Praying ‘Sinners’ Wins Best Picture? Try the Hypnotic Vampire Classic ‘Ganja & Hess’ While You Wait

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.

First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”

The Bait: Blood, Romance, and an Ancient Ancestor to “Sinners”

The way some people speak about it online, you’d think Black horror cinema was invented in 2017 when Jordan Peele made “Get Out.” In reality, that’s not the first film to use horror as a medium for social issues, and while the genre has long been predominantly (read: tragically) white, there have been movies that uses terror as a vehicle for exploring questions of otherness and identity for decades.

On the heels of “Sinners” incredible cultural success, and unprecedented awards recognition for director Ryan Coogler, Oscars weekend is the perfect time to revisit one of cinema’s most misunderstood classics: “Ganja & Hess.” This 1973 cult favorite also uses vampire tropes to tell a story about Black identity. But where “Sinners” is a thrilling blockbuster, this hazy romance offers something far weirder. It’s dreamlike art piece that filters fear, Blaxploitation, and list into one beguiling, slippery vision.

Bill Gunn in “Ganja & Hess” (1973)

The story behind the making of and reception of “Ganja & Hess” is almost as interesting as the film itself. In 1972, independent filmmaker and theater director Bill Gunn was approached by the production company Kelly-Jordan Enterprises with an offer to make a Black vampire movie for $350,000. The producers were new and inexperienced, and as a consequence, Gunn was able to film the movie with an extraordinary level of artistic freedom. He aimed to use genre conventions as a metaphor for very human addictions with the blood thirst that drives his hero (Duane Jones) threatening allegorical ruin.

That interpretation is obvious and effective as “Ganja & Hess” portrays the vampiric turn of anthropologist Dr. Hess Green (Jones, already horror icon for his 1968 performance in George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead”). After a first murderous high, Green spends the rest of the film chasing that euphoria through a recognizable 20th century America braced for inevitable collapse. What’s intrigued critics in the years since the film’s release isn’t Gunn’s interpretation of craving and compulsion so much as what the stance he takes on those intimate forces say about Black identity in the United States.

Duane Jones in “Ganja & Hess” (1973)

Hess is turned not by another vampire (you’ll notice the word “vampire” is never actually said in the film), but by his crazed assistant George Meda (Gunn in a sharp and layered cameo). Meda stabs Green with an ancient dagger from the “Myrthians,” an ancient African nation of blood drinkers, three times. That’s each for the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost, as the intro explains. The attack grants him immortality and an unquenchable taste for blood. But when Meda’s wife Ganja (Marlene Clark) arrives at Green’s mansion looking for her husband, Hess turns her in a way that’s tender, ceremonial, and violent.

From that simple premise, “Ganja & Hess” unspools several ideas about identity, lived experience, and religious or ancestral guilt. There’s a lot to digest emotionally and intellectually thanks to Gunn’s arthouse style, but the director isn’t preachy about the themes he’s wrestling with. On the contrary, “Ganja & Hess” is an entrancing watch with odd and unconventional pacing that eschews narrative coherency for arresting imagery and emotionally piercing set pieces that are sexy and crowd pleasing.

Marlene Clark in “Ganja & Hess” (1973)

“Ganja & Hess” played at the Cannes Film Festival Critics Week in 1973 to mostly positive reviews from French publications, but it faced a tepid reception and weak box office in America. Kelly-Jordan sold the rights to the film to the grindhouse company Heritage Pictures, which put later out a new version of “Ganja & Hess” that shortened the by almost 30 minutes. (Editor’s note: “Blood Couple,” as it’s known, is not currently streaming.) Gunn disavowed the new version and wrote a letter published in the New York Times titled “To Be a Black Artist” decrying the disrespect and mistreatment he believed his art received.

Gunn would make only one other movie, 1980’s “Personal Problems,” before dying just shy of a decade later at the age 54 from encephalitis. In recent years, his work has been heavily reappraised and reappreciated, in part thanks to a 2018 restoration of the original version of “Ganja & Hess” created from a print held by the Museum of Modern Art. Spike Lee has praised the film extensively, loosely remaking the work with 2014’s “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.” The rising critical esteem for “Ganja & Hess,” which Gunn and his star Jones didn’t live to see, is bittersweet and a reminder that even the most intoxicating nightmares can arrive ahead of their time. —WC

“Ganja & Hess” (1973) is streaming through VOD and the Criterion Channel.

The U.S. poster for the 2018 “Ganja & Hess” re-release©Samuel Goldwyn Films/courtesy Everett C / Everett Collection

The Bite: Now, Cue Up the “Sinners” Trailer at 45 Seconds…

Can you hear it? The chanting? Yes, that’s audio from “Ganja & Hess.” More specifically, it’s a sped-up sample used by the hip-hop group Clipping in their much later track “Blood of the Fang” (h/t to the vampire expert who pointed that out via the site Perfectly Imperfect). Coogler could make history this weekend as the first-ever Black filmmaker to win the Best Director category at the Oscars. But with “Sinners” up for 16 nominations, Coogler’s victory — or lack thereof — tells a much bigger story.

When “Black Panther” made history at the Academy Awards in 2019, Coogler wasn’t nominated for Best Director. Now he’s up against Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece “One Battle After Another” in several races that are too close to call. A win or loss for “Sinners” will no doubt be seen as symbolic for many modern audiences. But as far as comparisons go, weighing Coogler’s latest work against anything other than the luminous shagginess of something like “Ganja & Hess” feels misplaced.

A fiendishly horny ode to toe rings and double-breasted suits (not to mention “grape jelly, hominy grits, and extension cords”), Gunn’s timeless tone experiment from 1973 is as potent a monster movie as ever. It’s also groovy enough to drill glitter straight into your bones, with “Ganja & Hess” already cemented as essential genre viewing on most cinephilic starting guides.

Duane Jones and Marlene Clark in “Ganja & Hess” (1973)

And yet, reframed through Coogler’s dark Southern Gothic triumph, Gunn’s vision takes on new life as a critical foundation for a corner of the film world that remains broadly unmatched in its soulful specificity. I’ll never turn down a chance to see Duane Jones in anything, but his performance here is so far removed from his Romero days that the actor almost feels like the lucky passenger to the larger-than-life cynicism of Hess.

The chemistry he shares with Clark — a kind of yearning protest, steeling the couple against the indifference of a universe they could theoretically navigate more responsibly — feels relatable and wonderfully inaccessible. Its glossy sheen and period aesthetics make for a mesmeric cinematic trip, leaving behind hazy emotional portraits that remain just far enough out of reach to be haunting.

From William Crain’s “Blacula” (1972) to Anne Rice’s contemporary “Interview with the Vampire” universe, Black vampires represent one of the most haunting subgenres in horror. Bookending that final vision of a man emerging from the water with the philosophical musings of Meda earlier in the second act, “Ganja & Hess” offers a stylish immersion that entertains through serious existential fear. Scares don’t have to manufacture dread when the world we’re crawling through is already hellish. And that’s a lesson Coogler’s known for years, following wisdom as ancient as art itself. —AF

Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie rewatch club:

• Can’t Sleep? Try Listening to Old Oscars Ceremonies
• Obsessed with the Olympic Curling Scandal? Try the Canadian Cult Classic ‘Men with Brooms’
• Are You Scared of the U.S. Government Turning on Its Citizens? Try 1971’s ‘Punishment Park’
• We’re Failing Our Boys… if They Haven’t Seen 1971’s Rat-Obsessed Incel Horror ‘Willard’