In Sinners, Bluesmen and Vampires Face Off
Two BU faculty unpack Ryan Coogler’s hit horror film, set in 1930s Mississippi Delta
Michael B. Jordan (left) plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack, and Miles Caton is Sammie, in Sinners, the Gothic supernatural horror-thriller from director Ryan Coogler. Photo via Alamy/BFA/Warner Bros
In Sinners, Bluesmen and Vampires Face Off
Two BU faculty unpack Ryan Coogler’s hit horror film, set in 1930s Mississippi Delta
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the movie Sinners.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is the most talked-about movie of the moment. Coogler (Black Panther) depicts ancient African griots, Mississippi sharecroppers, and Chicago bluesmen as links in the same chain, giving vent to Black joy and pain through music. But making music from deep in the soul carries risks—and, in Coogler’s vision, some of those risks have fangs.
Most of the movie takes place over 24 hours in 1932 in the Jim Crow South. Specifically, rural Clarksdale, Miss., the Delta town where bluesman Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads in return for his guitar prowess. Sinners doesn’t mention Johnson, but that myth hangs over the story.
Via digital movie magic, Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack, hardened veterans of combat in World War I and on the streets of Al Capone’s Chicago, who return to their hometown to open a back-road juke joint with their hard-earned cash. The headliner will be their musically gifted young cousin Sammie, a guitarist and singer, played by Miles Caton. But, as if the local Ku Klux Klan wasn’t threat enough, the power of Sammie’s opening night performance summons a group of white vampires who besiege the venue. And the movie’s tone switches from earnest Southern drama to intense, full-on horror, bloody and violent.
Even the vamps have their own musical tradition. Call it “Riverdance from Hell.”
Vampire movies have long carried many layers of meaning, but the subtext has generally been about gender and sexuality. Sinners is more in the line of Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, using genre-movie tropes to explore racism, Black struggle, the Great Migration, and the nature of freedom. The blues elder Buddy Guy appears in a final flash-forward as a bluesman who migrated north to Chicago—as Guy did (from Louisiana) in real life—and finds Clarksdale has followed him there.
Discussion of the movie has also drawn in the present racial climate in America and even racism in Hollywood dealmaking.
In Sinners, a Mississippi juke joint offers respite to sharecroppers weary of life in the Jim Crow South—until the vampires show up.
It’s a lot to unpack, and we asked two Boston University experts to help. Regina Hansen is a College of General Studies master lecturer in rhetoric and also teaches in the Writing Program; she often writes about the supernatural in popular culture and teaches courses such as Supernatural Horror in American Literature and Film. Victor Coelho is a College of Fine Arts professor of music in the musicology and ethnomusicology department; he is also a guitarist and the founder of the Rooster Blues Band. They were interviewed separately via Zoom.
Q&A
with Regina Hansen and Victor Coelho
BU Today: You’ve both seen Sinners. What did you think?
Hansen: I thought it was beautifully constructed. It did a thing that horror doesn’t do that much anymore, which is actually set it up so that you care about everybody before terrible things start happening to them. It’s not just, okay, here’s a bunch of teenagers, let’s chop their heads off. There are actual people you care about. And then, when the bad things start happening, you’re engaged in a way that makes it tragic.
Coelho: It draws on a deep, deep history of Mississippi culture, and this relationship between music and the occult that’s manifested in blues songs and blues lyrics, and of course most famously represented by Robert Johnson’s apocryphal story about making a deal with the Devil. That story goes in and out of reality and myth. And myth is important in music. Myth is important in any kind of sacred music. You have to believe.
BU Today: There’s almost an hour of movie before things really get supernatural. Coogler really brings the 1932 Delta alive, doesn’t he?
Coelho: Very well. I mean, I like the accents, the beautiful scenery—they all look like the Library of Congress photos that [ethnomusicologist Alan] Lomax took when he did his historic fieldwork. A lot of that seems to have been consulted. Even the prison gang, the chain gang when they were working—those stripes were taken almost directly from the color photographs that Lomax took when he visited Angola Penitentiary and some of the really notorious prisons in Mississippi. So that research was good. On some other levels, it strayed beyond authenticity. In the juke they play the song “Wang Dang Doodle.” Now, that’s written by Willie Dixon, and first recorded by Howlin’ Wolf in 1960. But clearly you’re making a movie, right? It’s not a scholarly book.
It was great. I love the authenticity of the dialogue and the virtuoso performance of Michael B. Jordan playing two characters. The juke joint, the Klan, all those things are authentic. That’s all a part of history, nothing of that is made up. And then you put that together with the vampires.
BU Today: There’s an amazing scene where the music at the juke really catches fire, and suddenly the crowd in the bar includes everyone from pre-Christian African dancers to a rapper and a guy who looks like he’s in Funkadelic. And the barn literally burns down—but it turns out to be, what, a dream?
Hansen: I just looked at that and I said, this is wonderful. A bit of magical realism. Coogler engages magical realism and Gothic horror and then sets it in this beautifully realized place. I had two thoughts. One was, we are so involved in this. We’re so excited. This is such an amazing thing, it’s actually a barn burner, right? We’re burning down the roof. Then I also wondered if it was a premonition of the terrible things that were to come.
Coelho: This is what happened, the blues impacts all of this. It’s like a virus goes and infects all of these genres, Black genres to be sure. It all starts there. This is how I teach my Motown class and any rock class that I teach—I start with a map of Mississippi. And I say, we’re not talking about Paris or Vienna or London. We’re talking about Clarksdale. And Three Forks. These tiny little towns in Mississippi. And this is where it all starts. This is where Elvis starts to hear the stuff, just up in Memphis. American popular music starts in these small little towns. And so I value that idea that all these faces start appearing. At that point, they are all in some ways part of this big family.
The KKK are worse than the vampires, right? I think he pretty clearly states that if you’re going to pick one, you’re going to pick the vampire.
BU Today: And then: vampires. This time, though, the threat is a little different than it was with Dracula.
Hansen: The vampire is a figure that is so well known, even if he’s not known to your culture as much as other things. You know: don’t let him in! They just knew. And part of that was, you know, “Don’t let the white guy in to ruin our party.” I love that he was Irish, because here’s a person who was a human once, who was oppressed in his own country. And what my daughter noticed when we were watching it was, here’s someone who has now taken his oppression and is going to use it to oppress other people. And so I think they did a really wonderful job with the complexities of that. There were two evil forces in this movie, right? There’s the vampire and there’s the KKK. The KKK are worse than the vampires, right? I think he pretty clearly states that if you’re going to pick one, you’re going to pick the vampire.
Coelho: That’s the vampire’s pitch this time, that we can bring you out of racism. We can bring you out of poverty. We can bring you out of all of this stuff. Just let us do it. It’s a hard thing to think about, but they are so persuasive. We can bring you out of racism. We can bring you out of cotton-picking. And that part of it is tough to hear.
Hansen: There’s that quote from Federico García Lorca: “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.” And these people aren’t even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace. Poor people, Black people—all kinds of people who are marginalized have so few places to just be themselves. And the threat to that is almost equally important in the film as a threat to their physical safety.
These people are enjoying themselves. And [one of the twins] even says, this is going to be for us. This is going to be our place. We’re going to get to dance. And, so, the incursion of this white Irish vampire represents physical danger, but also, “Can’t we just be left alone? Just leave us alone.”
BU Today: How does this fit into the recent run of Black filmmakers, specifically Jordan Peele, working in horror?
Hansen: I look at it as talented filmmakers finally getting the chance to tell the stories that they want to tell. And they’re going to tell stories that have at least touched on the experiences that they know. When you get a chance to tell your own story, and you are in love with a genre, the chance to merge those things must just be incredibly exciting.
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