At first glance, Sinners’ surface pleasures are undeniable: visually lush cinematography shot entirely on a film camera and star-driven by the likes of Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld to create a horror-thriller that leans into the seductive mythology of vampires. But if we stop there, we miss the provocation beneath the surface. More pointedly, Sinners is a tale of what the history of such monsters represents.
Sinners is set in 1932 in the Jim Crow South of the Mississippi Delta, specifically around the town of Clarksdale. The film’s central conceit is that these vampires are chasing the culture that the blood represents. This reframes the genre as a historical fictional retelling. A central character is an Irish vampire stripped of his own cultural identity through the history of British colonial subjugation. This becomes a haunting embodiment of the cycle of coloniality where the Irishman is both the victim and the perpetrator of cultural subsumption. He achieves this through the colonisation and erasure of Irish culture and the ongoing economic and cultural extraction in the American South, respectively. In this way, the film resists simple moral binaries and is incredibly thought-provoking. It provides us with a cinematic depiction of how colonial domination evolves, migrates, and replicates itself across various geographies and people. The vampires in the film specifically target Sammy, a young Christian African American jazz singer. Afro-American blues were born from the history of the Southern struggle and resilience, drawing from various diasporic cultures. Ryan Coogler, the director, gives an anti-imperialist account of organised religion, perhaps depicting the colonial importation of Christianity as oppressive, while portraying “pagan” spirituality as a powerful force against evil. This is shown through Annie, a practitioner of Hoodoo (Black American spiritual tradition), who uses herbal medicine to protect against the vampires.
This is not a movie about some vampires. If that is what you are looking for, I hear Twilight is popular. This is a contemporary, neocolonial thesis about the continuation of control beyond the formal cessation of colonisation. Sinners is a rare offering of a one-way mirror that ever-decadently portrays the erasure and commodification of the very expressions of cultural survival. This is done by the persistence of European cultural and religious dominance, assimilation, and exploitation. The past is not some relic; the structures which enabled colonialism have adapted rather than disappeared. Just like the Irishman, we are all left in limbo by the covert effects of colonialism, longing for identity and culture. The insidious trick is that in this pursuit, we can flatten cultural diversity just as quickly as attempting to foster exchange. I wish I could go into all the nuances of the film, but, truly, you just have to screen the masterpiece for yourself.
