“Sinners” is being touted as Ryan Coogler’s first foray into horror. But I would suggest he began in horror — real-world horror — with his first feature, “Fruitvale Station.”
Ryan Coogler's journey
“Fruitvale Station” (which also marked Coogler’s first collaboration with star Michael B. Jordan) depicted the last 24 hours in the life of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old Black man who was killed in 2009 by a BART police officer in Oakland. The tension, violence and terror of the incident are exactly the elements that fuel horror. But films about horrific things that happen in the real world generally don’t get the genre label of horror, no matter how terrifying they might be.
But yes, “Sinners” is Coogler’s first official stab at horror. In the press notes, he states: “My earliest memories of movies were while sitting in a darkened room, full of strangers, and being absolutely terrified by something that was happening on the screen. That feeling of being with others, the unison, the horror and delight made me feel like home. That’s where it began for me … ‘Sinners’ is my love letter to all of the things that I love about going to the movies, as a cinephile, especially watching films with an audience. It’s the communal experience — and this movie was made to be seen with a crowd of people you don’t know.”
And “Sinners” does demand a big screen, not just because Coogler designed it for IMAX but also for the phenomenal music and sound design. Plus, it demands that communal experience. And while it presents as a vampire film, it is also about real-world horrors, and is loaded with history that is both personal to Coogler and more broadly American.
Coogler began as an indie filmmaker with “Fruitvale Station” in 2013, but just two years later was helming “Creed” for a major studio.
What impressed me about Coogler was his ability to be both true to his indie roots while playing the Hollywood game. He was smart enough to see an opportunity to reimagine the "Rocky" franchise for a new and more diverse generation and deliver the perfect mix of an indie drama about a young Black man coming to terms with his heritage and a Hollywood crowd-pleaser about underdogs.
He would reveal the same savvy with “Black Panther,” balancing Hollywood’s demand for a marketable product with his own personal vision as an artist, again mixing entertainment with social awareness.
'Sinners' delivers more than just horror
With “Sinners,” he once again pulls off a tricky high-wire act, delivering a big-budget horror-action film as well as a personal story about Black culture and his own Southern roots.
“Sinners” is set in 1932 Mississippi and takes place over a single day and night (but stay for a post-credit sequence that takes the story further and sets up a potential sequel).
The film opens with a disheveled and bloody young man named Sammie (Miles Canton) carrying a broken guitar and entering the church where his father is preaching. Then the narrative jumps to 24 hours earlier (that’s also the same time frame of “Fruitvale Station”).
The Stackhouse twins, Smoke and Stack (both played by Jordan), arrive back in their hometown after having been gone for seven years. During that time, they served in the war and also in Al Capone’s mob in Chicago. They return to open a juke joint and hopefully start again. But what awaits them proves far more terrifying and evil than war or Chicago mobs.
That evil arrives in the form of Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a vampiric demon who seems to have been conjured up or pulled from the other side by Sammie’s soul-piercing blues music. The tagline for the film warns, “You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.” And Sammie’s preacher pop keeps warning him that he’s a sinner for playing that music.
Music is absolutely key to the film, and the scene that everyone may be talking about at the water cooler might not be any of the horror set pieces but rather an extended music and dance sequence where the music comes pulsing up through the floor so you feel it viscerally in your body as it pierces the veil between time and dimensions, life and death. So while we are in 1932 Mississippi, we also spy a DJ spinning records, a man playing electric guitar and African dancers. It’s surreal, sensual and hypnotic. The sound and music design is also richly layered and as riveting as the visuals. The scene climaxes with Sammie’s music burning down the juke joint (take that as literally as you want in this fantastical moment) and exposing the partygoers to the malevolent demons outside.
Remmick arrives at the party offering the twins a deal: Everyone can leave alive if they just hand over Sammie. Remmick wants him and his supernatural music skills so he can use it for his own purposes.
Not your ordinary vampires
The vampires in "Sinners" adhere to certain folklore conventions: They need to be invited in, wooden stakes through the heart seem to kill them, sunlight is lethal, they don’t like garlic. But the usual Catholic/Christian elements of crosses and holy water do not come into play. But Annie (played by the fabulous Wunmi Mosaku) offers up some hoodoo options as potential weapons or protections.
Remmick sounds like a preacher as he talks about community and family as if becoming a vampire is like joining a congregation. He doesn’t simply want to feed on these good folks; he wants to convert them, and perhaps even convert them in the manner of a colonizer.
Remmick uses a traditional Irish song as a kind of rebuttal to Sammie’s blues to fire up his vampire horde and as a kind of seductive enticement to the partygoers. And the Irish music feels as forceful as Sammie's, but in this context it also has an ominous edge. Coogler layers ideas about cultural appropriation and colonization into what is also just a heart-pounding and tense standoff between humans and vampires.
The entire film is provocatively layered through a complex narrative that raises questions about communities, beliefs and religious and secular conflicts (and not just between Black and white communities but also within the Black community). We are used to seeing zombies as blank slates for social commentary, but vampires have been far less inclined to such messaging. Vampires tend to be about sex, repressed desire, and maybe class, but not so much social commentary.
But Coogler dives into the possibilities with relish, mining the genre and vampires for all they are worth. While Coogler delivers horror action with brutal gusto and a true sense of tragedy, he is also dropping real historical facts about musician Charley Patton, killing floors, Black soldiers and just what life was like for people of color (there is also an Asian family and, briefly, Native Americans) in 1930s Mississippi.
Seeing “Sinners” once is not enough. The first viewing engaged me foremost on a visceral level of survival in classic horror genre terms. But Coogler has so much more going on that I long to see it again to try to catch something I thought I heard or to investigate something I was unfamiliar with.
Coogler effortlessly has mastered a style that allows his films to pull you in as pure entertainment, but then he finds ways to resonate on a deeper thematic level. Not every piece of "Sinners" falls into perfect place, but Coogler is such a vivid and compelling storyteller that I was willing to take the ride and thrill at every turn. Now I want to go back and ponder what lies beneath the genre tale.
