Magnetism & Madness

This week, an arty vampire classic, a Carpenter (maybe) classic, and another attempt at The Mummy. . . .

(Some spoilers below.)

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ Ganja & Hess, dir. Bill Gunn, 1973.

Magnetism. Vampires are supposed to be magnetic, and Duane Jones’s Hess certainly fits the part. He connects to people without much in the way of introduction or interaction. People reveal themselves to him, monologuing whole personal narratives unbidden. And yet, the magnetism doesn’t seem to stem from the vampirism, it seems to just be who he is. The vampirism is more a sad secret—which makes sense for a movie explicitly linking vampirism to addiction. This gives the depiction of addiction a rare kind of realism. A sad secret, yes, but not one that entirely overwhelms the man. It’s a quiet, dark mire. 

Sophistication. American critics in 1973 didn’t get the movie, and neither did audiences. Rereading Eden Royce’s piece in Crossroads Issue 1 arguing for Ganja & Hess’s place in the folk horror canon, I was struck by the quote she pulls from director Bill Gunn: “White folks can understand an educated black man, but they cannot understand a sophisticated black man.” An extension of Gunn’s quote, it occurs to me, is that if there was little place for a sophisticated Black man on-screen, then there was not a lot of space for a Black vampire. Vampires are—in a post-Stoker, Western context—sophisticated (It’s Count Dracula). Black vampires were seemingly a tough sell in 1973 (though note that Blacula’s blaxploitation approach to a Black vampire was a box office hit the year prior), even though vampires are themselves classic embodiments of racial and xenophobic fears—styled as foreign, invasive others. If this was a significant dynamic behind the poor reviews, it’s revealing:  mainstream critics couldn’t even metabolize a Black man as one of cinema’s monsters if that monster happened to be a sophisticated one.