him. He was completely normal again--smiling, wanting to know what else he could do for us.”

Davis had few qualms about his book being made into a Hollywood film. After living in Haiti, he realized the film makers couldn’t possibly invent anything more bizarre than what regularly occurs there.

One afternoon in the town of Gonaives, Davis stopped by the theater to see “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” During the finale, when spirits begin shooting out of the ark, the audience reacted with horror and astonishment.

“They took what was happening on the screen literally,” Davis said. “Everyone started shouting ‘loup garou’ (the werewolf), one guy warned pregnant women to protect themselves and someone insisted that we tie ribbons around our left arms to ward off the spirits.”

Davis was fascinated by the Haitians’ intimate rapport with the spirit world.

“Our Western tradition has given us a certain defensiveness toward the power of the spiritual world,” he said.

“There are so many misconceptions about voodoo. It’s a completely lived religion. Its ceremonies aren’t scary or forbidding--they’re full of entertainment, sensuality and laughter. It has no bible, no theocratic manifestoes. And it’s a very elastic, democratic faith.”

Though he’s lived on the far fringes of society--working as a forest ranger in British Columbia and traveling through Europe, Haiti and South and Central America--Davis is hardly an Indiana Jones-style adventurer. With his curly blond hair, starched white shirt and thoughtful air, he looks about as rugged as a Banana Republic sales clerk.

Still, his innocent manner is engaging, as is his self-deprecating humor. Downplaying his exploits while studying Haitian secret societies, he quipped: “I’m not macho. Of course, I have a total naivete that might be mistaken for macho.”

He also has little interest in being a media star--even a tiny, flickering one.

“It’s nice to get attention so you can serve as a spokesman for issues you care about,” he said. “But it doesn’t impress me to be on TV. Until last summer, I didn’t even own a TV. Or a car. Or a house. Or a stereo. Or a VCR. All I had was a great collection of blowguns.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t realize why people had houses till I got one and saw how neat it was to actually have a place to put your things.”

Rob Cohen has produced dozens of films--from “The Wiz” to “Ironweed” and “The Witches of Eastwick.” However, “Serpent” was the first movie he could recall that ever needed insurrection insurance.

“The bond company thought we were a little crazy shooting in Haiti,” he chuckled as he sipped cappuccino at a Sunset Strip cafe. “We had to be covered--just in case filming was disrupted by a revolution, or if someone were killed or the film stock was stolen.”

Now he can laugh. One of the first things the producers did when they reached Haiti was pay a courtesy call on several respected voodoo leaders, who were asked to bless the production.

“You go into their homes, into their inner sanctums, with all the skulls and bones--it’s a pretty amazing experience,” Craven said. “And once they were persuaded that we weren’t going to exploit the religion in any way, we were given protection with a true voodoo ceremony.”

By the time Craven began shooting an elaborate candlelight march ceremony--using 2,000 local extras--the protection had apparently worn off.

“We paid them each $2 for 3 hours’ work, which is twice what they normally got for a day’s hard labor, so we didn’t feel we were exploiting anyone,” Cohen said.

“But when the extras realized there was more money available they became very unruly and angry. They all had rocks and machetes--and by the time they surrounded our auditors, it was clear we were on the verge of a disaster.”

According to Craven, the company gave out raises on the first day of shooting, but the next day the extras demanded more.

“That’s when it turned very ugly. I’ve never been surrounded by such a wall of humanity. They were so close you could feel their body heat. We had army soldiers using rifle butts to beat back the people and keep them from assaulting us.”

Producer David Ladd, who had been to Haiti before, attempted to quell the disturbance.

“I got up on the roof of our van and tried to negotiate,” he said. “But when I found myself facing thousands of people, all with rocks in their hands, it became apparent that our well-being was in danger.”

That night, after offers of another raise momentarily quelled the angry mob, the production evacuated its film crew and flew to the Dominican Republic.

“All of us left with mixed feelings,” Craven said. “It was scary to see so much anger and frustration, but you couldn’t help but have enormous sympathy for them. The poverty is just limitless.”

The country definitely cast a spell.

“It’s such a potent, sensual and dark place,” Cohen said. “One of our art directors got so caught up in the crazy things in the air that he met a woman down there and was married, in a voodoo ceremony by a voodoo priest.”

Asked how the marriage has fared, Cohen raised his eyebrows.

“They’re not together now, but. . . .” He grinned. “Listen, nothing surprises you down there. When I’d call people back home and tell them, ‘Yeah, I saw this guy dancing tonight who stuck pins through his cheeks,’ they’d always say, ‘Rob, how much rum are you drinking down there?’ ”

Being a Hollywood film, “The Serpent and the Rainbow” takes certain liberties--enough to make Davis quietly complain that some of its special effects were “gratuitous and regrettable.” But overall, he’s satisfied.

“I think, given the commercial imperatives, they really did a good job,” he said. “The movie captures the beauty of the country and shows how it radiates both good and evil.”

Still, for an ivory-tower guy who is most comfortable analyzing closed systems of belief or societal alienation, a cross-country movie publicity tour is quite nerve-racking.

“I guess I’m just not very tuned in to popular culture,” Davis said. “When I did ‘The Today Show,’ this woman came up to me before the program and told me how much she and her husband liked my book. I had no idea until I went on the show that she was Jane Pauley.

“But the worst was when I was on this talk show with Debbie Reynolds. She had this handler (a publicist), like she was a wild animal or something. And her handler’s identity was completely caught up in this celebrity’s life.”

Davis laughed. “And she couldn’t believe I didn’t know who Debbie Reynolds was.”

Is it any wonder Davis is more enchanted by the jungle and the outback, where, as he asserts in his book, there lies a spiritually complete world, with no separation between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the profane?

“I’ve just never really felt like a member of this society,” he said, walking through the zoo’s aviary, listening to the birds’ staccato greetings. “I’m much more comfortable out in the wilderness, either by myself or with tribal people.

“Look how ahistorical American society is--with a President who doesn’t even read. Do you realize that Teddy Roosevelt wrote 48 books! And instead of nourishing the cultures we still have, we’re destroying them.”

Davis grinned sheepishly. “There I go again. I always know these interviews are going to come to an end when I start raging on and on about biology and culture.”