A blood-soaked Southern Gothic fable where juke-joint blues and Black mythology do barnstorming battle with vampiric threats, in Ryan Coogler’s triumphant return to – and surpassing of – his previous form.
★★★★★
On a snowy Chicago night in January 2013, the same week that local man Barak Obama was inaugurated as President in a moment some described as “the end of racism,” I went to see Buddy Guy.
Holding court in his club, during a break between songs, Guy told his audience: “Some very rich men came to see me last month. They told me they wanted to establish a Museum of the Blues. And that they would very much like to have my endorsement, and any items of memorabilia that I might wish to donate. So I asked them where this museum would be, and they told me ‘why, it’ll be right here in Chicago, the home of the blues!’”
There was raucous hollering from the Chicago audience, half of which were white professionals still in their work shirts.
“So I told them, gentlemen, thank you!”
More hollering.
“But the home of the blues IS THE SOUTH.”
With that he burst into a roof-raising rendition of ‘Baby Please Don’t Go.’ It wasn’t just a geography lesson—it was a rebuke, a reminder that origin matters, and that where something comes from burns inside it, and shapes what it becomes.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners lives and dies by that same conviction. It’s a southern horror epic through and through—sweaty, bloodied, and set to the low hum of a haunted history.
It’s also, if the rumours are true, something more improbable: a phoenix rising from a failed pitch. Whispers say Sinners began as a rejected Blade pitch set in the 1920s—a prequel of sorts, too strange and Black and blues-soaked for the Marvel machine. If that’s true, Marvel’s loss is our gain.
Coogler doesn’t just return to form—he digs down, taps into something primal. After the compromised spectacle of Wakanda Forever, Sinners feels raw, handcrafted, and gloriously untamed. It’s a vampire movie, yes, but also a Southern Gothic fable, a siege film, a juke-joint musical, and a blues elegy. Coogler has noted that it stands in conversation with Near Dark and From Dusk Till Dawn, but the tradition it’s most invested in is older and deeper: Black horror as spiritual inheritance.
The plot has the simplicity of folklore. In 1932, two brothers—Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan, in a dual role)—return to Clarksdale, Mississippi, after war in Europe and criminal adventurism in Chicago, carrying with them ghosts of empire and ambition. Their dream is to build a juke joint, a secular temple to music and drink. They hope folks will come, but they summon more than just humans. Vampires come, not in velvet capes but in white vests, with silver tongues, bearing offers of shared music and promises of unity that reek of assimilation. These are not the lost—they are the leeches.
Coogler stages this with operatic scale, and you need to see it in IMAX. The heat shimmers on every frame. The sweat on skin, the candlelight in church basements, the blood on the floor—all rendered in blazing 65mm that makes myth feel immediate, with images that drip from the screen and sounds to rattle the rafters. It’s less a film than a visitation.
Delroy Lindo is magnetic as Delta Slim, a bluesman too old to be surprised, too stubborn to run. Wunmi Mosaku brings grounded gravity to Annie, a hoodoo practitioner whose rituals guide the film’s emotional spine. As for the music—Göransson’s aching, layered score, folding gospel, spirituals, and drone into something that feels both archival and apocalyptic. A movie that’s at least as much about the spiritual power of music as it is about vampires needs a blazing soundtrack, and Göransson – who came to blues when investigating the roots of his beloved heavy metal – absolutely delivers, and must surely be in the running for an Oscar.
The horror is corporeal—gory, physical, satisfying—but also cultural: the fear of being erased, of having your sound and your spirit stolen away. Sinners doesn’t just stake these vampires, it indicts them. It’s about the long theft of Black art and the survival of Black spirit. This is horror where the monster wears the mask of progress and the antidote is memory.
Yet the film never becomes didactic. It dances, it howls, it grieves. Like the best of Southern Gothic, it understands that the grotesque and the spiritual are often neighbors—and sometimes kin.
That night in Chicago, Buddy Guy softened his tone, but didn’t back down. “Now I don’t mean any disrespect,” he shrugged. “But if you don’t know where it came from, you can’t know what it is.” Sinners knows exactly where it came from. And in the full, immersive thrum of IMAX, it doesn’t just tell you. It shows you – in blood, fire, and song.
Sinners is in cinemas now.
Other writing on Sinners:
Mo Moshaty for NightTide Magazine
Kelechi Ehenulo for DigitalSpy
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