GANJA AND HESS was the only American film screened during Critic’s Week at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, where it was named one of the 10 Best American Film of the Decade. It opened at Manhattan’s Playboy Theater a few weeks later. “The first time I saw the movie was at the opening-night screening in New York,” Clark reveals. “There was a splashy party afterward -- and being the lead actress, I was pretty much the star of the party! Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. It was wonderful.” The bubble burst the next day, however, when almost every New York critic panned the film. “When I read the reviews, I thought, ‘They didn’t get it,’” Clark remembers. “Many critics believe that black people make very straightforward, literal movies -- so Bill was really an enigma to them. They just did not understand what he had done.”
Gunn’s unique cinematic treatment of African-American spirituality and vampirism was also lost on the film’s distributor, Kelly-Jordan Enterprises. After a one-week run in Manhattan, the 110-minute version was pulled from circulation and replaced by a 76-minute bastardization called BLOOD COUPLE, with new credits listing “E.H. Novikov” (a pseudonym for film doctor Fima Noveck) as director. For nearly 25 years, it was this version that viewers were subjected to, both in theaters and on video, under such misleading titles as DOUBLE POSSESSION, BLACK EVIL, BLACK VAMPIRE, and BLACKOUT: THE MOMENT OF TERROR. "It never found much of an audience," Clark says, "but a number of industry people saw it, especially in New York, so I was offered some other movies."
Temple of shock, January 20 2011, Slinking Through the Seventies: An Interview with Marlene Clark, an expanded and revised interview by Chris Poggiali that originally appeared in Fangoria #191 (April 2000)
