Sinners

“The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the near genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another.” — Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

Jordan Peele used the word “idyllic” to describe Ari Aster’s Midsommar in 2019. “I think you’ve made the most idyllic horror film of all time,” the director of Get Out and Us praised the summertime Florence Pugh-led cult film set in Sweden. “Idyllic,” sharing a root with “ideal,” literally conjures the idea of something tranquil, peaceful, or blissful. One can interpret Peele’s short and lofty praise in a variety of ways, but no matter how one cuts the cards, the definitive dissonance between “idyllic” and “horror” remains. How can something be happy yet horrifying at the same time? Ideal yet terrifying? Blissful and disastrous?

Peele’s praise points to this contradiction, opening the door for an innovative description of a new class of horror films. For horror to be idyllic, the scares cannot originate from quick jumps and cheap tricks à la Conjuring. Visceral and bodily surprises defeat the “idyllic.” What I believe Peele was getting at was something much deeper: what is scary about Midsommar and other idyllic horror films is not the degree to which they provoke rapid bodily responses lodged deep within our bio-evolutionary psyche but rather their ability to reflect and project higher-order fears about ourselves and the terrifying world we live in.

Peele’s own Us, a masterpiece that shoulders racial apartheid as the defining sociological sin of the United States, encapsulates the tremendous power of this trend in idyllic horror, as does Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite to a lesser extent (it’s not a very happy film). The horrifying reality of the socio-economic divide revealed by the man living in the basement is scary for reasons beyond the sheer shock of the visual of his living conditions. For most of the traditional cheap-trick style jump scares, the film loses all of its potentially terrifying steam as soon as the credits roll. Idyllic horror only begins with the end credits.

Sinners, the latest sexy vampiric sensation from director Ryan Coogler, takes one of the most classical of all cinematic horror premises, the undead blood drinkers of old Europe, and challenges audiences with a cutting premise about the liberatory power of art and the cost of actual freedom from oppression. Under the fiendish shadow of the Ku Klux Klan, Delta blues meets the supernatural over a single night, October 15-16, 1932, in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Coogler gets dangerously close to the horrifying center of American culture over the course of the single night — close enough for Sinners to dance with America’s original sin.

Ryan Coogler orchestrated an impressive start to his directorial career with his first four feature films. 2013’s Fruitvale Station dramatizes the real-life death of Oscar Grant, a young Black man killed by a police officer at the Fruitvale Station subway station in Oakland, California. It would begin the racial aims and thematic concerns that still concern the cinema of Coogler. It would also be the first in a series of four films adapting non-original stories. In 2015, he would add Creed to his filmography and completely outdo the artistic merit of the entire Rocky franchise in the process before moving onto the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Black Panther (2018) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). All four star Michael B. Jordan. Sinners, another collaboration with his favorite actor, is the first time Coogler has ever worked on something wholly his, unadulterated by the IP of others or the facts of real tragedy. He also wrote the film and even has long-term ownership rights over the title, an almost unheard-of distribution arrangement. All of his chips are in. This alone makes Sinners an exciting venture, not to mention the directions it may point regarding Coogler’s future.

Set one year before the end of Prohibition in the deep south, gangster twins Smoke and Stack return home from Chicago with enough cash to turn an abandoned saw mill they purchase from (unbeknownst to them) local Ku Klux Klan Hogwood (David Maldonado) into a juke joint. On the run from both the Irish and Italian mafias in Chicago, the brothers dream of Black ownership over capital and the self-determination of their community of sharecroppers. Coogler models the pursuit of these same aspirations in the ownership deal.

Michael B. Jordan plays both brothers and Coogler’s script and direction waste no time relishing in the gimmick of the casting; Michael B. Jordan simply is both of them. Smoke is quicker to pull the trigger and his blue Irish scally cap makes him easy to distinguish from Stack’s business smooth-talking and piercing russet-red fedora. Both have skeletons in their bedrooms. Smoke has never gotten over his wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and she embraces her returned lover — always using his proper name, Elijah — like the loving father welcomes home the Prodigal Son. Stack’s old flame, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), now (unhappily) married to a never-glimpsed white man, still has her grievances to vent.

Sinners bookends around Sammie Moore (Miles Caton, making an impressive screen debut), also known as “Preacher Boy” in a nod to his stern though loving father’s profession. He may be the brothers’ little cousin, but Caton’s voice rumbles deeper than most old men and makes the character always feel more seasoned than most men his age would be. He is also one of the gifted blues musicians the brothers tag with performing on the opening night of their juke joint, a night that folk-singing vampires rue. After a narrated prelude about music’s ability to open up the crack between this world and the next, a panicked and bloodied Sammie runs into his father’s church mid-service with a broken guitar in hand. The boy is speechless as his father preaches for him to drop the instrument and abandon his devilish pursuit of music. “You keep dealing with the Devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home,” his father warns like the biblical prophets constantly insisting on repentance (literally, to change course through regret). Editor Michael P. Shawver cuts this opener with the shocking and supernatural horror of the night of the juke joint’s opening, violence that at this point in the viewing prophetically cements the disaster to come. A title card and scene transition move us to the night before, October 15, 1932.

The same scene returns to close the feature. This time, we have seen the vampires intrude on the opening night — the violence foreshadowed in the opening of Sammie running into the church. The scene plays out the same on Sammie’s side; perhaps the shots hold a moment longer, but they might even be the same takes we saw earlier. Shawver's cuts change, though. The morning after, Hogwood brings his KKK terrorists to the site of the mill to blindly slay the Brothers and whoever may be inside. One way or another, Smoke and Stack were never making it out of their joint alive. Instead of the aftermath of the vampires, Shawver cross-edits with Smoke, in one last martyric hurrah, going full gangster against the Ku Klux Klan and picking up gun after gun as he cathartically disposes of some twenty supremacists. The mutual edit to Sammie in the church spiritually links the two bloody conflicts. The fight with the vampires, two of whom were Klan members while alive, now becomes a metaphoric guise for the white on Black violence.

The most talked-about scene in Sinners is the long shot mystical tour through (mostly) Black music history. In certain corners of the internet, the next most talked about scene burns with more primal urges. It is a horny film with enough pro-cunnilingus propaganda to be too taboo for mainstream audiences — a silly thing to say since the vast majority of all adult audiences partake (or long to) in sexual activity on the regular. But it’s not the cunnilingus that everyone is talking about. After being converted into an undead monster, Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary struts back inside the juke joint with an erotic confidence that cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw captures in a tracking long shot. Everything rides on Steinfeld’s body acting. She swings her shoulders like she owns the place and approaches Stack like she owns him. Her seduction downs him effortlessly. The two move to a secluded room and let their arousal lead their rediscovery of each other. Mary drools on her chin and then spits the fluid into Stack’s mouth.

The act may repulse some, but Coogler and Arkapaw don’t care. The spit play carries forward Mary’s erotic confidence and the intimate saliva swapping is musically cross-edited with images from Pearline’s (Jayme Lawson) intense vocals and a steamy performance. The latter’s dominant sexual agency on stage contrasts with Stack’s passive and vulnerable dependence on his whiter-skinned partner.

It’s not the only time Sinners uses spit. The first and grossest salvia comes from Hogwood, the burly KKK leader who sold the property to the brothers. He lodges a fat loogie to the floor of the barn while hesitantly selling his property to two Black men, highlighting his piggish behavior (and arguably, appearance) — a long way away from Hailee Steinfeld’s more desirous spitting. The next saliva appearance is drooping from the lips of a drooling Remmick (Jack O'Connell), the master vampire yearning at the opportunity to turn Mary. His drool tips her off that something is wrong with the group of three white folks singers and she quickly darts away from the creeps before being killed by the head vampire.

All three scenes come from white or white passing lips. (Mary, like Steinfeld, has a half black grandparent.) Two of them come from literal vampires, forcing another allusion to vampirism for the Klan and white-supremacy. For Hogwood, the spit symbolizes his repulsion and imagined superiority over the Black bodies before him; the Irish man’s drool summarizes his uncontrollable urge for Mary (and her part Black body); Mary’s spit, longed for by Stack, in the context of the other uses of saliva leans into the sexual action’s dominate and submissive roles. Mary controls the situation while straddling a perpendicular Stack, allowing her to exploit the situation to take the life of her lover immediately after. It is once Stack submits to her in bed that Coogler shows his human life coming to an end.

Stack and Smoke’s respective given names are Elias and Elijah. Both seem to reference the Hebrew Bible prophet Elijah, whose Greek name is usually rendered as Elias. It’s fitting that the identical twins played by the same actor would have names reflective of their shared identity. They are for better or worse two alternating pronunciations of the same man. The biblical Elijah’s fate foreshadows their fates. The biblical prophet never died. In 2 Kings, he ascends to heaven and escapes death. This is why in many Jewish traditions his return is thought to prelude the coming of the Messiah (and this is why Christians usually refer to John the Baptist as an Elijah figure.) In a strange and redemptive way, Elijah is un-dead. Like a vampire, he exists in a limbo state between Earth and the afterlife.

The vamps aren’t mindless hordes of killers used to generate fear in their victims (and thus viewers). They play a more complex role than do most serial killers in slasher films, for contrast. Coogler’s vampires cannot enter indoor spaces uninvited. They roam free outdoors and being outdoors with them is a game no mortal can win at. Cleverly re-interpreting Jim Crow spatial segregation, the original crew of vampires is all white and the spaces they desire to enter are all Black. The mixed body of Mary at the juke joint door in the scene of them requesting permission to enter palpitates with both danger and discomfort. Once the white vampires have access to the Black spaces, they eat their way through both Black culture and Black bodies.

The same violence that shreds Black physical spaces follows in cultural spaces. Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), the elder statesman of the Delta blues, edifies the younger Sammie, “White folks … like the blues just fine. They just don’t like the people who make it.” The Choctaw vampire hunter’s hesitancy at the KKK home shows an already trained fear response to white spaces. The long shot of Sammie’s music ripping open a chasm between the living and the dead and witnesses into the future legacy of the blues, complemented with a canonical score from Ludwig Göransson, delights in the beauty of the Delta culture and raises the stakes for what can be lost. The folk music of Remmick and his motley gang is a lifeless imitation of the blues inside the juke joint. Even if their rendition of “Rocky Road to Dublin” galvanizes, the Black bodies dance more like Irish immigrants than the jubilant Black men and women rocking the juke joint just moments ago. They have been absorbed into a new community and this one is forever imprisoned by the sun in addition to whiteness.

The vampires are more complicated than their personification of white violence. When Remmick attacks Preacher Boy in the last hours of the night at the foot of the lake, Sammie, in a moment that summons with it the entire cinema history of supernatural horror, mutters the Lord’s Prayer in desperation before the Irish ghoul. Remmick finishes the prayer for him, a powerful line read highlighted even more forcefully in the Dolby Atmos mix. The undead man finishing the prayer simultaneously disarms the Christian prayer of its power and, contradictorily, turns Remmick into the demon of James 2:19, a devil that “knows” the Lord of the Lord’s Prayer.

Then Remmick spills a one-breath yarn about when the Christians took his daddy’s land, dating him to the Christianization of Ireland in the fifth century. The brief dialogue ties histories of oppression together, as well as the role of (false) narratives of freedom in one people’s subjugation of another. Remmick, just like the medieval Christian missionaries evangelizing Ireland, offers eternal life and a utopian community to the lost souls.

Coogler may not be making Marvel movies right now, but he can’t shake the temptation of end-credit shenanigans. In a mid-credit scene, a vampiric Stack confides in an elder Sammie (blues legend Buddy Guy) that it too was the best night of his life until things went sour. They were free for a night, he boasts with smirking pride. The line, working like a coda, points to the liberatory undercurrents of Coogler’s vampire-blues film. And the cost of liberation is something Coogler answers through the proposition of violence: at some point, violence becomes the only means to secure one's freedom.

The end credit scene of Sammie singing church music, specifically the gospel song “This Little Light of Mine,” adds a tame but still jubilant ending to a dark film. It also forefronts the resilience of Sammie and the music he makes. The song became something of spiritual food during the Civil Rights Movement decades later. It was also used by Reverend Osagyefo Sekou in 2017 “to curb passions during a counter-protest, before a crowd of white supremacists and alt-right supporters gathered for the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA.” Sammie singing the song, just like when his music broke time and space in the barn, prophetically speaks truth as it cuts through history and arms oppressed Black Americans with the determination to resist white supremacy.

There’s not much to be happy about in Sinners. But, just like Peele’s “idyllic horror,” critical understandings of Coogler’s film insight more to fear than the things that make us shriek.