So Horror Movie Month With my wife ends with two movies selected off the Criterion Channel, of which this is the first we watched.

So the back story on Ganja and Hess is that after the success of Blacula, some people looking to cash in on the blaxploitation craze gave $350K to Bill Gunn to direct a black vampire movie himself. Gunn took the money and proceeded to technically kinda sorta give his financiers what they asked for, while also completely not giving them at all what they had asked for.

Because ok, this is the story of a Black doctor who has, after being stabbed three times with a sacred dagger, developed immortality and an addiction to blood (though the word “vampire” is never uttered). And I guess technically he does kill some prostitutes, and the movie does have nudity, so you can make a case that he made exactly what they asked for. But in fact, not at all really, because this is a pretentious film where characters give these random soliloquies and where the plot never advances in the obvious (or even necessarily comprehensible) ways.

When it was finished, it apparently got some applause from critics at Cannes, but the financiers were horrified at having accidentally backed some kind of Black arthouse movie, and hired an editor to re-cut the movie to make it more commercially viable. The difference between the commercial cut (which Gunn disavowed and had his name removed from) and his version (which we watched) is summed up pretty well by this difference:

After Ganja angrily announces she has discovered [her husband’s] corpse in the basement, the scene in which Hess explains why it is there (“I didn’t kill him. Your husband committed suicide. I swear that’s the truth.”) is unique to [the re-edited commercial] variant. The director’s cut substitutes a three-minute sequence shot… in which Ganja reminisces about a snowball fight she participated in as a child.

Man, that’s the arthouse right there, isn’t it: You find your husband’s dead body, and then instead of getting an explanation from your host about what’s going on, you deliver a long monologue about childhood snowball fights.

So yeah, it’s a weird movie, and you can absolutely tell that it was made on an extremely tight budget: The 16mm film looks really rough (this is a recent restoration, and apparently it looks better than it ever has… but it doesn’t look good), the sound is so badly recorded that we needed to turn on subtitles because people were frequently just inaudible, and it’s just all around a really rough, almost student-level production. But the pretension and the low-budget amateurishness still don’t completely kill the movie: It’s got a compelling performance from some of its cast (particularly Duane Jones, playing Hess, who gives a performance that can be described as cool, distant, yet smoldering), and has some real energy in the scenes when it works (which mostly come in the second half of the movie once Ganja enters into it and their affair begins).

Not exactly recommended, but also not exactly not recommended. Weird, not entirely likable, but there’s a reason people are still showing it and talking about it almost 50 years after it was made.