Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
It’s a lovely feeling when a record that you’ve been anticipating for a while matches up to your lofty expectations, and that’s absolutely been the case with my first couple listens of “Heartmind”, the latest, and tenth studio LP by singer-songwriter Cass McCombs—and this week’s quick rec.
It’s probably a bit naff to admit it, but I first came to McCombs, an eclectic and prolific rocker, via the Spotify algorithm. Specifically, it was the song “Switch” from his 2016 LP “Mangy Love” that popped up one day, and hooked me. “Switch” is classic McCombs—a steady, ebbing groove, witty yet oblique lyrics, and a calm, swirly musical patina with intricate below-surface detail that reveals itself upon repeat listens.
The track that has stood out to me most on “Heartmind” so far is the eight-and-a-half minute closing title track, a moody, noodly ditty that opens out into something pastoral and expansive, a widescreen landscape watercolored with synth, sax, jagged guitars and pipes. It’s perhaps not the best entry point if you’re new to McCombs, but it’ll be catnip if you happen to be a fan of the music it instantly and happily reminded me of: the early post-Japan solo LPs by David Sylvian, including Brilliant Trees (1984) and Gone to Earth (1986). These extraordinarily atmospheric proto-post rock albums are rarely far from my turntable, and if you’re not familiar, I can’t recommend them highly enough, especially if you dig this:
I had a lovely catch-up this week with a filmmaker friend, who told me he was taking his son to a repertory screening of the genuinely haunting 1973 horror movie Ganja & Hess, written and directed by the criminally under-resourced and underrated-in-his-time multi-hyphenate Bill Gunn. This reminded me that I’d written about this remarkable film many years ago, in a 2013 piece for a Halloween horror symposium in the journal Reverse Shot, which is to this day an essential space for thoughtful film criticism. As regular readers of this letter will know, I occasionally use this space to resurface old work, especially in very busy non-free-Substack-land weeks! Here, then, is that piece, which I’ve given a very light edit for publication today.
Bill Gunn’s disturbing Ganja & Hess follows the exploits of wealthy anthropologist/geologist Dr. Hess Green (Night of the Living Dead ’s Duane Jones), who becomes a vampire after his crazed assistant Meda (Gunn) stabs him with a dagger possessing an ancient African curse. Meda soon commits suicide, but Green falls in love with his assistant’s haughty widow, Ganja (Marlene Clark), who learns Green’s secret and becomes his vampiric partner in crime.
The film’s producers had desired another straightforward Blaxploitation cash-in after the success of the lurid Blacula (1972), but the fiercely individualistic Gunn delivered a muted, moody melange of contemporary class commentary, Afro-European symbolism, and vampire mythology. With its elusive structure and inextricable fusing of sex and death, Ganja & Hess most keenly recalls the psychologically troubling work of Nicolas Roeg, whose Don’t Look Now—also released in 1973—would make a fine, perverse double-bill with Gunn’s film.
Ganja & Hess’s boldest, most chilling aspect is its complex, allegorical treatment of intra-class tensions within America’s Black community; this sets it apart from the frequently Manichean “stick it to The Man” dynamics seen in many Blaxploitation movies. Hess is happy to swan around with his financial peer group in his palatial private environs, but he actively seeks out the urban poor and needy for his victims. Coldly rational about his business, Hess raids a blood bank (a crucial social service), murders a Harlem sex worker and her pimp, and then—horrifically—a young mother. When Ganja gets in on the act, she seduces and destroys an urban Black community worker.
The film’s oblique ending seems to suggest that even if Hess has seen the redemptive Christian light and renounced vampirism (as critic Brandon Harris has pointed out, the film delivers “a meditative and uncondescending representation of Black protestant Christianity”), Ganja will continue to prey on the needy.
Ganja & Hess’s thematic discord is matched by its dizzyingly diverse form. It is elliptically edited, with spooky recurring cutaways to mysteriously masked white aristocrats and images of an ancient African tribe. The score from Sam Waymon and the kaleidoscopic sound design, too, consistently unsettle: the refrain which repeatedly accompanies Hess’s burgeoning bloodlust—a conflation of buzz-saw noises and African chanting—evinces a combination of modern urban industrial grind and unrestrained rural earthiness.
The film’s fragmented nature extends to Gunn and cinematographer James Hinton’s consistently oddball compositions. In one of the most understatedly chilling scenes, Ganja condescendingly addresses Hess’s Black manservant Archie (Leonard Jackson) at the dinner table. The way Archie’s head is cut off by the top of the frame recalls the racist caricature of permanently headless Mammy Two Shoes in Tom and Jerry cartoons; the scene is uncomfortable because it fully implicates the viewer in Archie’s powerlessness.
Another discomfiting example of historically charged imagery arrives when Hess discovers the suicidal Meda halfway up a tree. While Meda’s disembodied voice prattles on, all we can discern against a background of inky black is Meda’s dangling feet to the left of the frame and the noose he’s fashioned for himself on the right. Even though the scene ostensibly deals with Meda’s self-loathing, it’s hard to avoid the specter of lynching. The wrenching ballad “Strange Fruit” (“blood on the leaves and blood at the root”), most notably performed by Billie Holiday, comes to mind, particularly within the context of this blood-soaked vampire movie.
It is both ironic and weirdly apposite that the distribution of Gunn’s film was as fractured as the work itself. After it had been rapturously received at Cannes Critics Week in 1973, it was released back home in a bowdlerized sexploitation cut under the prosaic title Blood Couple, and later on VHS in the U.S. under no less than five alternate monikers, each more cringe-worthy than the last (Black Evil, Blackout: The Moment of Terror, Double Possession, Vampires of Harlem, and Black Vampire).
The treatment of Gunn’s film reflects a sad historical tendency for challenging Black “arthouse” fare to be suppressed, mishandled, or fundamentally misunderstood (see: Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Wendell B. Harris’s Chameleon Street). And yet, in spite of this rather depressing trend, there is a paradox at work: for me, in spite of the deep sympathy I feel for the filmmakers let down by such prejudice or short-sightedness in each case, I also feel that the consequent film maudit status fosters a significantly enigmatic extra-textual charge. Such an effect is particularly pronounced in the case of Ganja & Hess, whose every frame seems thoroughly haunted by ghosts and glitches.
Ganja & Hess has now been restored by Kino Lorber, and is available to stream in many places. Chameleon Street, which I mentioned in the paragraph above, has also been restored, by Arbelos Films, and is available to stream exclusively on the Criterion Channel.
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