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The Appropriate Tune: "Drawn to the Blood", by Sufjan Stevens
I’ve covered several movies on the Marathon that would be labeled as ‘blaxploitation’ films over the years, and while I’ve always strived to be as objective as possible I’ve been thinking lately that I might not have been properly mindful of the cultural context that these films were made under. I approach these films as genre films first and foremost, as that’s my bread and butter, and I tend to judge them based on that. To the Black community, while I certainly do not speak for them, I could understand the view that while getting to see Black actors on screen and Black directors behind the camera might have been considered a plus, because these were films that glorified negative portrayals of Black people (protagonists striving to become pimps, for example) while also pushing the sex & violence of other low budget movies, it might not have neccessarily been a source of pride. A source of tongue-in-cheek humor perhaps, as we see in films like Black Dynamite and Pootie Tang, but I can definitely see why it might be frustrating, and I apologize if I’ve come across like a dumbass in that respect in the past. Which is basically how I feel everytime my review for Coonskin gets another hit.
So this year I wanted to find something a bit different, and I eventually found one: Ganja & Hess, released in 1973 and written and directed by writer/actor/director/playwright Bill Gunn. Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead fame stars as Dr. Hess Green, an anthropologist and geologist who is stabbed overseas while researching Myrthia, an ancient African civilization. Rather than dying however, Hess is instead cursed: Unable to die, and filled with an insatiable urge for human blood. Still it’s pretty manageable, the benefits of wealth and all that, but things start to change when his colleague George Meda (Bill Gunn himself) ends up killing himself during his stay at Hess’ house. It’s because of that secret suicide that Hess meets Ganja Meda (Marlene Clark), George’s wife, and quickly becomes intoxicated with her beauty. Is this a whirlwind romance, or a spiral into depravity? I guess that depends on if someone gets hungry.
So what we have in Ganja & Hess is a vampire story, and in fact in some cases the film was repackaged under such titles as Black Vampire and Vampires of Harlem, although the only clue as to the film’s setting put it 20 or so miles north. You’ve got the wealthy, mysterious gentleman with an otherworldly charisma and the beautiful woman who is drawn into his world (although Ganja isn’t as chaste and meek as her peers in that regard). Yet unlike another film we’ve covered years ago on the Marathon, Blacula, Ganja & Hess stands on its own two feet. Blacula by its very nature cannot exist without Dracula, whereas G&H uses a couple aspects of vampire folklore (immortality, drinking blood, the connection to Christianity) in order to tell its own story. Hell Bill Gunn doesn’t even use the word vampire once, so if you wanted to you could excise any thoughts of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee from your minds and take it as its own thing, an erotic thriller with supernatural elements.
Stylistically Ganja & Hess quite unlike your standard horror film as well. Heavy use of montage, odd camera angles, dialogue faux-pas (characters talking over each other for example) to give the impression of realism, there’s definitely an attempt here to do something beyond just a monster movie. Very much inspired by New Wave directors like Godard and Fellini it seems and from what I’ve read Bill Gunn seemed like a worldly, arthouse kind of guy, so that’s not much of a stretch. I think credit is also due to the cinematographer, which I don’t do often enough in these reviews, James Hinton. Hinton did a lot of documentary work during the Civil Rights movement, and that makes sense as there’s definitely a candid aspect to the film that reflects that, the scenes at the church in particularly feeling very off-the-cuff and improvisational All done on a 350,000 dollar budget too, so I don’t want any grumbling from modern filmmakers about low budgets anymore.
Of course if you don’t like that New Wave inspired cinema from that late 60/early 70s, your Zabriskie Points and what have you then Ganja & Hess isn’t really doing much to persuade you in that regard. I don’t know if I would point to the editing or what but it’s often difficult to ascertain the what, when and why of scenes in this film. Like at one point I believe we’re introduced to Hess’ son at a garden party, which seems to exist only to set up that Hess’ addiction to blood is socially inconvenient, as that kid is never seen or referenced ever again in the film. Then there’s another scene where Hess has gone the classic monster route of going after sex workers; The woman takes off her wig, they kiss for a second, then he stands up and is immediately attacked by the pimp character who was established a couple minutes prior. If the intention was to rob Hess, wouldn’t it have made more sense to rob him post-coitus, when he was most vulnerable? It’s so similar to a previous scene with George Meda that for awhile I thought part of his curse was that people just attacked him randomly. Then there’s the dream sequences involving people in masks that kind of just ends after a while, which is never touched upon. Is it Hess’ victims coming back to haunt him? No, because people appear that were never killed by Hess. Is it a statement on how people adopt ‘masks’ in society to hide who they really are? Maybe, but you would think the end goal of those sequences would be Hess recognizing that he himself wears a mask, considering he’s not exactly forthright on the whole ‘murdering people and drinking their blood’ front, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Plus the ending, which makes sense from a character standpoint but also seems to just arrive without much preamble. It feels like this movie is trying to say a lot of things but what those things are I’m not sure, and it’s taking almost two hours to do it.
I also must admit that I wasn’t taken with Duane Jones as Hess Green. He’s easily the best part of the Night of the Living Dead because he was the most dynamic character; He was the one who had his shit together, unlike the rest of the characters in that movie, and you were drawn to him as an audience because he was getting shit done. Here he’s...sedate, for lack of a better term. I assume the intent was to portray him as guilt-ridden and haunted by what he has become, but in practice it comes across less like ‘vampiric PTSD’ and more ‘when are we done shooting for the day because I’m jonesin’ for some Thai food’. Even the relationship with Ganja (Marlene Clark is great by the way) feels off because it feels so one-sided in terms of the energy level. Hess says he loves her and is considering giving her his curse and I’m like really? You had one awkward talk with her and then almost immediately have sex, which she initiated and pursued (there’s probably a path you can go down regarding how Gana is portrayed and what that means, but I don’t think I’m smart enough to express it). That he looks into ways to destroy himself seems off, because again he shows little indication that he actually cares one way or another about what he does, besides not liking going through blood withdrawal. I hated Martin, another vampire-adacent movie, but I thought it did better at showing us why Martin was the way he is than Ganja & Hess does with Hess here.
Is Ganja & Hess a film I would recommend? If you’re a Marathon follower and enjoyed films like The Shooting or A Boy and His Dog (or Witchfinder General for the nastier moments) then yeah, this is a film that you can get into. Is it a film I’d watch more than once? Probably not, in all honesty. As I said the film is almost two hours long, and while there are interesting ideas and performances, I feel like it putters around too long for those things to be as effective as they could have been, which I believe was my main point of contention with those films as well. If you’re running a cult film night this Halloween, consider throwing Ganja & Hess in the queue and seeing how you feel.
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