Ryan Coogler produced, wrote, and directed the highly anticipated film “Sinners” (2025), following his success with directing Marvel’s “Black Panther” franchise and the “Creed” trilogy of the Rocky series. “Sinners” transcends a typical historical drama as it uncovers the historical trauma. Coogler’s film serves as a vital cultural commentary on our current climate.
Coogler uses the supernatural gothic horror not for cheap thrills, but as a lens to examine and challenge the endearing nature of systemic oppression and its impact on society today. Despite the film’s setting in the 1930s Jim Crow South, this acts as a mirror, suggesting that the “living death” of that period, defined by racial terror, poverty, and state-sanctioned violence, is the blueprint for the structural injustices the Black Lives Matter movement grapples with today.
The film is set in the Mississippi Delta, where twin brothers return home to open a juke joint, only to be confronted by a supernatural evil that threatens their night. The gothic elements of the supernatural are reimagined as tools of liberation.
This narrative allows the characters to literally escape from the literal and metaphorical confines of the Great Depression, the “living death” of the Jim Crow South, and the racism of the 1930s. This offers a fantastical escape route from a terrifying reality that continues to echo today.
The film opens with a voice-over from Annie (played by Wunmi Mosaku), who is a Hoodoo practitioner and is the estranged wife of Smoke, one of the main characters. She introduces the legend of people “born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future.”
Within this narrative framework, music emerges as a spiritual and supernatural power capable of healing communities, but also attracting evil forces. The story follows WWI veterans and identical twins Smoke and Stack (both roles played by Michael B. Jordan), who return to their hometown after working for Al Capone in Chicago. The brothers describe their experience by saying, “Chicago ain’t nothing but Mississippi with tall buildings” instead of plantations.
The twins’ return focuses on opening a juke joint for the Black working community with their cousin Sammie Moore as the guitarist. This “Preacher Boy” becomes a key character who dreams of becoming a blues musician despite his strict pastor father’s warning that he is “dancing with the devil.”
In the juke joint, the film shows Sammie possessing a supernatural musical gift. His music breaks the temporal and spatial walls of the juke joint, bringing African dancers from the past and hip-hop breakers from the future together with the characters living in the 1930s.
Temptation of the Vampire
However, Sammie’s music attracts a different kind of devil: Remmick, an Irish immigrant vampire, accompanied by two KKK followers whom we see being picked up and converted early in the film. The film layers the history of British colonization in Ireland, which effectively continued as part of the United Kingdom from 1801 until 1922, and whose ripples can still be felt today.
By making the antagonist a former colonial subject, the film suggests that oppression is a pervasive force that often turns victims into perpetrators, using the vulnerable to maintain power. This systemic exploitation is felt by the Black community and twins who are financially struggling.
Since most of the juke joint’s customers are paying with “scrip,” or plantation money issued by white landowners to Black sharecroppers to be spent at company-owned stores, the twins’ struggle to turn a profit. Yet, Remmick and his crew are denied entry to the juke joint even when offering gold and performing musicians themselves. In doing so, the refusal of Remmick’s gold is a refusal of assimilation into the exploitative system.
But this resistance is undermined when Mary, Stack’s white passing ex-girlfriend, attempts to negotiate for more money and is instead turned into a vampire by Remmick and his crew. Unlike Remmick and his crew, Mary is allowed to re-enter the juke joint, where she ultimately bites Stack.
The success of her infiltration is Coogler’s way of showing that the deepest wounds are often inflicted by those who have been closest to the community but are desperate to survive outside of it. For Remmick, becoming a vampire was his pervasive answer to his own historical suffering as a way to gain immortality and power after fleeing the oppression of British rule.
Ultimately, he lies to his followers, whether KKK members seeking to protect him from the Choctaw Vampire Hunters or tricking Mary with salvation. He manipulates them by offering freedom from the old system’s rules to replace them with his own rules.
This act of political persuasion is a chilling parallel to what we see today, as modern political darkness exploits cultural trauma and division to persuade people to join a destructive, anti-democratic cause. In fact, Eric Dolan reports “the research, published in Public Opinion Quarterly, indicates that both Democrats and Republicans show a tendency to support behaviors that erode democratic principles when their own party controls the presidency.”
With the evil now literally inside the sanctuary, the juke joint must transform from a space of celebration to a ground for spiritual and physical reckoning.
Colonization Reimagined as “Living Death”
Despite Remmick’s tempting offer of immortality, becoming a vampire would entrap one in a state of “living death.” While the concept of living death is associated with Modern Black existentialist philosopher Lewis Gordon, the idea originated from French political philosopher Frantz Fanon in his 1952 essay titled “The North African Syndrome.”
As a psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon observed colonized North African patients, who arrived with “vagueness” pain that is “an ache everywhere.” He used the term “death in life” to describe the psychological and physical torment experienced by colonized people.
In the “Sinners” movie, this torment is immediately made manifest when Stack is bitten by Mary. Instead of instantly receiving power, Stack collapses in a moment of pure, agonizing pain, desperately clutching for life. This cinematic choice provides a visceral, visual depiction of Fanon’s theory as Stack’s body is literally consumed by the “ache everywhere.” This symbolizes the instant, toxic corruption that comes with attempting to assimilate into the power structure of the vampire/oppressor.
Lewis Gordon builds on Fanon’s concept in his 2015 book “What Fanon Said.” Gordon explores how anti-black racism and colonialism create the condition of living death, in which Black people are alive but are functionally treated as “cadavers.”
This dehumanizing denial of personhood is precisely what is captured in the eerily, forced choreography after Stack is turned. In contrast to the juke joint’s earlier scene, where Sammie’s music caused patrons to dance freely and connected them across time in a beautiful act of spiritual liberation, Remmick later makes his newly turned vampires dance to his music, devoid of juke joint rhythm and soul.
This is the “cadaver” status made chillingly explicit as the victims are reduced to puppets where their bodies are moving but their spirit is gone. This confirms that the vampire’s promise of “fellowship” is simply a state of absolute, eternal control under a new master. This spiritual death is the ultimate cost of assimilation, setting the stage for the final reckoning of the film.
However, this theme of dehumanizing control is not merely supernatural. It echoes in tangible, historical systems of oppression. The character Delta Slim provides this crucial real-world context by connecting the historical abuse of convict leasing to the modern-day exploitation of incarcerated workers.
While driving, Delta Slim explains to the other characters that he recognizes the chain gang as gifted musicians who were framed by racist sheriffs on a fabricated vagrancy charges, but are trapped in the brutal system of forced labor. This historical abuse directly shows the economic reality of “incarcerated workers produce an estimated over $2 billion each year in goods and services in state prison industries programs,” according to the Economic Policy Institute.
For this reason, Remmick’s supernatural gift sounds like an escape from this very violence. Nonetheless, their new vampire existence tragically echoes the very oppression they want to escape. Becoming a vampire is an exchange of one form of bondage for another because they are permanently waiting for permission from others to access other spaces. In other words, being a vampire becomes a new form of exclusion. Therefore, vampires are forever cursed from enjoying the sun or entering places without an invitation.
In the film’s ending, Sammie grows old playing as a blues musician and living the life that Remmick tried to control. While Vampire Mary and vampire Stack visit old Sammie one last time, they long to experience authentic blues once more because it reminds them of the joint juke night, as they describe it as the “best day of their life”. At the end, the three are the only survivors of that night’s massacre, but the ambiguous ending leaves viewers questioning whether anyone, in a society defined by such profound cycles of exploitation, can truly escape a living death in America.
Avoid the spoilers: Watch “Sinners” at these Chicago Public Library locations, or rent “Sinners” on www.chipublib.com to watch at home.
Feature: A “Sinners” Musical Journey: Delta to Chicago Blues with Vino Louden
Friday, Oct. 24, 2025, at 1 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Registration Not Required
Harold Washington Library Center
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium
400 S. State Street
Chicago IL 60605
Opening with a Blues set from renowned musician Vino Louden in our Grand Lobby it will then be immediately followed by a screening of Sinners on the big screen in our Cindy Pritzker Auditorium. Presented as part of the Renaissance Project, this event invites participants to actively engage with the rich and often untold stories of Black history and heritage at Chicago Public Library.
Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025 12:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.
Registration Not Required
Walker
Community Room
11071 S. Hoyne Avenue
Chicago IL 60643
Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025 5:30 p.m .–7:45 p.m.
Registration Not Required
2nd floor meeting room
1701 N. Milwaukee Avenue
Chicago IL 60647
Monday, Nov. 3, 2025, 5 p.m. – 7:15 p.m.
Registration Not Required
Community Room
2708 S. Pulaski Road
Chicago IL 60623
