Garton objected to his publisher’s decision to sell the 1992 book In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting as non-fiction, and admitted the story wasn’t true. The Warrens hired a horror novelist named Ray Garton to write a book about the Snedekers’ haunting, but Garton soon “realized that a lot of the information wasn’t making sense,' Radford says.

“Part of the modus operandi of the Warrens was to solicit help in publicizing these stories,” Radford explains. Most shockingly, both parents claimed demons had raped them. Parents Allen and Carmen Snedeker claimed they’d experienced paranormal phenomena at the Connecticut house they rented in 1986. Remember Ed and Lorraine Warren, the ghost hunters from Amityville? A decade after Amityville, they became involved with the Snedeker family. Writing in a 1989 issue of Latin American Anthropology Review, anthropologist Robert Lawless seemed to consider this fitting, since the book already read “like the first draft for a Hollywood movie with Davis himself as an Indiana-Jones-type hero.” The story grabbed the attention of horror filmmaker Wes Craven, who adapted the book into the 1988 film The Serpent and the Rainbow starring Bill Pullman as a Harvard researcher based on Davis. Kao, who called it “a carefully planned, premeditated case of scientific fraud.” Many other scientists denounced Davis’ claim as bunk, including tetrodotoxin expert C.Y. In it, Davis claimed he’d discovered that secret Haitian societies used tetrodotoxin, a toxin found in puffer fish, to trick people into thinking they’d died and come back to life as zombies from Haitian folklore.

In 1985, a white American graduate student named Wade Davis published a book with an extremely long title: The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic. Bill Pullman in the 1988 film The Serpent and the Rainbow.

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