Sinners, Black vampires and Reconstruction

Not so much a review as a reckoning

Hi Stackers!

I’ve been promising (accidentally teasing) this post for a few weeks. Initially, I wanted to do a roundup of some of the movies and tv shows and podcasts I was watching and listening to (and there will be some of that), but once I saw Sinners, it was all I wanted to think or talk about for a while. And then I saw it again and the process of obsessing over it started all over again.

First and foremost, there will be spoilers! I don’t know how to talk about my thoughts and feelings about this movie without revealing some of the plot, so here’s the poster as a spoiler break. Proceed no further if you haven’t seen the movie yet or dislike spoilers (and I really recommend watching the movie in the theater without reading spoilers the first time, but stay through the full credits!).

Okay, here we are. I didn’t know much about Sinners when I went to go see it, other than it was Ryan Coogler’s new film, it stars Michael B. Jordan (twice over!), that it was a horror movie set during Reconstruction (that was mostly because of the clothes and poster design).

A few members of one of my writing groups saw it first and said it was amazing, but nothing more. When I saw it, I reported back via text, saying “It could be a depressing horror film, but there’s just so many other emotions, so much satisfaction and joy despite everything.” [More of my texted thoughts to them later in the post].

In a film where almost everyone dies (in some fashion), you’d think the tone would be nihilistic, but that’s not the case. Despite most characters’ lack of choice when it comes to being attacked by the vampires in the story (yes, there’s vampires), almost every character has agency in how they’ll respond to the vampires, how they’ll go out, what and who they’ll protect.

I was excited to see a horror film depicting the Reconstruction Era, especially from a Black filmmaker and even more especially from Ryan Coogler, who has blown me away with every film he makes.

I’ve thought a lot about that moment in Sinners when the Irish vampire and his cronies try to gain admittance to the the juke joint, claiming (somewhat genuinely and somewhat disingenuously) to want to be in musical fellowship with the musicians and audience inside. “This is just for us,” the Black characters tell the white interlopers and to a degree, this is Coogler talking to the white folks in the audience. We’re allowed admittance, unlike the white musicians, but the film isn’t for us.

When I watch a Ryan Coogler film, like the Black Panther movies and Sinners, I’m very conscious that the movie isn’t for me as a white audience member. I won’t be pandered to or coddled. I will, however, be invited - even urged - into worlds and lives that I can witness and observe. There is always a call in his films to come to the story as it’s being presented, to find my way to it, and there’s always a reward when I do.

Like Mary, I’ve been a singular white face in all-Black spaces. I don’t have the same claim to those Black spaces that Mary does, with her ancestry, but I do feel kinship with her experience, growing up alongside the twins and Annie and Grace. I’ve been so lucky to have been invited into these spaces, allowed to observe and learn and experience. Knowing that a Coogler film, Sinners in particular, isn’t for me, but still feeling and hearing the call, the invitation, into its world, is the reward, as a white audience member.

I’ve been thinking a lot for the last 5 years about how little I was taught about Reconstruction in school and have come to feel, as an adult trying to learn more about this era, that this period of American history is probably one of the most important.

A character like Sammie, a young sharecropper in 1932 Mississippi, is a conduit. He and his older cousins, the Smokestack twins, know people who were enslaved. They’re still alive in his life and in the film. At the end of the film, in 1990, he’s an old man in an era where I’m alive, a young child not being taught about the history that he lived. Whenever Reconstruction is presented, it’s in black and white photographs, as if this is ancient history, but my grandmother was alive in 1932, the same age as some of Sammie’s younger siblings.

It’s a remarkable feat to give that history life again, especially in such an entertaining genre film. So many people will be curious and driven to learn more about Reconstruction, I think, because they see this film and want to know everything they can. And while I don’t think Coogler made the film to educate white folks kept ignorant about our shared history, I do think that is one of the things the film can and will accomplish.

I felt in a daze in the immediate aftermath of seeing the movie and for days afterwards, both times.

After seeing Sinners the first time, I listened to the Unspooled episode that talks about it and the Minecraft movie. It’s hard to imagine now, just a few weeks later, but Sinners was being reviewed as a box office failure after the first weekend, which Paul and Amy talk about in the episode. Hearing that discussion cemented my desire to see the film again in the theater - I love the theater experience and this is a fantastic movie to see in a theater full of people, but also it’s original in a way that so few of our modern films are and I want to support that.

I also listened to this This Day episode Sinners and the Deep History of the Mississippi Delta and found it to be a fascinating listen.

The second time I saw it, it was with writers from another writing group I’m in, one of whom has significant knowledge of banjo music, American blues and Irish music, which was a really cool lens to look at the mythology of the film through.

Here’s some of the of the articles that I read, shared with me and by me with friends after we saw the film, in the aftermath of it when we were all lusting to know more.

Conjuring the Past and Future in Black Music in “Sinners” -NYT

“Sinners” is a Black challenge to White Christianity - Washington Post

Do You Even Understand How Big a Deal “Sinners” Is? - Daily Beast

Last, but absolutely not least, I signed up for Michael Harriot’s ContrabandCamp Substack after a friend sent me his post Primary Sources: The Black History Hidden in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which is a fantastic and informative read.

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of Sinners and my thoughts about it in this post, but it’s gotten very long, so I’ll wrap it up for now. There’s so much more to say!

Have you seen Sinners? What did you think? What are you favorite articles and interviews about?