Mary Mba (Ph.D.)
This Mother’s Day (2025), my children gifted me an experience I didn’t know I needed: a theater viewing of Sinners (2025), the new genre-defying film directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B. Jordan. It was, in many ways, a spiritual experience. For a few hours, I was not just a mother being celebrated – I was also a daughter remembering, a Black woman reflecting, and a scholar stirred to critical inquiry. My children have formed this ritual of sending me to the theatre to relax and watch movies that just came out, and as usual, this year’s did not disappoint.
Coogler’s Sinners is not simply a movie. It is a conjuring. A remembering. A ritual of reckoning. And I left the theater knowing I would be writing more about it – not just here on my blog, but in academic journals and cultural essays to come.
Synopsis: Vampires in the Juke Joint
Set in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, Sinners follows twin brothers Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both portrayed by Michael B. Jordan), World War I veterans returning home from Chicago to open a juke joint. Joined by their nephew Sammie – a gifted guitarist whose strict preacher father condemns the blues – they hope to build a sanctuary for Black expression, healing, and joy.
But their haven becomes a battleground. A pale, cold force has come to town: Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irish-immigrant vampire who leads a coven of undead musicians. They are drawn not just to blood but to Black vitality – joy, sound, and soul. The struggle to preserve the juke joint becomes a metaphysical war for cultural survival, where music is both weapon and shield, memory and prophecy.
Major Themes: Blues, Blood, and the Black Soul
1. Racial Oppression and Cultural Appropriation
Remmick and his vampire coven represent the centuries-long siphoning of Black culture – by those who consume its art, labor, and rhythm while erasing its originators. The vampires don’t just feed – they curate, repurpose, and dominate.
2. Spirituality and Resistance
Far from caricature, African spiritual practices – rootwork, ancestor veneration, sacred drumming – become tools of protection. The film reveres these practices as legitimate, powerful alternatives to Western Christian binaries.
3. Music as Liberation and Memory
Blues is not a soundtrack – it is theology. It holds grief and joy together. In Sinners, music raises the dead, opens portals to ancestral wisdom, and confronts the forces of death with the rhythms of life.
4. Family, Legacy, and Duality
The Moore twins personify two sides of the Black survival coin: Smoke’s guarded stoicism and Stack’s open-hearted joy. Sammie’s journey reflects the burden of breaking generational expectations to reclaim ancestral power.
Unspoken Shadows: Subtext and Secondary Themes
The Model Minority and Complicity
An Asian couple who own two convenience stores and quietly treat injured Black victims without alerting authorities are framed as “helpful,” but their neutrality masks complicity. Their silence fosters unchecked Black-on-Black violence and reflects the model minority myth: proximity to whiteness and economic benefit, but without disrupting racial hierarchies. They profit from pain and patch up wounds – but never challenge the systems that cause them.
Eroticism, Whiteness, and Destruction
One of the twins’ involvement with Mary, a white-passing woman with a one-eighth Black blood, ends in both literal and symbolic death. She is the first to be vampirized – and she turns her Black lover. The tragedy recalls a long lineage of Black male downfall linked to white femininity, not as judgment but as historical commentary. Their intimacy – beautiful and doomed – exposes the dangers of uncritical desire under the white gaze.
This is not just a personal fall; it is a political echo. Coogler revisits a painful archetype and complicates it, forcing us to ask: What is the cost of loving whiteness when whiteness refuses to love you back?
Character Analysis: The Living, the Lost, and the Lurking
Smoke Moore
Haunted by war and trauma, Smoke is skeptical of both God and man. A World War I veteran, he bears his scars internally and outwardly. His silence is not weakness – it’s a defense mechanism against a world that has rarely made room for Black vulnerability. Yet his loyalty and fierce protectiveness ground the narrative. He is the bruised backbone of the family – guarding the juke joint like sacred ground and embodying a form of masculinity forged in survival, not dominance.
Stack Moore
A dreamer, dancer, and emotional heartbeat of the film. Stack believes in the transformative power of joy, music, and community. His expressive nature contrasts Smoke’s reserve, but his refusal to shrink from beauty is its own form of resistance. His downfall – linked to both love and naivete – feels Shakespearean. Yet his arc is also a celebration of art as defiance. His joy is his rebellion, and his memory lingers in every note that follows.
Sammie
Caught between a fire-and-brimstone upbringing and the siren call of the blues, Sammie embodies spiritual hybridity. His father’s condemnation of music as “devilish” clashes with Sammie’s intuitive sense that rhythm is healing. His guitar becomes both confessional and altar. His journey is one of self-reclamation, and by the end, Sammie is not just a musician – he is a griot, carrying forward ancestral memory through melody.
Remmick
An Irish-immigrant vampire and plantation-era parasite cloaked in elegance. Remmick doesn’t just want to feed – he wants to curate, control, and become what he consumes. His villainy is systemic, not individual. In every smooth smile and calculated charm, he mirrors whiteness’ historical ability to absorb Black genius while remaining untouched by Black pain. He is the colonizer dressed in couture.
Mary (Stack’s White-passing ex-girlfriend/Lover)
Mary’s presence is small but devastating. Her relationship with Stack is initially tender, but her transformation into a vampire – and her role in turning Stack – invokes the tragic trope of interracial desire leading to ruin. Her character functions not merely as a symbol of the “forbidden,” but of whiteness-as-desire: beautiful, dangerous, and ultimately, consuming. She does not survive the transformation; neither does the man she loves.
Annie (Hoodoo Priestess and Spiritual Guardian)
Annie, portrayed by Wunmi Mosaku, is a powerful Hoodoo priestess and the spiritual heart of the community. Deeply rooted in ancestral wisdom and protective ritual, she embodies a sacred feminine presence that holds space for both personal grief and collective survival. Her history with Smoke – marked by shared loss – adds emotional depth to the film’s themes of memory and mourning.
Annie’s presence is not limited to ritual scenes; she appears as both a guide and a warning in moments when the juke joint’s sanctity is threatened. Through her rootwork, incantations, and connection to the spirit world, Annie becomes the ancestral channel through which protection flows. She is a reminder that in times of crisis, survival does not rely solely on strength, but on memory, tradition, and sacred knowing.
Annie doesn’t simply represent spirituality – she enacts it. She is legacy and labor, both mythic and real, reminding us that not all warriors carry weapons. Some carry knowledge. Some carry fire.
Pastor Elijah (Sammie’s Father)
A towering figure of moral rigidity. His condemnation of the blues as “the Devil’s music” reflects internalized colonial Christianity. He is not a villain, but a product of spiritual warfare – a man who chose respectability and repression over rhythm and resistance. Yet, there are cracks in his stoicism. His silence after Sammie’s first performance suggests a man wrestling with his own forgotten voice.
The Asian Shopkeeper Couple – Grace and Bo Chow
A deeply complicated presence. They treat Black victims of violence without involving the authorities – a gesture of pragmatic care or silent complicity, depending on your read. They profit from the community but do not participate in it. Their quiet neutrality in the face of anti-Black violence exposes the myth of cross-racial solidarity under capitalism, raising questions about the “model minority” role and what it means to be adjacent to, but untouched by, Black suffering.
Six Theoretical Lenses for Sinners (2025): Reading Horror Through Black, Decolonial, and Feminist Thought
As a genre-defying Southern Gothic horror film, Sinners is brimming with symbolic and thematic layers. To unpack its richness, I turn to six theoretical frameworks that illuminate the film’s deeper currents – each revealing how horror can be a vessel for truth, trauma, memory, and resistance.
1. Afropessimism & Afro-Optimism
Key Scholars: Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton
What It Is:
Afropessimism contends that anti-Blackness is not just a social condition, but an ontological one – Black suffering forms the structural core of Western civilization. Meanwhile, Afro-Optimism insists on survival, joy, and cultural creativity as acts of rebellion and renewal.
Application in Sinners:
Vampirism in the film is a near-perfect metaphor for the parasitic relationship between whiteness and Black cultural production. The vampires feed not only on blood, but on soul, rhythm, memory. Blackness becomes a consumable aesthetic – desired, devoured, but never fully humanized. And yet, Sinners doesn’t stop at despair. It insists on the spiritual and creative power of the Black community – through music, ritual, and resistance – as a force that cannot be fully colonized.
This tension – between what is taken and what refuses to die – sits at the heart of Sinners, mirroring Afropessimism’s realism and Afro-Optimism’s defiant light.
2. Postcolonial Theory
Key Scholars: Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon
What It Is:
Postcolonial theory interrogates the lingering effects of colonialism in cultural, psychological, and material life. It explores how colonized people resist domination and how empire reshapes identity and culture through mimicry, surveillance, and violence.
Application in Sinners:
Remmick, the Irish-immigrant vampire, is not a caricature – he is a colonizer who cloaks himself in sophistication and civility, echoing Bhabha’s idea of mimicry and Fanon’s portrait of colonial mental violence. His presence in the Black juke joint is not accidental; it is invasive. He seeks to become what he exploits, dressing in style, learning the music, appropriating the aesthetic while remaining untouched by the trauma that produced it.
The juke joint becomes a postcolonial battleground – a space of resistance that simultaneously seduces and repels colonial desire.
3. African Spiritual Epistemologies / Decolonial Theory
Key Scholars: Sylvia Wynter, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Molefi Asante
What It Is:
This framework centers African worldviews and cosmologies as legitimate sources of knowledge. It challenges the Eurocentric binaries of good/evil, sin/salvation, and reason/spirit that have historically dismissed Indigenous ways of knowing.
Application in Sinners:
The film unapologetically roots its spiritual logic in African traditions – rootwork, ancestor invocation, spiritual possession – not as superstition, but as survival technology. The church calls the juke joint sinful, but the film argues that spirit moves most powerfully in places deemed profane by colonial Christianity.
Decolonial theory helps us see how blues music, conjure, and oral storytelling become sacred rites. It’s not just about resisting the vampire – it’s about remembering who we are before they arrived. And knowing that the medicine we need is already in our bones.
4. Critical Race Theory (CRT)
Key Scholars: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Derrick Bell
What It Is:
CRT holds that racism is not aberrational but systemic – embedded in law, policy, culture, and institutional life. It emphasizes intersectionality and questions the narratives of legal neutrality and colorblindness.
Application in Sinners:
The juke joint, while a cultural space, is also a legal and political space. It is surveilled. It is threatened. It is coded as “sinful” and thus disposable. Meanwhile, the real predators – like Remmick -operate with impunity.
The film illustrates how “sin” is racialized. Black joy is pathologized. Black gathering is criminalized. The idea of safety is flipped: within the system, protection is only afforded to the powerful. The juke joint is a site of “illegality,” but also of liberation – where law is replaced by community, care, and rhythm.
5. Black Feminist Theory
Key Scholars: bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers
What It Is:
Black feminist theory centers the experiences of Black women and critiques the ways race, gender, sexuality, and class intersect to create unique structures of oppression and resistance.
Application in Sinners:
Though the film focuses on the Moore brothers and Sammie, it gestures toward women in critical ways: the mother who raised the boys, the preacher’s wife who shields her son, and Mary – the white lover turned vampire – whose body becomes a vessel of transmission.
A Black feminist reading asks: Where are the women’s voices? What are the stakes of Black male vulnerability when it is disconnected from Black feminine presence and spiritual labor? What happens when patriarchal values within Black communities – like the condemnation of the blues – silence the very healing traditions women often preserve?
And what does it mean that the juke joint – coded as feminized, emotional, sensual – is the site of salvation?
6. Gothic and Horror Theory
Key Scholars: Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark), Julia Kristeva (abjection), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Monster Theory)
What It Is:
Gothic and horror theory explores how monsters embody cultural anxieties, how the grotesque disrupts boundaries, and how horror confronts us with what we repress – historical violence, desire, grief.
Application in Sinners:
The vampire is a long-standing symbol in Western horror. In Sinners, it becomes a racialized metaphor for cultural cannibalism. But the film also builds on the Southern Gothic tradition, where the horror lies not in the monster but in the landscape itself – segregated towns, lynching trees, cracked stained glass in empty churches.
Toni Morrison reminds us that American literature has always used Blackness as a shadow text. Here, that shadow rises fully formed. The vampires are not metaphors instead of history – they are metaphors because of history.
Similar Films, Shared Bloodlines
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) stands at the crossroads of horror, history, spirituality, and resistance. While it offers something wholly original, it also joins a lineage of films and narratives that have used genre – particularly horror, fantasy, and Southern Gothic – to interrogate Black life, survival, and memory.
The following films share bloodlines with Sinners, echoing its themes and broadening the cultural conversation it participates in:
Get Out (2017)
Directed by Jordan Peele
Like Sinners, Get Out uses the horror genre to expose the deep undercurrents of anti-Blackness within liberal white spaces. Both films deploy supernatural elements – vampires in Sinners, hypnotism and body-snatching in Get Out – as metaphors for the parasitic consumption of Black bodies and minds.
Comparable Themes:
- Cultural appropriation as horror
- White liberalism as masked violence
- Black autonomy as the true site of fear
- Racial exploitation framed through genre conventions
While Get Out focuses on present-day liberalism, Sinners leans more heavily into spirituality and historical grounding, embedding the horror within a Southern, post-WWI Black landscape where the enemy is not just liberalism, but centuries of colonial hunger.
Eve’s Bayou (1997)
Directed by Kasi Lemmons
This Southern Gothic classic explores secrets, spirituality, and family through the eyes of a young Black girl in 1960s Louisiana. Though not horror in the traditional sense, Eve’s Bayou simmers with mystical tension, ancestral presence, and emotional haunting.
Comparable Themes:
- Southern Black mysticism
- Gendered spiritual insight and repression
- Family secrets and inherited trauma
- The thin veil between life, death, and legacy
While Sinners focuses on male protagonists, it shares Eve’s Bayou‘s investment in Black Southern spiritual knowledge – especially the idea that what is seen and unseen are constantly in conversation.
Blade (1998)
Directed by Stephen Norrington, starring Wesley Snipes
Blade redefined the vampire genre by centering a Black protagonist who hunts vampires instead of being their victim. It merges action with horror and unapologetically repositions Black masculinity as powerful, strategic, and supernatural.
Comparable Themes:
- Black resistance against predatory whiteness
- Vampirism as a symbol of elitism, corruption, and racial supremacy
- Weaponized Black bodies as sites of reclamation
While Blade is more action-based, Sinners slows the tempo, inviting reflection on the spiritual implications of the vampire metaphor – how whiteness feeds on Black expression while simultaneously vilifying it.
The Harder They Fall (2021)
Directed by Jeymes Samuel
A bold revisionist Western that centers Black gunslingers and reclaims a genre that historically erased Black presence. The film subverts tropes and injects style, swagger, and revenge into a narrative about family, justice, and legacy.
Comparable Themes:
- Genre revision through a Black historical lens
- Revenge as justice
- Mythmaking and narrative power
- Radical style as a vehicle for radical truth
Both films rewrite genre from within. Sinners does for Southern Gothic horror what The Harder They Fall does for the Western – disrupts, centers Blackness, and elevates aesthetic form into historical testimony.
Beloved (1998)
Directed by Jonathan Demme, based on the novel by Toni Morrison
A deeply haunting narrative rooted in post-slavery trauma, maternal grief, and memory as both gift and curse. Beloved reveals how history refuses to stay buried—and how the past lives on in the body and spirit.
Comparable Themes:
- Haunting as historical echo
- Motherhood, grief, and ancestral return
- Spiritual possession and unresolved trauma
- The horror of survival, not death
Coogler’s film similarly explores what it means to be haunted by history – not only by loss, but by the vampiric systems that refuse to release Black communities. And like Morrison’s work, Sinners treats the supernatural not as escapism, but as revelation.
Final Thought
Each of these films dares to envision Blackness not only as a site of suffering – but also as a source of power, magic, creativity, and cosmological depth. Sinners earns its place among them by building a rich, blood-soaked altar at the crossroads of horror and history. It demands not just to be watched, but to be remembered.
What Comes Next: Scholarship and Reflection
Sinners didn’t just entertain me – it unsettled, provoked, and ultimately activated something deep within. It stirred memory. It stirred inquiry. It called forth not only the ghosts of the past, but the voices of theory, music, and ancestral witness that have long lived in my academic and personal work.
This film demands a response, not only as a viewer, but as a cultural critic and scholar. Over the coming months, I will be expanding on the ideas seeded in this reflection – developing essays and academic articles that explore the film’s cultural, spiritual, and political dimensions through multiple critical lenses. Please, let me know in the comment section, the one or ones you would like me to develop first.
Works in Progress:
- “Bloodlines and Blues: African Spirituality and Resistance in Sinners”
A study of how African cosmologies and ritual practices are reclaimed as legitimate epistemologies and survival strategies within the film. - “Vampires and the Plantation: Gothic Capitalism in Black Horror Cinema”
A comparative exploration of how vampirism functions as a metaphor for racial capitalism, extraction, and consumption in Sinners, Get Out, and Beloved. - “The Juke Joint as Sacred Space: Reimagining Sin and Spirit through Black Sound”
An analysis of how the juke joint disrupts colonial notions of sin and sanctity, positioning blues music as theology, ritual, and resistance. - “Twins, Trauma, and the Black Masculine Psyche: A Character Study of Smoke and Stack”
A psychological and symbolic examination of how duality, war trauma, and masculine identity are represented through the twin protagonists. - “Desire and Destruction: Race, Eroticism, and the White Gaze in Sinners”
A critical look at interracial desire, betrayal, and the dangers of romantic proximity to whiteness within the racialized horror tradition. - “Model Minorities and Mute Complicity: Cross-Racial Tensions in Black Horror”
A provocative interrogation of how Asian characters are positioned as silent enablers of anti-Black violence in Sinners, and what this reveals about racial hierarchy and cultural proximity.
These forthcoming pieces are not just academic – they are offerings. Rituals of clarity. Testimonies stitched together from blood, basslines, and Black memory. Sinners will not leave us alone – and that, I believe, is the point.
Final Reflections: A Mother’s Gift, A Scholar’s Joy
I didn’t plan to watch Sinners. I was gifted the experience.
This Mother’s Day, my children gave me something profound: not flowers, not chocolates, but the gift of story – a seat in a dark theater to witness Ryan Coogler’s Sinners unfold on screen. But it wasn’t just the film itself that moved me – it was everything that came after.
On the drive home, my son and I dove headfirst into discussion, dissecting symbolism, drawing cultural parallels, and naming the characters’ choices out loud like we were building a syllabus in real time. We were breathless with ideas – teasing out metaphors, asking what it meant for Blackness to be desired and devoured, and what it meant to resist through music.
Later that evening, my daughter called, and the conversation picked up with even more intensity. We talked about gender and spiritual legacy, about the vampire as a stand-in for systemic power, about blues as theology and survival, about the role of the Asian couple and the one-eighth Black white woman. I learned from her that Hailee Steinfeld, who played the role of Mary, Stack’s ex-girlfriend who passes for white in the film, is also one-eight Black in real life. Our voices spilled over with excitement, the kind that only comes from being seen and intellectually engaged at the same time.
These are the moments I cherish most. Not just because they show how deeply we think as a family – but because they are proof of love. Love in the form of thoughtful conversation. Love in the form of a movie ticket. Love in the form of listening, reflecting, and wrestling with meaning together.
To my children: I love you more than I can say. Thank you for seeing me – for knowing that this, this blend of spirit, story, cinema, and critical inquiry, is what makes me come alive. Thank you for meeting me there. For gifting me a Mother’s Day of deep joy, of shared thought, of laughter and fire and revelation.
This blog post is also yours. Your voices are here.
Your questions live in every paragraph.
Your hearts echo in every line.
Sinners reminded me that horror is often just another word for memory. That resistance can sound like a guitar riff. That history lives in both blood and breath.
It also reminded me that the ancestors are watching.
And so are we.
And thanks to you – my beloved children – I’m watching with fuller vision, an open mind, and a grateful, overflowing heart.
Sinners – Official Trailer | IMDb
Sinners – Official Trailer | IMDb
References:
Films & Media:
Coogler, Ryan, director. Sinners. Performance by Michael B. Jordan, Jack O’Connell, 2025.
Demme, Jonathan, director. Beloved. Performance by Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, and Thandiwe Newton, Touchstone Pictures, 1998.
Lemmons, Kasi, director. Eve’s Bayou. Trimark Pictures, 1997.
Norrington, Stephen, director. Blade. Performance by Wesley Snipes, New Line Cinema, 1998.
Peele, Jordan, director. Get Out. Universal Pictures, 2017.
Samuel, Jeymes, director. The Harder They Fall. Netflix, 2021.
Books & Theoretical Sources:
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Basic Books, 1992.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241–1299.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.
hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979.
Sexton, Jared. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.” Rhizomes, vol. 29, 2016.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81.
Wilderson, Frank B., III. Afropessimism. Liveright, 2020.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.
