'Sinners': The History Behind Ryan Coogler’s Brilliant Horror Movie

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For all their pop culture currency, horror movies are often undervalued as art. Unlike romance, comedy, or other storied film genres, the perception of horror as pure nightmare fuel tends to obscure its depth. When a story delivers scares to its audience, the impact usually stems from a deeper intent. Open yourself up to the fear and the intellectual rewards are endless.

Examples abound: The original Night of the Living Dead was a sharp critique of the status quo, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a Vietnam allegory, The Fly tapped into the AIDS crisis, and Midsommar confronted religious extremism. Now comes Ryan Cooger’s Sinners, which blends the scope of a large-canvas epic with the B-movie kick of bloodthirsty vampires. The result is a searing interrogation of American culture and the way that music lies at the core of its identity.

As twin brothers in Depression-era Mississippi, Michael B. Jordan is like John McClane by way of Van Helsing: A couple of tough guys who don’t go down easy. Returning to their small town after an overseas stint during WWI, the pair find themselves holed up in a juke joint with their community after hordes of white supremacist vampires come knocking at the door. Paranoia and suspicion arise as the vampires gradually infiltrate their surroundings throughout the night. That’s all spooky and fun, but through the role of a young musician named Sammie (Miles Caton, a genuine discovery), Sinners transforms into something much deeper and more profound than the usual kooky Dracula routine. Sammie’s guitar is coveted by the bad guys, but his musical talent also becomes the ultimate weapon of liberation.

Sinners takes place in 1932, the same year that the Playhouse first opened as a movie theater. As we last explored in our inaugural repertory series “The Spirit of 1932,” this was not the easiest time for America. The Great Depression was at its zenith and Prohibition didn’t help. “The Depression was, indeed, a rite of passage for millions into an unknown realm of terror,” writes David J. Skal in his excellent history book The Monster Show. Audiences generally turned to the movies for escapism, not a mirror.

With Sinners, Coogler acknowledges the hardship of this moment while recognizing that for his protagonists, it didn’t change much. “I would ask my grandmother about the Great Depression, and she would kind of laugh,” he told me in a recent interview for the Playhouse Post. “She said, ‘To be Black during the Great Depression, not much changed. We just saw more white people.’ Their classes were affected much more than the Black lower classes in the South. I was thinking, ‘If this is a Black story, wouldn’t it be interesting to see it as business as usual?’”

Of course, “business as usual” in Sinners is Black people in a segregated community fighting for their survival. Let that sink in – and the true potential of the horror genre along with it.

No spoilers here, but: Stick around for the end credits. After about two hours of exploring the transcendent nature of music across the generations, Coogler arrives at a coda that connects the past and the present with a surprising degree of warmth and optimism for the future. That conclusion points to the nature of Sinners as Coogler’s most personal work.

The filmmaker broke out of the indie scene with his tragic police brutality drama Fruitvale, reinvented the Rocky franchise with Creed, and took the Marvel universe to the next level with Black Panther. Sinners isn’t just Coogler’s first project based on an original idea; it’s a direct result of the experiences he had with those previous successes.

Growing up in Oakland, Coogler relished the stories of his uncle, James Emerson, who was born and raised in Mississippi. (Sinners is dedicated to him, while Coogler named the Sammie character after his aunt.) “He would listen to blues records on vinyl, drink Old Taylor Whiskey, and tell me about his life in Mississippi before he came to Oakland,” Coogler said. The filmmaker cherished those memories and developed a lifelong affection for Delta blues, which plays a powerful role in Sinners.

James Emerson never got to see his nephew’s moving feature-length tribute. “As a filmmaker pursuing my dreams, I was away from my family more than I wanted to be,” Coogler said. He was busy with the post-production of Creed when he heard that his uncle passed away. “I felt really guilty about that,” he said. Then he found catharsis from his grief by turning to the same blues music his uncle used to play for him. “I would listen to these records with my eyes closed, almost like conjuring a spirit,” he said. “That was the birth of the central idea for this movie.”

There is beauty in sorrow and awe at the root of fear. Sinners dives into that complex emotional stew as only cinema can. Call it a first-rate horror movie, a dazzling musical seance, an IMAX-grade spectacle, or simply a good time at the movies: It’s all that and more.

Check out our full interview with Coogler below: