The fly-by-night B-movie producers at Kelly-Jordan Enterprises merely asked writer/director Bill Gunn for a black vampire film, something to earn a few bucks off the blaxploitation boom. What Gunn gave them was one of the most weirdly beautiful American art films of the time. A slow, misty dream full of pain and made with deliberate love. A film with its heart in the arthouse and no business in the grindhouse. Naturally, the producers then did their best to destroy it, burying their treasure under piles of drastically re-edited versions with lurid titles. For about twenty-five years, they succeeded. Gunn’s original vision went all but unseen, rarely written about and barely known. Gunn and his collaborators protected their baby though, quietly stashing away reels of the uncut film. Gunn flew an unexpurgated print himself to the Cannes Film Festival and eventually donated it to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, though the movie still managed to slip through almost every crack.
That’s the real horror of the would-be horror film of Ganja & Hess. That and that Bill Gunn died in 1989, a good decade before his masterwork would finally be restored. In a better world, this film would have been a bold little sensation in 1973, a unique and important work from black filmmakers and starring a black cast, no blaxploitation cliches for miles. The same audience that went to Bergman and Fellini films would have seen this and then talked about it all night. Who knows the body of work that Gunn might have offered afterward?
Here, Gunn sees his vampires as addicts (the film uses that exact word) with blood as their drug. He doesn’t care about old horror mythology. He ignores almost all of the rules. Gunn’s vampires can look at themselves in a mirror in a room full of sunlight and surrounded by crucifixes and be fine. All of that is kid’s stuff next to Gunn’s real interests here which are black identity in the mainstream world, chemical dependence, sex, suicide, dream sequences, the howl of black churches and the discretion of the upper class.
Lead actor Duane Jones is a wealthy anthropologist who owns a beautiful country mansion, attends elegant parties and is a model of good taste and refinement. He’s not the warmest guy around, but through sheer charisma (Jones has the same screen magnetism here that he earlier showed in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead), we like him. We even trust him. At the very least, we know that he’s smart. We can see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice.
And that’s how he gets away with being a junkie. The film stresses that it’s not his fault. He’s a victim of it, had his addiction forced on him, like any other vampire. Things complicate further when his new academic assistant (played by Bill Gunn himself, delivering long, neurotic speeches so naturally he doesn’t seem to be acting) shows up and commits suicide in the house. The next turning point comes when the dead man’s wife shows up looking for him, develops an attachment to Jones and then things get really weird.
There aren’t a lot of texts that tell you that this is an important film, but this IS an important film. There is no better example of a great artist repressed by the film industry than this (at least Orson Welles had some final say over Citizen Kane). It’s also a film that reminds us the importance of putting aside our expectations and taking a work of art for what it actually is. If cinema history is a wide and colorful valley, this film is a jewel hidden just under the dirt.
Spike Lee remade this forty years later as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.