Originally financed to capitalize on the success of Blacula in 1973, Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess (1973) uses a distributor-mandated focus on vampires as the framework to make an elliptical, arthouse horror that threads together the many faces of the vampire myth (seducer, blasphemer, carrion creature) to make an inward-facing investigation of the perils and pressures of assimilation on Black people in America.
The plot is introduced through a trio of devices that lets us get used to the dreamlike nature of the film’s universe. Text title cards fill in the basic outline, while a gently crooning singer provides additional context. A voice-over completes the trio, speaking of the same events in the present tense, though we have yet to see them happen.
Wealthy anthropologist Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones) is stabbed three times by his crazed and suicidal research assistant, George Meda (writer/director Bill Gunn). This attack with an ancient ceremonial dagger infects Hess with a disease that grants him both near immortality and a thirst for human blood. Soon after, Hess meets his former assistant’s wife, Ganja (Marlene Clark). Though Ganja is initially concerned about her missing husband, she soon joins Hess as his partner in marriage and vampirism.
Once infected, Hess begins stealing from medical facilities and stalking victims who likely won’t be missed from disenfranchised neighborhoods. The nature of addiction is an obvious component of the most linear aspects of the narrative, but identifying it as the sole metaphorical flourish of the film ignores the larger themes of isolation and assimilation the movie has carefully laid out.
Dr. Hess Green is almost always seen alone and, until Ganja’s arrival, rarely interacts with anyone who does not work for him. His art collection is vast, his son educated in French at the finest schools, and he is chauffeured about while wearing sharp suits. While Hess’s life is the ideal of aspirational upward mobility, there is a telling scene just before George Meda attacks Hess in which the former is contemplating suicide. As Meda talks of his desire to drown or hang himself, Dr. Green coolly points out that he is “the only colored on this block” and that the corpse of another Black person on his property would surely bring the authorities, who would assume the worst of Hess. Dr. Green has done everything possible to fit in with his affluent milieu, but his Blackness leaves him permanently othered, his choices no real protection against the potential of racist assumptions. The vampirism adds another dimension of exclusion and isolation, but both of those things were already a condition of Hess’s existence amongst a white upper class majority even before his infection.
The arrival of Ganja not only provides Hess with the companion he clearly desperately needs, but it gives us an illustration of a more individualistic and separatist response to the same societal structures and stresses that Hess faces. Ganja covets the trappings of Hess’s wealth enough to forgive finding the body of her husband in his wine cellar. While the audience knows that Meda killed himself, Ganja shrugs off Hess’s possible psychopathy as “everyone is some kind of freak,” and marries him. Brash, beautiful and openly disdainful of everyone she meets (particularly the help), it is not until later in the film that Marlene Clark gets a humanizing monologue detailing the childhood traumas and rejections that underlie her resolve to “ALWAYS take care of Ganja.”
Check out the trailer for Ganja & Hess, which was re-released to theaters in May, 2018:
The persistent introspection of Ganja & Hess is notable, particularly amongst films of the Blaxploitation era with vampiric mythology. While Blacula uses vampirism as a metaphor for the death and cultural destruction caused by slavery in a promising opening scene, it is a concept the movie fails to fully flesh out. (Check out this article on the flaws and successes of Blacula.) While classically trained actor William Marshall gives the character of Prince Mamuwalde pathos, the script does not allow him catharsis, justice, or peace in the existence to which Count Dracula condemned him. Our sympathy is increasingly supposed to lie with those chasing Blacula down, to the point where suicide caused by hundreds of years of abuse and loss is painted as a victory of man over monster.
Ganja & Hess stays firmly rooted in the Black experience, and even the source of its vampirism is an ancient African civilization. It only looks outward as far as its characters do, concerned with Eurocentrism in the context of how it intersects with our titular couple. Whiteness is reduced to non speaking extras in a few hallucinatory scenes, and the vampirism is not played for villainy, with no one to enforce an idea of monstrous other aside from the characters’ conflicts with themselves.
As Ganja and Hess become more enmeshed in their vampiric coupling, some of the film’s most beautiful and sensual photography is given over to the skin, blood, sweat and tears that allows both of them to continue to exist. This same visceral quality, the ever present struggle for blood, is what slowly drives Hess away from Ganja, his last hope of companionship.
They share a kill, and it is telling that Hess wants the husk of the victim to be left to die on the grounds, but Ganja insists he is technically still alive even in his drained state. She sees their violent needs as a source of power, while Hess is hesitant to consign anyone else to their spiritually uncertain fate; thus, Ganja and Hess’s conflicting approaches to their outsider status comes to a head.
Unable to handle the demands of the ancient curse, but permanently blockaded from his former ambitions, Hess uses his academic research skills to discover the one thing that can destroy the afflicted. The shadow of the cross centered over the heart of a cursed one is the only way they can die. In the context of assimilation and isolation for Black individuals, Bill Gunn takes this slightly modified piece of classic vampire lore to make a bold statement about the futility of that effort, as well as about religious hypocrisy.
Hess ends his suffering by entering the church, and letting the shadow cross his heart. In keeping with his characterization, he makes the ultimate gesture of assimilation, destroying the ancient cursed knowledge with the white man’s version of Christianity, trading the blood of his victims for the blood of Christ. In the end, it is a futile effort, as what is promised as salvation is merely destruction by another name. Ganja opts not to join him, saving their last victim to be her new lover, her final few frames steeling her determined gaze onto what is now her domain.
Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess boldly used an exploitation plot to make a film that has more to do with the new freedom of the era’s arthouse cinema than any Blaxploitation formula. Instead of the simplified narrative of Black avenging angels rising up against larger than life white oppressors, Ganja & Hess ignores the dominant lens of whiteness. The film quietly lurks in the shadows of the darker daily struggles for Black people, without stooping to recommend a singular correct course of action. It presents its ideas in a heady, bubbling brew of fractured narrative, letting the viewer decide from which cup they wish to drink.
Ganja & Hess is available to stream on Amazon:
G.G. Graham is a cult film cryptid, horror hag, and exploitation film explorer of the dusty and disreputable corners of cinema history. The street preacher of Z-grade cinema can be found at www.midnightmoviemonster.wordpress.com or on Twitter @msmidnightmovie
