Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
An affluent scholar develops a taste for blood in Spike Lee’s reinterpretation of Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult thriller Ganja & Hess, which Lee calls “a new kind of love story,” blending social awareness with invigorating low-budget roughness.
After remaking Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Spike Lee tackles another bloody cultural artifact: the late Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult thriller Ganja & Hess (screening here in February in our showcase of black independent filmmaking in New York, Tell It Like It Is). This time, Stephen Tyrone Williams is Dr. Hess Greene, an affluent professor of African art who, in a scuffle with his assistant (Elvis Nolasco, a Lee collaborator since 1995’s Clockers), is stabbed with a cursed Ashanti dagger. Now sporting a taste for blood, he meets his assistant’s wife (Zaraah Abrahams), and the two embark on what Lee dubs “a new kind of love story.” Da Sweet Blood of Jesus blends the social awareness of all the director’s works (commenting obliquely on addiction and class inequity) with the invigorating roughness of a crowdfunded project shot in an astonishing 16 days. Musical highlights include Bruce Hornsby’s jazz piano score and a rousing gospel performance at the Lil’ Piece of Heaven Baptist Church of Lee’s Red Hook Summer. An Eammon Films release.
“A grisly and ghoulish vampire story… also an evident labor of love.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“A dizzying hall-of-mirrors stunt, a horror remake as autobiographical X-ray, and a work of fantasy that serves as a decadently cleansing creative exorcism.” —Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine
“Positively alien in the best possible ways.” —Landon Palmer, Film School Rejects
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