Ganja and Hess is a film that exists in an odd sort of limbo -- while a handful
of fans (among them Spike Lee, James Monaco, and Tim Lucas) consider it a
masterpiece, the film has been so inaccessible for so long that plenty of
knowledgeable film enthusiasts have never even heard of it, and until recently
most interested film buffs were forced to make do with the incoherent short
version of the film (variously titled Double Possession, Blood Couple, and Black
Vampire, among other things) which was ineptly re-cut to more easily sell the
picture as a horror film. But Bill Gunn's original edit of Ganja and Hess (now
thankfully available on DVD) not only doesn't play by the rules of a horror
film, it eagerly confronts the formal structures of American genre filmmaking in
general. Ganja and Hess is a film about addiction, not vampirism; and as Hess
Green's dependence on human blood grows, it pulls him toward a heritage and a
mindset that he's preferred to ignore as an educated and assimilated African-
American, while his relationship with Ganja Meda at once parallels his dilemma
and intensifies it. Ganja and Hess is a elliptical, dreamlike film that often
disdains the literal in favor of the imagined or implied, and for a filmmaker
with only one picture to his credit, it's a remarkably accomplished and
visionary work.