In Sinners, Bluesmen and Vampires Face Off
CFA's Victor Coelho, professor of music in musicology and ethnomusicology, alongside BU master lecturer in rhetoric, Regina Hansen, 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
CFA’s Victor Coelho, professor of music in musicology and ethnomusicology, alongside BU master lecturer in rhetoric, Regina Hansen, unpack Ryan Coogler’s hit horror film, set in 1930s Mississippi Delta
This article was originally published in BU Today on May 5, 2025. By Joel Brown
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the movie Sinners.
EXCERPT
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[Sinners] 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.
