Ganja & Hess began as an act of subversion. Producers Kelly and Jordan of Kelly/Jordan Enterprises wanted to churn out a horror movie capitalizing on the release of 1972’s Blacula. Regarded as the first-ever blaxploitation horror movie, Blacula was among the highest-grossing films that year. Its success opened the doors for predominately black horror casts and brought black audiences, and their money, to studios.
Kelly and Jordan turned to rising star Bill Gunn, an accomplished playwright and author, for their mockbuster. Instead, Gunn made a beautiful arthouse masterpiece that defied convention. Despite positive reception at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, its distributors attempted to recut, edit and re-release the film under numerous terrible names, most famously Blood Couple. Gunn’s original vision of Ganja & Hess survived, becoming a horror cult classic and posthumously catapulting Gunn from artist to auteur.
Gunn’s next act of subversion is Ganja herself. Self-possessed, Ganja makes no apologies for who she is. She resists the period’s popular criticisms of black women’s stereotypical portrayal and emasculation of black men. Married to narrative and visual themes of assimilation, Gunn’s vision on the nature of vampirism, is also survival. To embody survival as a confident, independent black woman is Gunn’s greatest act of subversion and cements the film as essentially black feminist.
Blacksploitation films received criticism for portraying black men as criminals, which originally set out to reflect Black Power in conflict with white oppression. Representations of black women failed further: black women were one-dimensional stereotypes, little more than bodies onto which sex and violence happen. Even Blacula’s Juanita and Tina reinforce this: the smart-mouth who’s murdered and the ideal woman, who is also murdered.
Like Juanita, Ganja’s explosive entry in Ganja & Hess is read as negative. From her initial call, she’s seen as demanding and pushy, going so far as to call back upon being hung up on. She curses Hess’ assistant George Meda for losing his mind, then, demands a place to stay, culminating in the arrogance of the line “I’m hard to miss because I’m valuable.”
Scholars Lydia Ogwang, Manthia Diawara, and Phyllis Klotman characterize Ganja’s first impression as aggressive and unsympathetic. Ogwang specifically uses descriptors that color this as “hotheaded,” “obtuse,” and “vixen” while simultaneously arguing that black female bodies are a target of exploitation and eroticization. It’s only through her revelation of her traumatic past that audiences (and Hess) soften to Ganja. Only then does she lead her own narrative, as described by Diawara and Klotman in their critical essay “Ganja and Hess.” However, Ganja’s softness is not in opposition to her aggression. If anything, it supports Ganja as a multi-dimensional character.
Ganja reveals key information about her character from her first interaction with Dr. Hess Green. Her demands to speak with Meda reveal six months of directed frustration. While we do not know why Ganja arrives much later than Meda, we immediately understand her position. Ganja is alone and without money in a time when women were not allowed their own bank accounts. She has encountered similar situations with her unstable artist husband, and this alone makes her immediately sympathetic.
Later, Ganja stands before a casually dressed Hess outside his estate, the limousine door between them. There’s an entitlement to the scene. Now, fully seeing her as she sizes up Hess and her environment, we cannot deny that Ganja looks every bit as valuable as she claims to be in the earlier phone booth scene. What Ganja asserts in that line is not arrogance but rather an understanding of her value. Hess also intentionally doesn’t introduce himself, baiting this assumption out of pride. Ganja does not apologize for herself. She merely assumes, as Hess parallels with Meda, that he is not the owner of the house.
It becomes clear that audiences immediately invalidate Ganja’s very real frustration because of a perceived attitude and arrogance. These perceptions put Ganja in direct danger. No one attempts to warn Ganja. Not even Archie, who is well aware of what his employer is. Like Reverend Williams, who narratively represents the Christian patriarchy, Archie does not attempt to protect or warn her. Like Juanita, the audience distances themselves from Ganja and thinks she deserves what’s coming to her.
When asked by Hess what she wants, Ganja notoriously responds, “Money” so powerfully, there’s no mistaking her assertion. Considering her initial reception as an aggressor, it further casts Ganja as the antagonist deserving of her violent transformation. We expect that in doing so, she’ll be ostracized, but instead, she is rewarded. Here lies the underlying motivation of Ganja’s character. Where Hess is motivated by his loneliness, Ganja is motivated by Hess’ money.
Money provides power in the post-colonial Christian patriarchy. Hess’ money allows him to operate in white spaces. It affords him privacy, independence, and material trappings–a house, staff, a limousine, and parties. For Hess, his success others him into loneliness. For Ganja, someone denied power at every turn by virtue of her race and gender; her dual otherness makes her capable of not only surviving the Mythrian blood curse but thriving. Ganja is a survivor of her dual identity and is rewarded for that.
The Mythrian woman, visually presented as a mammy figure, is the powerful matriarch of the Mythrian people. Followed by two young boys, she cuts through tall grasses, her body reflecting her importance and leadership. She is often pictured against the white mask-wearing administrator, set pastorally versus a hallway. Hers is the metaphor of returning to cultural power, a power that resists and subverts the white Christian patriarchy with black feminine power.
In Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” report for the U.S. Department of Labor in 1965, Moynihan suggests that given the rates of single motherhood and welfare, black people were essentially forced into a matriarchy structure, which slowed the growth of black people as a whole. This idea gained popularity among black male scholars who believed black women’s independence doubly emasculated black men. Unlike, as Gunn asserts, a cultural practice lost to colonization.
Bill Gunn’s use of subversive black feminism allows Ganja to fully embody herself as a multi-dimensional character and contend with the masculine forces around her to fulfill her ultimate goal of independent power. A story of assimilation and otherness, Ganja is inherently doubly othered by her race and womanhood. She bears no temptation to die under the shadow of the cross. As evidenced by Reverend Williams, she is left out of Christian narratives centered on men. As experienced with Meda, Ganja is no stranger to the conflict of black men’s maleness with their blackness. She is rejected based on class, as revealed in Archie’s hostility.
Ganja is not in conflict with herself. She is wholly united in and protective of herself. By seeking power for herself above the approval of men in the film and the audience, her ultimate survival as a vampire and Mythrian Matriarch is victoriously black feminist.
