Nicole Huff
The newest addition to our current Black Horror Renaissance comes from none other than Ryan Coogler in his vampire horror debut Sinners. As a Black person from the South, I was in awe of how Coogler portrays the Jim Crow South as still full of Black hope and joy despite its cotton-field-filled backdrops. And, as an Afrofuturist, it was these themes of liberation and unmitigated joy that drew me in.
Already I’ve seen commentary on Sinners negating its status as a horror movie. Even Spike Lee has stated that this is a “new genre” rather than a horror film. But I want to reiterate that this, amidst all its historical exploration of the Black South, is a horror film. In fact, it’s a particular horror film— a vampire film! The tendency to label this film anything other than horror I believe stems from a long history of Black art and literature needing to legitimize itself and prove itself worthy thus rejecting genres and mediums that have been effectively ghettoized. Why would we associate ourselves with a ghettoized genre like horror? Well, that’s exactly what Coogler, and many other Black artists, have done as there is a potential within horror and especially in Black Horror and that potential lies in the hopefulness embedded in the genre.
People often forget that horror is a hopeful and redemptive genre. To quote my dad after seeing Sinners and getting emotional by the end: “Horror isn’t supposed to be touching!” But Coogler reminds us that horror is, in fact, the most touching genre through its insistence on hope. You hope to survive the night. You hope to save yourself and your loved ones. You hope for the evil to end. Horror is filled with hope, and it is this hopefulness that I think adds to the picture of the Jim Crow South that Coogler has painted for us in Sinners.
Coogler uses many of the classic vampire genre tropes such as vampires needing an invitation inside, being unable to withstand garlic, and being unable to tolerate sunlight. Coogler also complicates the vampire genre, pointing to the variety of vampires that exist and playing with those varieties even within this film, as we see some of the vampires feel pain when their sire, Remmick (played by Jack O’Connell) feels pain, while others are unaffected. This alone demonstrates the unique way Black Horror remixes horror tropes. But I believe that there is also an Afrofuturist sensibility that permeates our Black Horror Renaissance which allows for conflations of time and place with a core message of hope and liberation. Amidst scenes of Black joy, Coogler reminds us that the ever-present evil of white supremacy still looms but can be thwarted even if it comes in a vampire package. Sinners asserts a powerful belief – a belief that Black people have always survived, continue to survive, and will survive and exist in the future by any means necessary.
Scholar Julian Chambliss contends that Afrofuturism is “the intersection between speculation and liberation by the concerns of Afrodiasporic peoples.” While people often associate Afrofuturism with science fiction rather than horror, I am of the belief that Black Horror and Afrofuturism must be in conversation, as horror is another fantastical genre that can be used to speculate about other worlds using violence and the grotesque to achieve those futures. Coogler’s Sinners is an example of how Black Horror and Afrofuturism are often in conversation.
Coogler sets the Afrofuturist stage at the film’s opening as a montage of black and white images depicting various cultures and their legends of storytelling is displayed. A voiceover accompanies this montage telling the viewers that “There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death conjuring spirits of the past and the future.” As the narration continues, we see images of a West African Griot and an African American bluesman with a guitar on his back reminiscent of the images of Robert Johnson. While the film’s bluesman, Sammie Moore (played by Miles Canton), does not sell his soul to the devil for his talent as Robert Johnson’s legend states, he possess a talent so powerful that it “pierces the veil between the living and the dead.” From these opening images and the centering of a bluesman throughout the film, Coogler highlights the relationship between Black spirituality and music. Coogler uses the blues and its power to carve out a space for Black people to assert their presence and influence in the past, present, and future as well as to create a world not governed by a white western hegemonic imaginary.
Figure 1 (left) West African Griot from the opening of the film Sinners. Figure 2 (right) Bluesman from opening of the film Sinners. From https://gizmodo.com/sinners-spotify-easter-eggs-offer-an-inspired-immersive-lore-discovery-2000592250.
Yvonne Chireau, a professor of religion and a consultant on Sinners, contends that “While the blues captured the [B]lack experience in song, they also served as a prime conduit for African American supernatural beliefs” (Chireau 145). There is a rich history of the blues being used to channel the spiritual outside of religious institutions, which are often too conservative of spaces to address the more secular topics of the blues. Chireau also explains that the tension between the blues and the Black Church often comes from the messages portrayed in blues music as bluespeople sang about pleasure, pain, sex, and the woes of everyday life (Chireau 148). The blues and places where the blues were played like juke joints were spaces that encouraged freedom of all kinds, with special attention to bodily and emotional freedom. Thus, Smoke and Stack’s (played by Michael B. Jordan) Club Juke becomes an alternative Black Church free from the respectability politics that plague religious institutions, and Sammie becomes a preacher giving new meaning to his nickname “preacher boy” through his ability to conjure a space and time for Black joy.
The moment when Sammie starts to play at Club Juke, he conjures a portal where everyone in attendance can experience pure joy. As he performs, we see bodies wrap around one another as couples new and old cleave to each other covering one another in their sweat. They appear unaware of the world outside of the juke joint as they only focus on the music and one another. While the patrons dance, Sammie has seemingly conjured spirits of the past and future. We see a Black man shredding an electric guitar a la Eddie Hazel, DJs spinning records, breakdancers, and various African traditional dancers from across the diaspora all within this same scene. Coogler even shows a group of Black women in modern-day clothing twerking together!
Figure 3. Snapshot of scene in Club Juke from the film Sinners where ancestors of the past and future emerge.
As I watched the camera pan around the room showcasing all of these cultures from different time periods intermixed in a single room, I was moved to tears as a sudden rush of euphoria and reverence came over me. I realized in that moment, that Coogler was attempting to alter both time and space to carve out a place that lies outside of our Western concepts of reality – to create a new, Black, reality where Black people could be free even just for a moment. Coogler seems to be employing an Afrofuturist sensibility within his horror film, moreover, and ultimately creates a queer temporality through the junk joint.
Kara Keeling defines a queer temporality as a place that “names that dimension of the unpredictable and the unknowable in time that governs errant, eccentric, promiscuous, and unexpected organizations of social life” (Keeling 19). To create a queer temporality, then, is to create a space that is both elsewhere and otherwise. In Sinners, the queer temporality is conjured by Sammie’s music and is a space where the past, present, and future can co-exist and Black joy can flourish. As we watch this joyful moment, we also see the building seemingly burning around them while they continue to dance signaling to the viewer that although the world around them is on fire, literally and figuratively, Black people must find a space and time to feel unmitigated joy and intimacy. Thus, Coogler continues to remind the viewer of the setting they are in— the Jim Crow South— while pushing against a fatalist perspective of the Black South as filled with only pain and trauma and highlighting the joy and futurity that can still find a way to endure despite that same pain and trauma.
Figure 4. Scene from Sinners where club juke appears to be burning while patrons continue dancing.
After crafting this beautiful queer temporality filled with Black joy, Coogler reminds us that there is a still an evil lurking in the shadows and this evil, represented by Remmick and his two KKK affiliated vampire sidekicks, are watching their joyous moment with contempt: Remmick is jealous of Sammie’s ability to conjure the ancestors with his music and longs to conjure his own. Thus, Remmick decides he wants to turn Sammie and use him and his abilities to conjure his own ancestors, unleashing horror to rain down on their joy.
The appearance of Remmick and his desire to use Sammie’s abilities for his own gain at this pinnacle moment of Black joy is an interesting commentary on white supremacy’s insistence on interrupting Black life to ensure its own endurance. While Sinners continuously shows white supremacy’s interruptions of Black life and joy through the vampires, Coogler’s film insists on fighting back against those interruptions and refusing them as the core characters ban together to fight the present evil. Through the horror genre, Coogler speculates about Black futures with an emphasis on Black joy and an assertion that you can send the KKK, vampires, and institutionalized racism at us, and we will still fight back and survive. The use of the horror genre to make this assertion reminds viewers that we will not only survive, but we will claim our space in this world by any means necessary, even if that means surviving a horde of vampires and taking down a horde of KKK members with heavy fire power shortly after.
Works Cited
Chireau, Yvonne P. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, University of California Press, 2003.
Keeling, Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures. NYU Press, 2019.
Nicole Huff is a PhD candidate in the English department at Michigan State University. She received her bachelor’s from Kalamazoo College and her master’s from DePaul University. Her research centers Afrofuturism, gender and sexuality, and Black women and/or Black Queer folks in pop culture with an emphasis on horror. Beginning Fall 2025, she will be an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture at the University of Rio Grande Valley.
