I may have a horror blog, but I rarely catch new films in the cinema. There’s just too much to stay on top of it all, and let’s face it, not everything that comes out is exactly great (plus, movie tickets are expensive and life is short). Past that, I don’t feel like it’s my job – I don’t fancy myself a journalist – I don’t imagine that most readers come here for up to date movie reviews – or if they do, they probably leave disappointed. But every once in a while, something new gets on my radar and I manage to seek it out, and I’m so glad that happened with this week’s movie cause I left Ryan Coogler’s Sinners just buzzing. Since then, it’s come to streaming and I’ve watched it two more times and, while it doesn’t, on subsequent viewings, give me quite the same electrical charge, I do believe it holds up as a great movie: rich in character and cultural detail, excitingly filmed, gorgeously shot, with a fun and thrilling vampire siege and a moving, loving portrayal of a group of people trying to make something of their own, high on the power of music and culture and community, and ready to fight to protect it all. It is an emotional movie, a beautiful movie, even a thematically challenging movie, but as this is a horror blog, it must be said that in spite of its vampires, it isn’t a “scary” movie – so don’t go to it for that or you may be let down (honestly, the same can be said of many a vampire flick). So, that said, let’s get into Sinners… I figure this is a very available film, so there will be spoilers.
Sinners (2025)
Off the bat, it must be said that this movie is a hit, a huge box office success, meaning that people have seen it and people have written about it. This is no obscure gem to sing the praises of. Rather, this is a Imax released blockbuster, which developed tons of hype (without which, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see it while it was still new), and inevitably, tons of counter-hype – people writing about how they don’t get what all the excitement is about (which I must say I understand, as I’m often allergic to hype – I don’t even know why it was different in this case). That said, knowing that it has been widely reviewed, I will endeavor to focus less on detailing its qualities (or weaknesses), and rather attempt to dig into what I think is most interesting about it as a whole.
In short, set in a Black community in Mississippi in 1932, Ryan Coogler’s story (which he wrote and directed) follows “Preacherboy,” Sammie, a young aspiring blues musician whose pastor father is trying to pull him back from a life of sin in illicit nightclubs to walk the straight and narrow with him in the Church. His cousins, Smoke and Stack, twin gangsters who left town years ago (I guess they fought in WWI and then stayed gone) have just returned after years of involvement in Chicago organized crime, with a truck full of stolen booze (prohibition is still on, so it’s quite a haul) and a dream of opening their own juke joint nightclub. The first third of the movie consists of Sammie riding around with them as they get the old gang back together so they can open tonight on very short notice. Following that, the next leg of the movie simply consists of the joint itself as it opens and the people come. There are interpersonal dramas along the way (who left whom years ago and why) and conflicts about financials (can they accept company scrip from the poor sharecropper clientele – which supports community, but won’t be economically sustainable?), but overwhelmingly, the feeling of the first half or more of the movie is one of joy and excitement.
There’s that old sense of “come on gang – let’s put on a show,” there’s a Blues Brother-esque camaraderie in “getting the band back together,” and there is such energy and passion in the music making itself (I just love when Stack is driving Sammie to town and has him play for him – Sammie starts with a simple blues riff – ok, but when he opens his mouth to sing, Stack lights up – damn, this kid has a voice – and it is unique and his own and glorious – he exclaims that they are “gon’ make some money!” But you know it’s more than that).
But on top of it all, there is the palpable intoxication that comes with knowing they are making something of their own, with their own hands, their own power, their own music, their history and love and pain. That is what freedom feels like. At one point, the old blues man, Slim, says to Sammie, “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion. Nah, son, we brought that with us from home. It’s magic what we do. It’s sacred… and big.” And he’s right.
Around the halfway point, Sammie plays at the juke and just burns the place down (Coogler literally filming that as a striking visual metaphor), and in what has to be the most famous sequence in the film, we see musical ghosts of the past and the future summoned by his song – images of African dancers and a George Clinton-esque Afro-futurist guitarist and hip hop kids and Chinese Opera singers and Ballet dancers drift through the electrified crowd. People carry their histories and their futures. And music brings it to life, gives it all expression, tears a hole in the world and lets all the feeling and possibility pour through – pain, yes, but also joy and lust and pride and glory. But something that powerful casts a bright light and can garner unwanted attention, in this case, from Remmick, the primary vampiric threat.
Before getting into what he brings to the story, I think it is interesting that he could have been excised and this still would have been a powerful flick. Had there been no supernatural danger, this could be a great period drama about community and music and social issues and antagonisms (the KKK very much still being a thing), full of well-researched cultural detail and standout performances (Michael B. Jordan delivers as the twins, Miles Caton’s Sammie really does have a hell of a voice, and I really appreciated little nuances like the role of the Chinese couple who can operate their grocery stores on both the White and the Black sides of the street). The first time I saw the movie, for all that I had genuinely loved it, I read it as a big glorious mess, kitchen sink filmmaking – just throwing in every idea that came to Coogler’s mind that he felt would be fun or moving or exciting, with little care to whether it entirely tracked or was exactly “necessary.” It didn’t need to be a vampire movie, but vampires are cool, siege films are thrilling, and raising stakes (boom, tish) makes for heightened drama. Just put it all in and then make it work (and some of the best parts of the movie do feel like just barely controlled chaos – notably the sequence when Pearline is singing “Pale, Pale Moon” as Smoke deals with the card cheat and the newly vamped Mary lures Stack into the back room to turn him – it is all frenetic and tight and tense and wild).
But the more I thought about it, the more important vampirism became to the story, and the more I felt the influence of a larger theme which I find both engaging and even, as I wrote above, personally challenging. The impression is that Remmick is particularly drawn to the juke this night precisely because of Sammie’s talent, because as an interpretation of the ‘soulessness’ of a vampire, Remmick is cut off from his ancestry, and Sammie’s power can be a bridge to that which he has lost. The music is so soulful that it inspires a voracious hunger and hence, the events of the latter half of the film.
Remmick shows up with two recently turned companions, all presenting as local musicians who have come to join in the party, spend some money, eat some food, drink some booze, and play some music. They audition at the door with a prettified rendition of an old blues song, “Pick Poor Robin Clean.” As I’ve come to read, this is one of the oldest known blues recordings, and has a very rough bluesy sound (as well as a second verse full of racial epithets – but they don’t get to sing that long). The three White musicians (two of whom we come to learn are (former?) Klan members) deliver it in such clean, “old-timey” tones. Their smiles are just a little too bright. Their promise that they only believe in “fellowship and love” and that they hope that for one night, they can all just be one big, happy family just feels a bit too earnest – something is clearly off. Plus, the old song, which is about, I think, cheating someone out of all their money, coming out of their mouths (which we, the viewers, know to be full of fangs), takes on real cannibalistic overtones (“I picked his head, I picked his feet, I woulda picked his body, but he wasn’t fit to eat”).
The twins turn them away, saying that there are many White joints in town where they could play and eat and drink if that’s what they’re after. The vamps challenge this exclusion, seemingly disappointed at being discriminated against for the color of their skin, but for the community within the joint, besides them being creepy, there is a real historical cause for concern. They live in the segregated south. The main street of their town clearly has a White side and a Black side and they really look like completely different worlds. If a White person were in the juke and some kind of argument started, the hell that could befall the Black community could be cataclysmic. Remmick et al. may talk a good game of progressive ideals, but Smoke and Stack live in a world where lynchings and worse are still common.
But eventually, no matter the precautions taken, things inevitably go south and we move into the final act (not counting two or three epilogues still to come – ala Lord of the Rings, this is a movie that ends at least 3 times) – vampires attack, most of the attendees at the juke get turned, and those that remain do their damnedest to make it through the night, with one suspenseful scene of internal suspicion echoing John Carpenter’s The Thing, as they all must eat a clove of garlic to prove their humanity. And for a long time, Remmick and his growing gang wait outside, knowing that they are certain, sooner or later to take what he’s come for. And while they do, they have a party of their own, a Ceilidh if you will, singing and dancing traditional Irish folk songs – featuring a rousing rendition of “Rocky Road to Dublin” with Remmick high kicking at its center. He may feel cut off from the soul of his people, but his culture and its music is clearly still vitally important to him, and he still carries it. He speaks with an Irish accent and we learn that he was alive when Christianity conquered his island (his description of that fact echoing Slim talking about how “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion”), making him at least 1500 years old.
When Sinners finally becomes a vampire movie, it does feel like a big change, but beyond being a good choice for a popular entertainment (exciting action-horror movies can put butts in seats in a way that period dramas may not), I think vampirism is essential to the themes of the story. We’ve already seen a justified need to police the boundaries of a closed space for the protection of the community inside. That is both important for them to be safe, and similarly, for them to feel safe. But this takes it to a larger, more symbolic level. I don’t remember where I first encountered it, but I read somewhere that “where there’s a monster, there’s a metaphor,” and here I feel the vampire is an embodiment of cultural threat – some amalgamation of cultural appropriation, selling out, and cultural assimilation to the point of losing one’s identity, to the point of disappearance. And, of course, if the bloodsucker isn’t given what he asks for, he will take it by force.
I believe that Remmick honestly loves what Sammie does – he is not disingenuous in his appreciation, but when he says that he “wants his stories,” “wants his songs,” there is a dangerous appetite there – a hunger that could consume until nothing remains, or at least until nothing remains Sammie’s anymore. Is Remmick a bit of a studio executive, here to sign this young artist, offering a better life, in a world where the color of his skin doesn’t matter so much as the color of the money he can make, but who will buy out everything that is uniquely his – and it will all become the property of the label, of the culture at large? In the world of Sinners, when someone is turned, they seem to tap into a bit of vampire hive mind – Remmick knows all of their memories and they know all of his. There is an element that is truly post racial and shared and utopian, but there may also be a horrific loss of personal identity, not to mention the heart of a culture being cut out and put on sale – maybe the real horror is capitalism?
Frankly, this is one bit that I wish were clearer. We have a sense of this endless hunger for culture, for identity, for music; we have a sense of the threat to concept of self; for all that Remmick is charmingly cheeky and fun, he is clearly “the bad guy” and there is little humanizing of the larger vampiric threat – once turned, the vampires seem ‘evil’ and less ‘themselves.’ And yet, when in the mid-credit epilogue, Stack and Mary show up as vampires at Sammie’s blues club in the 90s, they do basically seem like Stack and Mary, albeit wearing painfully early 90s fashion (the 30s look amazing in comparison) – was there actually any danger? Was being a vampire not really that bad? Has it changed them (this question bringing to mind the moment when Smoke stakes his former paramour, Annie, before she can turn, and vamp-Mary cries out in horror – perhaps Mary really saw good in the change and looked forward to the whole gang moving forward together in this new, bloodsucking paradigm)? It wasn’t clear to me. But hey, sometimes things are complicated and it could be better for a work of art for its themes to be a bit blurry around the edges, for there to be questions, to have room to breathe and to be read in different ways. The alternative is polemic, which very rarely, if ever, makes for good art.
And so we have this core fear of culture being stripped away, or of giving it away. This assimilation, this being subsumed feels like more of a preoccupation of the film than the direct assault of the Klansmen who Smoke so effectively dispatches at the end – it is a far more insidious and personal danger. And I have to say, I have mixed feelings about all this. I can only come to this discussion as who I am: a White, cis/het, male American. I may never be rich or powerful, but I understand that I benefit from what I was born into and that my culture, such as it is, has traditionally eaten up any other it’s come in contact with. There is a long history of imperialism and theft and exploitation – an endless story of wrongs done, of irreparable harm – some perpetrated out of active cruelty, but much also done out of mere expedience, out of simply wanting and taking and not being all that concerned with how that makes others feel. And yet, even if I understand all that, I have to admit I’ve always bristled at least a little bit at accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’ as if culture is a static thing that can ever be fixed enough to be owned, and thus stolen. I like cultures meeting each other and infecting each other and borrowing from each other. I like cultural exchange. I like cultural cross pollination.
For example, I live in Poland, a country that missed out on the colonialism and imperialism of the 18th and 19th centuries as it was busy being divided up by other European powers at the time (this is not to claim that Poland wouldn’t have liked to have colonies, but they didn’t get to – resulting to some extent in its present homogeneity – it’s generally pretty White, with the vast majority of residents being of Polish heritage – though that is changing as it grows economically and more immigrants – such as myself – show up). But something I think is cool is that there are vibrant communities of people here who study Irish or Scottish Dance, or Blues music, or American Gospel, or Hula, or Kathakali, or Japanese Sumi-e painting, or what have you (without a significant history of communities of Irish, Scottish, Black, Hawaiian, Indian, or Japanese descent). And isn’t that good? Wouldn’t it be restrictive and shuttered if Polish people only practiced “traditional Polish folk” forms (and the same were true for all other nations or sub-groups)? Isn’t that protectionist approach what one expects from racists and nationalists with essentialist views of the unbreakable connection between a given “people,” “race,” “religion,” “nation,” and “culture?” For me, if it comes from a place of respect and appreciation, it’s really difficult to understand how there could be something wrong about a person from one culture meeting, liking, and ultimately picking up forms from another, and in turn making them their own – isn’t that how all art is made? We live in a world, we are influenced by everything we encounter, we process it all inside and put out whatever we are able to – and if we’re very, very lucky, maybe it’s occasionally worth something.
And yet, watching Sinners, I have to say that I can, on some level, understand the discomfort, the hesitance, the fear of what all that could mean, could result in for a person or a people whose ‘cultural product,’ or less abstractly, whose personal expression, is the “form” being “picked up” – how that taking could feel like theft, or at least, could feel disrespectful. If so much of the early joy of this movie is ‘making something of your own,’ then obviously warning flags may shoot up when someone comes along, smiling a bit too wide, making beautiful promises of a loving, open future, who asks you to share that something with him, so that it can also be his. Will it still be yours? Will it even still be, or will it forever be changed by being assimilated into something larger, something more general? It’s easier to dismiss the idea of cultural ownership when yours is the culture taking freely of what all others have to offer, while at the same time, forcing your dominant culture onto them, whether they want it or not.
In Sinners, this is all about the Blues, but I think these are issues that someone from any marginalized group could wrestle with (and it is often out of such groups that new developments of culture spring, whether Black or Queer or representing some specific National Origin or Religion). This isn’t to say that I’ve completely come around to viewing all “appropriation” in a negative light, but the film does, at the very least, challenge me emotionally – it is complicated. I still believe cultural exchange can be a net good but something can clearly be lost in the process, and for those on the losing side, that can be a tragedy. If someone feels harmed, and you ignore that because, at the end of the day, you want what you want, and you value it more than the people who have it, there is a moral cost akin to blood sucking. And what are we, as humans, as art makers, to do with that? I honestly don’t know…it’s hard…
Wow – that all got heavy – wasn’t this supposed to be a fun movie about vampires and stuff? So in closing, I do just want to return to how this movie made me personally feel on first viewing. A lot of the cultural issues came to mind the following day as I went for a long walk to think about it all, but that night, I came out of the cinema electrified, just so excited, so charged with the thrill of creation, art and music and life. It is an earthy movie, filled with lust and sex and laughter and feeling. It is a vampire movie with a cool, charismatic, central bloodsucker. It isn’t a “scary” movie, but it has got plenty of action, intense sequences full of bold panache, and an intriguing vampire mythos. It is an absolutely spectacular movie to look at, to be enveloped by. It made my face hurt from smiling and it made me weep at its beauty. Coogler throws in every idea he can think of (Gangsters, Vampires, Blues, Social Criticism, Sex, Economics, etc.) and pulls it together into a rousing popcorn movie that is, yes, about ‘things,’ but which is also just tons and tons of fun. It lifted me up, but it also left me with stuff to ponder that I could engage with on a very personal level. It was a great night out, and I look forward to seeing what Coogler does next, in the genre or not. If you haven’t seen it yet, well, you probably shouldn’t have read this far – but go give it a chance; it’s widely available.
