FANTASIA OBSCURA: The Landmark Vampire Flick that Inspired Spike Lee
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, we realize we have nothing to fear from death, as long as we can handle what happens after that…
Ganja & Hess (1973)
Distributed by: Kelley/Jordan Enterprises
Directed by: Bill Gunn
Some folks never catch a break in movies. Those who manage to succeed elsewhere in other fields are never guaranteed that they’ll see that same success in films.
Bill Gunn is probably one of the most creative “shoulda-been” who tried his hand at it. Better known for his stage work and scripts he contributed to, he could not catch a break in cinema. Part of it was bad luck, but a good deal was his willingness to go places no one would try to head towards until years later, being truly avant-garde in a field that talks a better game than it delivers.
As a director, he got three productions mounted. The first, Stop, about couples on vacation in Puerto Rico, has never been released theatrically by Warner Brothers since the director handed them the picture in 1970. And 1980’s Personal Problems would not get released in the US until 2018, via home video.
Which makes his one film that did actually get before a paying audience all the more precious, especially as it decided to be more than just a vampire film:
The film’s opening is unique; it explains what’s going to happen before we watch it take place, with on-screen cards, before we get a brief introduction to Reverend Luther Williams (Sam Waymon, in his first credit as an actor, who also composed the score for the film):
We roll back a little to the time before Doctor Hess Green (Duane Jones) retained Reverend Williams as a driver, when he hosted an admiring colleague, George Meda (Gunn), who proves to be a horrible house guest. In between being socially awkward, Meda’s mental instability leads him to try and kill himself a few times at Hess’ place.
Hess manages to talk him out of shooting himself, jumping in the lake to drown, and even hanging himself with a noose placed in a tree (!) before Meda uses the cursed dagger to kill his host. After the deed, Meda shoots himself, followed by Hess returning from the dead and lapping the suicide victim’s blood off the floor with his tongue.
Hess tries to deal with his new condition by ripping off a doctor’s office, stealing bags of plasma, but finds that he needs his product fresh. This brings him to an encounter with a prostitute (Candece Tarpley in her first credited gig) and her pimp (Tommy Lane) where Hess’ newfound indestructability comes into play as he turns from prey to predator.
Just as he thinks he’s figured out how the rest of his unlife is going to go, into the picture comes Ganja (Marlene Clark), Meda’s wife. She rolls in, angry that her husband deserted her while having one of his “incidents,” and hits up Hess for a place to stay until she finds him.
An attraction between the two springs almost instantly, after a few shows of bravado, and the two soon have an affair. The affair is almost in danger of coming to an end when Ganja finds her husband’s body in Hess’ wine cellar, but after she gives a monologue to someone (possibly the audience) that breaks down what makes her tick, the affair heats up again.
This leads Hess to be willing to give her just about everything. First, he gives her his hand in marriage, and after the ceremony then gives her his “gift,” using the same cursed dagger Meda used on him to make her a vampire as well.
As a wedding present, Hess invites an unnamed dinner guest (Richard Harrow in his only credited film role) to the house, whom he gives to Ganja to play around with before she takes blood from. And for a while, the arrangement works, until Hess starts to have issues with his vampiric existence; he decides on a course of action with grave consequences, which leads to the main characters making choices that feel surprising, despite the inevitability from what their characters stated they wanted…
Watching the above unfold may seem a little confusing, the way important events in the narrative do not seem to follow a neat progression in time. Add to that moments when the characters have a scene to themselves to reflect aloud in monologue or read works they wrote to empty rooms, using story telling techniques found more often in live theater than film, and one gets the sense that we’re not so much watching things as we see them in real life but as in dreams, or more precisely nightmares.
In addition to Gunn’s warping of the script and settings, we also get placed more fully beyond the waking realm through sound, especially Waymon’s musical selections. He chooses pieces here and there that are echoed, slowed down, and otherwise distorted to best affect the viewer and place them in a state where we must submit to the fantastic:
Gunn’s script and directing does play around a lot with time and recollection, all for the purpose of the real story. When asked to do a vampire film on a $350,00 budget (around $2,000,000 in today’s dollars), Gunn was on the record saying he didn’t want to do a vampire film, but relented when he realized that he could use vampires to discuss obliquely a different topic: addiction.
If one were to substitute the blood that Ganja and Hess sought in the film with, say, heroin, there would be very little work that’d need to be done on the screenplay. By having vampirism stand in for other addictions, Gunn has a chance to use genre elements as a means to address a topic that might not be able to be looked at through mainstream mechanisms.
And it’s watching the struggle with addition wrack the title lovers that gives the film such drive. Jones’ Hess does a fantastic job as an established secure man who finds himself adjusting as best he can to the circumstances, even as they tear him apart. Clark’s Ganja, meanwhile, is a fascinating character, a woman whose bravado hides a vulnerability that makes her look for a landing that draws sympathy for doing things that should shock you more had you not known where she came from.
Despite the strong effort by Gunn and his crew, the film failed to draw enough juice to keep the producers happy. His backers, expecting a slightly artsy rift off of Blackula and its sequel, probably had not expected something that played out the way this does. Facing their own 
addiction, to money, the producers would cut close to 30 minutes from the film, rename it Blood Couple for another run at the theaters (and a few other names during various releases for VHS), and turn what was a lyrical meditation that didn’t play like a cheap exploitation pic, into a bad film that couldn’t reach the heights of being a cheap exploitation pic.
But like Hess and Ganja themselves, dying at the box office for this film was not the end. Unlike other auteurs, Gunn had the presence of mind to donate an original cut to the Museum of Modern Art. With the film in its collection for serious students, its reputation would build as the years went by and others discovered the picture in the way the writer/director intended.
One such student of film who would come to appreciate the original was Spike Lee. In 2014, he would undertake a re-imagining of the film, with Gunn given a credit for his original screenplay, which became Da Swett Blood of Jesus:
Much like its lovers, the film continues to exist on long after its death…
NEXT TIME: We take a look at an upstanding scientist to see how he was inverted; by the end of the piece, we will have alerted you…
