The Genesis of the Modern Vampire in Ganja & Hess

In my moodle post for Ganja & Hess, I discussed its unique aesthetic approach and its status as blaxploitation horror. Here, I want to briefly address another aspect of the film which greatly interests me, and that is its invention of what is essentially a different kind of vampire movie.

As we discussed over zoom, the vampire myth has traditionally been a queer one. This can be most clearly observed in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and the numerous films it has inspired. In such stories, Dracula always is, in some way or another, coded queer. In Todd Browning's 1931 film adaptation, this queerness is expressed via Bela Lugosi's dandy mannerisms and accent, his foreignness, his reservedness, and his strange delight in the hypnotism of Renfield. While this year a TV series adaptation/re-imagining was released which goes so far as to explicitly suggest homosexual union between Jonathan Harker and Dracula.

Ganja & Hess, however, makes the vampire myth straight. Yet that is not all it does, it also greatly centers on the vampire's ailment of immortality and the connection the heterosexual couple share as they drift through eternity together. This basic vampiric framework has been wildly influential on the vampire myth and has perhaps even altered its public perception from "rotten monster of queer sickness and desire" to "immortal romanticist." As an obvious illustration of this point, consider Twilight, which also presents a similar vampiric fable of heterosexual romance and vampiric infection of the woman via the man. There are clearer examples still though, such as Only Lovers Left Alive, which renders the protagonists, immortal vampire hetero couple, as, basically, artsy hipsters misunderstood by the mortal society around them. The Hunger also presents a similar story, though it lets some of the queer rot of the original Dracula myth back into the fold.

I think Ganja & Hess, despite being relatively unknown to the mainstream, has had a massive impact on the vampire subgenre and has introduced a new kind of vampiric story: the story of immortal (often heterosexual) lovers adrift in time. Of course, this is not to say that the original context of the vampire has been erased, but I think it should be noted that the image of the vampire has been complicated by its many different iterations within fiction and especially, cinema.