Hellbound Train / The Blood of Jesus

Director: Eloyce Gist , James Gist, Spencer Williams

1930 / 107min / DCP

“The work of self-taught African American evangelists who employed cinema as a tool for their traveling ministry, this surreal featurette was screened in churches and meeting halls, accompanied by a sermon and the passing of a collection plate. A campy episodic catalog of iniquity set on the titular choo-choo, it’s a car-by-car dramatization of the sins of the Jazz Age, presided over by a horned devil, that culminates in a colossal derailment (a model train tossed into a bonfire in a moment of no-budget ingenuity that would make George Kuchar proud).”—Brandon Harris



“Made and released in the same year as Citizen Kane with a little oil money and plenty of low-budget, magic-realist moxie, Williams wrote, directed, and starred in 1941’s The Blood of Jesus a decade before he rose to fame on the Amos ‘n’ Andy show, marking himself as that year’s other great triple threat. Mixing pious allegory with ingenuous spiritual horror, it concerns the remorse and desire for atonement of a sinful black Texan, played by Williams himself, who accidently shoots his newly baptized wife on their front porch.”—Brandon Harris