The key film of the late Bill Gunn-actor, playwright, novelist, andfilmmaker-Ganja and Hess, though suppressed by the commercial system,became an underground classic. Ishmael Reed, writing for a Gunn tributeat the Whitney, called it "one of the most beautiful and unusualfilms ever produced in the United States," and James Monaco wrotein American Film Now, "It is...the most complicated, intriguing,subtle, sophisticated, and passionate black film of the seventies."Filmed on location in New York, at the Brooklyn Museum, and in Gunn'sbeloved Hudson River Valley, it is a vampire film that seems at onceboth ancient and modern-perhaps postmodern in its complex narrative mix.Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones), a distinguished anthropologist andgeologist, contracts a mysterious disease after he is stabbed by hisassistant (played by Gunn) with an artifact from an ancientcivilization. The attack makes him immortal and imbues him with anobsession for blood. For Gunn's black aristocrats, Reed notes, "atthe end of (his) vision is ennui....Notice how the alienated vampireanthropologist has to go into the ghetto to get fresh blood. Has toreceive blood from bloods. Has to be recharged."