The following contains spoilers for Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”
No one’s really scared of vampires anymore. Once a vessel for our lingering fears about mortality, sexuality, and guys named Vlydisywch Pyztryznyz, the fear factor that once surrounded vampires is now tainted by decades of overexposure and the Twilight franchise (which my girlfriend recently made me watch). Vampire movies are now used generally as vehicles to explore the interplay between ancient bloodthirsty immortals and an unconventional setting (with the recent played-straight success of Robert Eggers’ homage to the original “Nosferatu” as an exception that proves the rule).
However, the cinematic pastime of “vampire + (setting)” has lead to some genuinely fun flicks in recent memory – vampire + Alaska in “30 Days of Night,” vampire + Mexico in “From Dusk til Dawn,” and vampire + Santa Cruz in “Lost Boys.” All of them fun, all of them engaging, and now bolstered by a recent addition to the canon – vampire + Deep South in “Sinners.”
“Sinners,” helmed by “Black Panther” and “Creed” director Ryan Coogler, takes place over a hot, sweaty night in 1930s Mississippi, and follows the exploits of twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played, Armie-Hammer-“Social-Network”-style, by frequent Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan. The Southern setting looks good – dusty streets, cotton fields, and one-room churches serve as counterpoints to the larger evils at work in the background, whether that’s roaming vampire gangs or the ever-present racism of the Jim Crow South.
The twin brothers, veterans of both World War I and the gang wars of Capone’s Chicago, arrive in town with carpetbags full of money and the desire to open their own juke joint in an old sawmill, purchased from a reluctant Klan Grand Dragon who takes their money and slinks away, seething. We are then introduced to other Mississippi players, including Miles Caton’s Sammie, the son of a local preacher and cousin of the twins, who is recruited to play the blues guitar on the joint’s opening night; Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary, a white-passing ex-girlfriend; Wunmi Mosaku’s Annie, Smoke’s voodoo practitioner wife who throws bones and warns of evil wandering spirits; and Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim, an alcoholic blues pianist who loves his corn liquor and blowing the harmonica, in that order.
Even without the supernatural element, the interplay between the twins – fresh from the battlefields of Europe and the streets of Chicago, spending ill-gotten Capone cash like it was going out of style – and the town, still mired in the failure of Reconstruction and held in bondage by the larger plantation owners, is interesting as a case study of Southern problems. The 1932 setting, pre-New Deal reforms, gives the audience a look at the separate world that persevered post-Civil War into the latter half of the 20th century and still, in some ways, persists into the present day.
But poverty and racism are not the only things that the residents of Clarksdale, Mississippi have to contend with. There are also the vampires, to whom we are first introduced abruptly as one falls into frame, smoking and steaming with the force of the Southern sun. Remmick, the main vampire, an Irish bluegrass musician played by Jack O’Connell, turns a Klan couple into his blood-sucking lieutenants and, attracted by the music coming from the bar’s opening night, goes in search of victims.
Something that I liked about the portrayal of vampires in “Sinners” is their susceptibility to all the old classics – sunlight, garlic, wooden stakes. The subversion of the genre has lead to some interesting takes on the age-old myth, but in the process, filmmakers have gotten away from the staples of vampire mythology that distinguished them from, say, a really pale guy that listens to a lot of Type O Negative and likes to bite.
Another element that Coogler brings back, and indeed, that motivates most of the film’s second and third acts, is the requirement for vampires to be invited into a house (or bar) before they can enter. In our introduction to O’Connell’s Remmick, he is being pursued by Choctaw vampire hunters – another movie I would watch – and desperately begs to be allowed into the Klan couple’s house. Once inside, he wreaks bloody havoc, and the story starts kicking into gear.
Inextricable from the plot and setting is the soundtrack. Delta blues permeates every aspect of “Sinners,” which borrows plot points from the story of bluesman Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads. Sammie’s status as a guitar picker alienates him from his preacher father, who warns him that if he keeps dancing with the devil, “someday he’ll follow you home.” Delta Slim picks out ragtime and jazz on the piano in the juke joint, as Sammie’s love interest Pearline croons soulfully on stage.
The spiritual power of folk music, Coogler shows us, has the capacity to unite people disenfranchised from the products of their labor and separated from their homeland by time and distance. In an extended musical sequence, Sammie’s guitar summons past figures from African musical culture, as well as future musicians – an Afrofuturist Sun Ra type jamming on a Flying V and b-boys spinning records, which bordered on a little silly, but in the context of the scene and the power behind Miles Caton’s voice, it worked.
Music in the Coogler-verse has spiritual power, but it also has the potential to attract those who would exploit the musicians. Remmick and his coterie of vampires fill that role in “Sinners,” as they simultaneously bring their own brand of Irish folk music to accentuate and fill out the movie’s soundtrack. Halfway through the movie, we are treated to O’Connell performing an Irish stepdance to “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” (which I wished was the Dropkick Murphys version).
The comparison and contrast between the African-American plight in the South and the discrimination against new Irish immigrants is another plot point. Remmick, trying to convince the proprietors of the club to let him in, offers them immortality and the potential to take revenge on their tormentors, referring to the potato famine exacted by British landowners and the machinations of the Ku Klux Klan. Two diasporas who, within living memory, were forced to use separate water fountains and told that “No Irish Need Apply,” but that, within the 12 hours that the events of “Sinners” take place, the two are set against each other by circumstances of fate.
When the action in “Sinners” gets going, it gets going hard. The juke joint is encircled by a growing army of new vampires, consisting of victims enticed outside to be bitten and converted into bloodsuckers. Here, Coogler pays extensive homage to this genre of locked-room horror, particularly “The Thing,” where the surviving non-bitten force each other to chew garlic to ensure everyone is still human, similarly to the infamous blood test scene in Carpenter’s classic.
Rodriguez’s “From Dusk til Dawn” comes across in this section of “Sinners” as well – beyond the surface level comparisons to a nightclub plagued by vampires, the way the characters interact and sacrifice themselves for each other, as well as the stylistic action sequences dripping with blood and gore and tinged with smoke, smack of Rodriguez and Tarantino. The last ten minutes of the movie play out like a reimagining of “Django Unchained” with the revenge fantasy turned up to 11 – it rocks.
The ticking clock aspect of “Sinners” lends the already frenetic action even more urgency – if the juke joint’s trapped patrons can survive until morning, the daylight will force the vampires away, so from the initial appearance of the Dirty Irish, the rest of the movie is a race for the sun to come up.
By coincidence, I had just finished doing a rewatch of the first season of True Detective with a friend when I went to see “Sinners,” and it was hard to not make comparisons between the occult setting, the Louisiana bayous and the Mississippi Delta, the African voodoo and the Carcosa cult, and both the show and the movie’s reflections on the nature of race, violence, and masculinity in the American South. As an unintentional double feature, it was pretty good.
Not everything about “Sinners” works – a mid-credits scene and a post-credits scene drag the movie on a little longer than it needs to be, and serve to undermine some of the finality of the film’s ending. Some of the dialogue setting up the origins and criminal background of Smoke and Stack feels a little stunted and could have benefitted from a rewrite, and the central plot of the movie takes a little long to get going. But overall, Coogler has added a novel and pretty entertaining entry into the vampire canon, one that asks the question “What if vampires did Riverdance?”
Jacob Hersh was born and raised in Anchorage. He is currently studying law at the University of Idaho. He occasionally does movie reviews and writes weird columns for the Landmine to get extra money for beer.