HORROR
There’s hardly any film genre more intrinsically allegorical than horror. If social borders, both conscious and unconscious, along acceptance and exclusion, empathy and revulsion, good and evil, are dictated by the mass projection of society’s fears onto whomever threatens its norms, then horror is the exaggerated projection of its basest, most grotesque imaginations around those boundaries onto the silver screen. While the human rights analogy of the Living Dead series and the Cold War nihilism of Texas Chainsaw Massacre prodded at social themes from the perspective of the cultural mainstream looking outward at the groups it excluded, there’s a rarer vein of the genre written from the purview of those on the outside looking in.
Week 8 of Black Is Not a Genre is another doubleheader featuring films from two definitive eras of Black American cinema. Written and directed by leading light of the ‘70s ‘rebellion’ era, Bill Gunn, Ganja and Hess uses vampire mythology to paint hauntingly abstract metaphors for Black assimilation, loss of identity (the real life simile for which is the irony that the film was thought to be lost forever at the time of Gunn’s death), and the social psychology of white religious imperialism. Director Ernest Dickerson’s 1990 film Def By Temptation laid the tracks for a brief but prolific burst of Black-centric horror films in the ‘90s, but the scrappy indie film is overshadowed more Hollywood fare like Vampire In Brooklyn. Lead actor and screenwriter James Bond III’s script reimagines the darker tones of the schlock aesthetic, a trademark of its distributor Troma Entertainment. Enhanced with savvy practical effects and Dickerson’s impossibly lush cinematography, the film uses a classic succubus tale to explore urban-vs-rural social dynamics of northern Black migration and moral/cultural identity crises within the Black faith tradition.
These unheralded gems represent a major void in horror that underscores the genre’s social significance. If horror is film’s window into society’s subconscious, its narration of who is worthy of fear and death and who is worthy of life and salvation, then the lack of films from America’s socially and racially ostracized has a host of real-life implications.
Ganja and Hess is available to stream on Kanopy and both films are available on @shudder and Amazon Prime.
About the guests:
Jazz and Kat are hosts of the horror & sci-fi podcast, Girl, That's Scary!
Jearold Hersey is an Austin based designer, former film critic for The Tribune in Mesa, Arizona, and curator and founder of a local film club now in its fourth year of weekly programming.