When Sinners hit theaters last March, almost no one expected that a year later, the movie would have taken in almost $400 million at the box office and earned 16 Academy Award nominations, the most for a single film in Oscar history.
Warning: Spoilers ahead...
After all, Sinners is a horror movie and horror movies rarely earn critical acclaim. But, two Davidson College professors argue, Sinners is more than just scary – it elevates the genre by infusing it with Delta blues and setting the action in 1930s Mississippi.
With 16 Academy Award nominations and nearly $400 million at the box office, Sinners has officially redefined the horror genre. But what lies beneath the surface of this 1930s Mississippi vampire epic?
Here, the professors share their insights.
What were your first thoughts after seeing Sinners?
I went in blind, had no idea what I was going to see. I was not expecting a genre-bending blues opera that depicted a deep love and cultural understanding of Black artistry.
I would love to teach a course based entirely on it: The history of African American lives and music told through Sinners.
You study the blues; what did you think of the way Sinners incorporated the music and the myths of the genre?
It deliberately subverts the story of blues guitarist Robert Johnson. He is a legendary guitarist whose skill grew so quickly that his origin became mythologized. The story is that he went to the crossroads of 61 and 49 and sold his soul to the devil to be able to play the blues guitar. This is a kind of Faustian legend, and in a way, Sinners is the opposite of that.
Blues becomes this kind of musical technology that eradicates vampirism. At the end, the actual guitar, the silver resonator plate, becomes the thing that kills the vampires.
And the movie pits blues music against Irish folk music as well. Was that a common tension back then?
The relationship between Irish Americans and African Americans is also based in fact. And I think one of the really clever things they did in this film was stage the conflict between the two at the moment when Irish Americans are becoming considered white Americans.
At first, both the Irish and Black people were disenfranchised. Irish Americans were not considered white. And so this movie is a playful retelling of the rift that was being created economically, politically, racially, and culturally.
There’s a scene where time seems to blur and you see a host of artists from across history. What did you think of that sequence?
There's a term in Ghana and also in the African diaspora: “Sankofa.” And it means to bring the past into the present.
The symbol is a bird that is marching forward and looking backward at the same time.
We see crip walkers, dancers twerking, Chinese opera, B-boys and B-girls. We see all of these different aspects of musical creation as a result of diaspora coming to life and intertwining and overlapping, and that is the point of music as a technology, it can call all of these aspects into the present.
That scene is about the full spectrum of Black artistry and not just being relegated to one label and one specific time. It's about the reinvention of self and culture across times and spaces.
What did you think of Sinners when you saw it the first time?
There are a couple of scenes where my mouth was just hanging open. It was just sound, bodies, movement, light and camera. It was pure cinema.
You’ve studied vampire literature; how does Sinners subvert the genre?
One of the primary qualities of Dracula is that he’s a count. He's an aristocrat. He's imperious. He's above everyone else. To him, humans are food.
In Sinners, one of the things that is striking to me is how cohesive the vampires are. They're together. They're happy together. Drinking blood is not their primary interest.
I was struck by how the main vampire, Remmick, says, “Love and fellowship,” and they repeat that over and over. At one point, he even uses the word “fellowship” as a verb, which is like a call back to my Southern Baptist upbringing.
They see themselves as bringing people together and everyone sings the same songs and dances at the same dances. That's really unusual in fiction and films, where vampires do not usually form stable groups. Because they are undead singers and dancers, the homogeneity is creepy, like a particularly sinister vision of assimilation.
The vampires actually look like they’re having fun.
Yes. We fear monsters, but that's not all that we fear. We usually have some kind of attraction or envy.
As one scholar puts it, the fear of the monster is really a kind of desire. That is a kind of ambivalence, like feeling two different ways and wanting two different things, and for me, that helps explain why Sinners features twin protagonists. You can go that way. You can go this way.
What's striking to me about it is that neither one of those ways is easy, right? … Dying as a human Black man in 1932 Mississippi, defending yourself against the KKK, or just wandering from place to place and reminiscing about the times when you're a human as a vampire.
