Ganja & Hess

An art film sold as a vampire picture, recut against its director's wishes and buried for decades before rediscovery. Bill Gunn uses a tale of an anthropologist infected with a blood addiction to make a dense, elliptical meditation on faith, assimilation and Black identity. It looks and moves like nothing else in the cycle.

The distributors wanted Blacula and got a genuine avant-garde work, which is why they chopped it. The restored version is a landmark of independent Black cinema. Spike Lee later remade it.

Not really exploitation at all, and one of the most important films tagged here.