Okay, I think it’s been long enough that nearly everybody who wants to see Ryan Coogler’s new vampire film Sinners has, by now, and I can talk about it here. (Beware, minor spoilers ahead for the film’s overall themes and its depiction of vampires.) If you didn’t catch this spectacular film while it was in theaters, it is now available to stream. I highly recommend all vampire-lovers check it out, as well as any music-lovers—as long as you can handle a bit of gore. Sinners uses an action-packed tale of a fight against vampires in the Jim Crow South to explore questions of identity, agency, and racial equality.
The film centers on Sammie, the young son of a preacher who works as a sharecropper in Mississippi but dreams of a career as a blues musician. His rebellious twin cousins known as Smoke and Stack (both played brilliantly by Michael B. Jordan) have just returned to town and plan to open a juke joint for the local Black community. Over his father’s protests, Sammie helps the twins prepare for their opening night and joins their lineup of musicians. When Sammie plays for the crowd his music is transportive—so beautiful that it pierces the veil between life and death and summons spirits from both the past and the future. But it also attracts creatures of a far darker nature… A fiddle-playing Irish-American vampire named Remmick covets Sammie’s musical powers and wants to use his vampiric gift to claim those abilities for his own. Over the course of the night, Sammie and his allies take a stand against the supernatural threat, all while still battling the equally dangerous threats of racism and systemic oppression.
The film takes a fascinating approach to the vampire genre. Each depiction of vampires in fiction creates different rules and world-building, drawing on and intentionally deviating from the various works that have come before. I view Sinners as primarily playing within the sandbox of the Anne Rice tradition. Rice’s shadow looms large over any vampire story set in the American South, and the image of a vampire with a violin can’t help but bring to mind the legendary Lestat. Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books also depict a transference of more than just blood between vampire and victim: when a vampire drinks someone’s blood, their memories and experiences meld. When drinking from another vampire, especially one older and more powerful, there is also a transference of abilities. Several of Rice’s vampires develop skills with telepathy and mind control, though a mental barrier exists between a sire vampire and the fledglings they have created. Sinners takes this psychic connection in the opposite direction: Remmick not only gains knowledge and memories from those he turns, but he seems to form a sort of hive mind with them (a concept more often seen in zombie fiction). Anyone Remmick turns comes to share his goals and objectives, and they act together in unison in some of the film’s creepiest scenes. And unlike Lestat, who gains supernatural abilities like flying and bursting others into flames, Remmick acquires more mundane skills from his human victims, such as the ability to speak a new language or—as he hopes to gain from Sammie—skill in playing an instrument.
Interestingly, the film sidesteps certain questions of vampires and religion, even as religion plays an important role in the story. In Sammie’s world, religion is in tension with making music. His preacher father declares that blues music belongs to the Devil and urges Sammie to renounce his artistic ambitions before they lead him astray. In some ways, his father is right: it is Sammie’s music that draws a great evil toward him in the form of Remmick. Yet these vampires cannot be defeated with the symbols of Christianity. While nearly every vampire story since Stoker’s Dracula depict holy water, crucifixes, and even the consecrated Host as among the most effective weapons to use against vampires, in Sinners the humans use only such secular tools as garlic, wooden stakes, silver, and sunlight. The crucifix necklace that one character wears does not save her from getting bitten, and when Sammie tries to recite the Lord’s Prayer at the vampires, they only mock him. Many classic works of vampire fiction have a religious moral: vampires tempt humans with false promises of eternal life, but in truth what they offer is an eternity of embodied damnation, while genuine immortality (of the soul) can come only through divine salvation. Sinners offers a similar moral but through a racial lens rather than a religious one. Remmick tries to tempt Sammie and his friends by promising a utopia of racial equality within his vampire family, where the hive mind connection breaks down all barriers of bigotry and cultural differences. However, true equality shouldn’t have to mean surrendering one’s individual identity and agency and completely assimilating into a featureless collective. Instead, the film offers music as an alternative path to the vampire’s promise. Beautiful music can bring people of different backgrounds together while still celebrating an individual’s unique experience.
Sinners is one of the most thought-provoking and thoughtfully executed vampire stories I have encountered in recent years. I’m excited to watch it again because I’m sure I will pick up on something new each time. What messages did you take away from Sinners? What did you think of its depiction of vampires? Let me know in the comments!