Blacula this is not. Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess is one of the best bad trips of the ’70s, a heady and sweaty vampire flick like no other. Duane Jones—who starred in just two films, both masterpieces, the other being Night of the Living Dead—plays wealthy anthropologist Dr. Hess Green who is stabbed by a ceremonial African dagger, turning him into an immortal supernatural being. His sudden bloodlust soon awakens other carnal hungers, and he lures Ganja, the estranged wife of his attacker, into his hedonistic lifestyle. Mishandled and all but buried at the time of its release, critics and distributors reacted with hostility to this raw, sexually charged art film—inspiring Gunn to pen a powerful, damning open letter in The New York Times titled “To Be a Black Artist”—but Ganja & Hess is now regarded as an ahead-of-its-time independent horror milestone, a key influence on a generation of boundary-pushing Black filmmakers (including one Spike Lee, who fought to remake it as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus). Hallucinatory, enigmatic, and deeply political, this vivid monster movie has only grown more potent over the last fifty years. Consider this an early Halloween present from VTIFF. ~OO