Release and Critical Appraisal
The Blood of Jesus was screened in cinemas and in black churches. The film’s commercial success enabled Williams to direct and write additional feature films for Sack Amusement Enterprises, including two films with religious themes: Brother Martin: Servant of Jesus (1942) and Go Down Death (1944).
For years, The Blood of Jesus was considered a lost film until prints were discovered in the mid-1980s in a warehouse in Tyler, Texas.
Critical appraisal of The Blood of Jesus has been positive, with Dave Kehr of The New York Times calling the film “magnificent” and J. Hoberman of The Village Voice stating it is “a masterpiece of folk cinema that has scarcely lost its power to astonish.” Time magazine counted it among its “25 Most Important Films on Race.” Historian Thomas Cripps, in his book Black Film as Genre, praised The Blood of Jesus for providing “a brief anatomy of Southern Baptist folk theology by presenting Christian myth in literal terms. From its opening voiceover, the film became an advocate for the most enduring traditions of Afro-American family life on Southern ground.”
Filmmaker Julie Dash cited the baptismal sequence in The Blood of Jesus as the inspiration for a similar scene from her 1991 feature film Daughters of the Dust. In 1991, The Blood of Jesus became the first race film to be added to the U.S. National Film Registry.
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