Ganja & Hess

Ganja & Hess is a unique and radically black take on the vampire genre. Director Bill Gunn paved a path for black filmmakers to use genre to say what is unsayable without it. Black anthropologist Dr Hess Green (Duane Jones) is researching the Mythrians, an ancient African nation who ritually drank blood. When he is stabbed with one of their artefacts, it awakens an unquenchable thirst. Ganja & Hess gave its star Duane Jones another classic horror film to his name, alongside his lead in Night of the Living Dead. Screening in a restored version as part of the BFI’s In Dreams Are Monsters Tour.

Originally intended to ride the coattails of William Crane’s delightful Blacula (1972), Bill Gunn’s 1973 film Ganja & Hess is a far more complicated and experimental creation. While Blacula is arguably a reinterpretation of Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) - itself intended by AIP to breathe some new life into a dusty subgenre - Ganja & Hess is its own animal and, like George Romero’s somewhat later Martin (1978), is one that refuses to play by any conventional rules of cinematic vampirism. Part dreamy Gothic romance, part vampire film, and part commentary on African-American life, there is really nothing else like it. Director Gunn worked as a playwright and stage director - though he also made other films, including the controversial, X-rated Stop (1970), which focused on gay relationships - but Ganja & Hess is his masterpiece…

From an article by Samm Deighan, Diabolique Magazine