By Jason Collins
| Published
Salma Hayek’s legendary snake dance scene from the Quentin Tarantino-written vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn has resurfaced in conversation this week. People are talking about it because there’s almost no denying it, it’s the sexist dance scene ever captured on film.
What people may not know about the iconic scene is that Salma Hayek was so terrified of doing it that Tarantino and director Robert Rodriguez had to brainwash and manipulate her to get her dancing.
Salma Hayek suffers from ophidiophobia, an extreme, overwhelming fear of snakes. When she was told she’d be dancing with one, she at first refused.
As Hayek tells it, “Quentin told me, ‘Oh by the way you’re dancing with the snake.’ I said, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it. It’s my, my greatest fear’ and he said, ‘Well Madonna would do it. Yeah, I already talked to her and she’s willing to dance with the snake.“
Back then Hayek wasn’t a big name and she needed the part. So after being threatened, she pushed through her fear. The results on screen speak for themselves, but Hayek says she was only able to do it by being in a trance-like state, and as a result has little memory of actually filming the dance. She used self-hypnosis to get it done.
Hayek says, “Frankly, I really needed to pay the rent. In some cultures, the snake represented — I started doing research — your inner power. And my whole thing that I brainwashed myself into doing this was about dancing with my own inner power.“
She used that self-brainwashing to hypnotize herself fully. And then, she somehow came up with the entire dance on the fly. It was not choreographed.
Hayek says, “…it was good because I had to overcome my greatest fear I had to go on trance to the dance and it was improvised, the dance is improvised because there was no choreographer, nothing because you cannot choreograph a snake.“
From Dusk Till Dawn also gave George Clooney his first major leading role. In the movie, both Clooney and Tarantino’s characters are hiding at a bar, and at one point, Salma Hayek’s character, Santanico Pandemonium, enters the stage and starts dancing with a large Albino Burmese Python. The performance stops the entire bar dead in its tracks, but the scene goes on to reveal two things: Tarantino has a thing for feet, and the whole bar is full of vampires.
The movie was a success, and Salma Hayek’s iconic performance contributed to it. From Dusk Till Dawn later spawned an entire franchise with both a sequel and a prequel, as well as a TV show that ran for three seasons, the latter two expanded the history of Salma Hayek’s character within the cinematic universe, and greatly expanded on the wider vampire mythology.
The television version of the movie tried to replicate Salma Hayek’s performance. For that version, she was replaced by Eiza Gonzalez.
This isn’t the only time Salma Hayek overcame one of her biggest fears while preparing for a role. Hayek starred as Ajak in the Eternals, the superhero group’s appointed leader and healer. In the movie, when the group split up, Ajak went on to live in South Dakota on an isolated ranch. The scene in which Hayek rides on a horse seems seamless on the screen, but it wasn’t so straightforward during filming due to Hayek’s phobia of horse riding, which is connected to an incident from her childhood.
