Long before rock and roll claimed the title, blues was “the devil’s music.” Black preachers denounced it as a gateway to licentiousness and drunkenness. White commentators condemned it as vulgar even as white crowds packed the clubs and white artists appropriated its style. To its critics, the blues was too profane, too sensual—and too Black. As always, we demonize what we fear.
The blues is the lifeblood of “Sinners,” the astounding new horror film from writer-director Ryan Coogler. As the title promises, there is plenty of sin on display, even before the vampires arrive. But the blues is a gateway to transcendence as well as temptation, the soul-deep cry of a people in exile, capable of connecting them with their ancestors across history and bringing freedom to a world bound by chains.
Sammie (Miles Caton, in an exhilarating debut performance) is a young sharecropper growing up amongst the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta in 1932, and an aspiring blues musician who performs under the name Preacher Boy. His father, the preacher in question (polymath performer Saul Williams), warns him: “If you keep dancing with the Devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.”
Temptation arrives in the form of Sammie’s gangster cousins, twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Coogler’s frequent collaborator, Michael B. Jordan). Recently returned from Chicago with a suspicious amount of money, they buy an old sawmill, intending to turn it into a juke joint: a spot for Black working people to drink, dance, gamble and unwind. The brothers are ice and fire: Smoke is deliberate, reserved, with nerves of steel; Stack gregarious, charming and always down for a good time. But they share a deep love for one another and faith in Sammie’s talents. With music, food and plenty of drink secured, they plan a blowout opening night. It’s an opportunity for profit, but it’s also a chance to give their neighbors, suffering daily under Jim Crow, a brief taste of freedom and community.
And then the vampires show up. Their leader Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a charming Irishman with a heavenly tenor, offers the juke joint’s patrons eternal life… after a bloody death, of course. As the ranks of the undead grow, the survivors barricade themselves inside, hoping to hold out until sunrise.
“Sinners” was inspired by Coogler’s family history in the Mississippi Delta and his relationship with a late, blues-loving uncle; consequently, it’s his most personal film to date. Coogler has a Spielbergian gift for making relentlessly entertaining genre movies infused with heart and thematic depth, as demonstrated in previous films like “Creed” (2015) and “Black Panther” (2018). In a market of “elevated” horror movies that are heavy on metaphor and light on scares, “Sinners” is refreshingly visceral and nerve-rattling, while still offering viewers plenty to chew on.
Enormous credit is due to the spectacular cast. Caton immediately announces himself as an actor to watch, Jordan pulls off two complex and idiosyncratic performances and O’Connell is as charming and quietly tragic as Milton’s Lucifer. Rounding out the stacked ensemble are Wunmi Mosaku (Smoke’s estranged wife, Annie), Jayme Lawson (Pearline, a singer who takes a liking to Sammie), Li Jun Li (Grace, a fearless Chinese shopkeeper) and the great Delroy Lindo (alcoholic bluesman Delta Slim). Coogler wrote the film as well, and his character work is dynamic and deft: The fifth lead of this film is more interesting than the heroes of other recent blockbusters.
And then there’s the music. With a score composed by Academy Award winner Ludwig Göransson (who has scored all of Coogler’s films) and a soundtrack produced by his wife Serena Göransson, “Sinners” becomes a sideways musical, reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000), where the songs drive character and plot. There is plenty of the blues in “Sinners,” but also gospel and traditional Irish folk music (including a truly terrifying performance of “The Rocky Road to Dublin”).
In the film’s most stunning sequence, Coogler and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw weave the camera through the juke joint as Sammie performs. His song (“I Lied To You”) literally breaks the barriers of time and space, conjuring spirits from the past and future of Black music—tribal drummers, electric guitarists, trap artists. In that moment, the bar becomes an entryway to eternity, connecting one small community with their ancestors and descendants across history, revealing the transcendent truth that they are never alone as long as they hold onto their roots.
The vampires, on the other hand, embody the Faustian bargain of assimilation: the temptation to sell what makes you unique in exchange for belonging. “I want your stories, I want your songs,” Remmick says. His whiteness is thematically important, but so is the choice to make the character Irish: a nod to the assimilation of Irish immigrants into mainstream white America. For a community bound to the same cotton fields that their enslaved ancestors worked two generations earlier, it’s a tempting offer. “I know it sounds crazy,” one friend-turned-vampire tells our heroes, “but once we kill y’all we’ll have heaven right here on earth.”
That line expresses the true horror of “Sinners.” As Annie explains, vampires’ souls are trapped in their bodies, unable to move on and join their ancestors in the afterlife. It might be heaven on earth… but it’s never anything more than that. They are, forever, cut off from the cosmic connection that Sammie conjures with his music. It’s the ultimate lie of “the world” in the Pauline sense: that this is all there is, this is all that matters, so you might as well enjoy it without regret. It doesn’t matter if it’s money, power or vampirism: Sin is a promise of freedom that’s really just another form of slavery.
