Sinners: Ryan Coogler Is Tying Vampires to the Blues and ‘Devil’s Music’

In the new trailer for Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s first foray into the horror genre, a worldly voice warns, “There are legends of people where the gift of making music [is] so true, it can conjure spirits from the past and the future. This gift can bring fame and fortune, but it can also pierce the veil between life and death.”

For anyone steeped in the history of American music, such mysticism and menace is part and parcel for a story set in the South. Still, the vampires are a new innovation on the part of writer-director Coogler’s film, which follows Michael B. Jordan in the dual roles of twin brothers trying to make ends meet in 1930s era Mississippi. But even then, as Coogler sees it, a vampire yarn naturally lends itself to something like the rhythm and blues, as well as how those sounds were demonized a hundreds years ago when Jim Crow was the law of the land.

“The film deals with American music, blues music,” Coogler says during a press conference that Den of Geek attended ahead of Sinners’ trailer drop. The filmmaker goes on to note that he is directly pulling from the legends around famed blues musicians Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, who despite having no relation both were whispered to have sold their souls to the Devil at a crossroads in Mississippi for the gift of musical talent. (In actuality, Robert might have been so accused because he was one of the biggest names who dared to turn his back from playing church “spirituals” in favor of the profits of “secular,” godless music.)

Says Coogler, “When you think about the vampire as it exists, it’s got an association or a counterpart in almost every culture. But it is the supernatural creature most associated with seduction, that’s most associated with choice. And that aspect is something that’s very present when blues music was also called the Devil’s music. There’s a contrast between a secular lifestyle and [Christian morality]. So the film is in conversation with all those things, but the duality is always at the heart of it.”

That seduction is on full display in the glimpses we have seen of the film. A teaser over the weekend revealed smiling white faces (including a devilish-looking Jack O’Connell) as they begged to be let into a blues juke joint run by the brothers Elijah and Elias (Jordan, both). This obviously hints at the classic vampire trope of being wary of who you invite in. Meanwhile a gorier scene shown exclusively to the press reveals the downsides of exactly that when one of Elijah’s friends returns and now also is asking for an invitation after going off with those white devils.

The film marks a chance for Coogler, who is on his fifth collaboration in as many films with Jordan, to dive into his influences and inspirations. Horror itself has long interested him, with the director saying, “I think the genre is for the popular consumers of film, but it’s also a genre that comes up when people ask about great pieces of art…. And I think it’s because it feels ancient, the first story told around a fire was probably a horror story.”

And the horror campfire tales of, say, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn seem self-evident on Sinners. Even so, the director points out he is inspired just as much by Rodriguez’s The Faculty, as well as plenty of Coen Brothers with Inside Llewyn Davis and O Brother, Where Art Thou? mentioned specifically (fitting since the latter also features a devil at a crossroads and a hell of a guitar player).

The biggest influences, however, are intriguingly less cinematic than they are spiritually linked: one is among the more darkly amusing episodes of The Twilight Zone, “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank,” a yarn about a Southern man in 1920s Missouri returning from the dead after his own funeral; the other is a 1975 Stephen King novel also about vampires, Salem’s Lot.

“Salem’s Lot is about the town,” Coogler says, “and this movie is about this community.”

Still, Coogler emphasizes the mixture of blues, vampirism, and Mississippi is hitting on a lot more than fictional reference points. In fact, it might very well be the most personal work in Coogler’s oeuvre.

“My maternal grandfather is from Mississippi,” Coogler says, “and my Uncle James who passed away while I was finishing up Creed is also from Mississippi… My maternal grandfather passed before I was born, but I grew up in the house that he built after he moved to California. And I was fortunate to have a really close relationship with my Uncle James. And the seed of it started with that relationship with my uncle. He would listen to blues music all the time. He would only talk about Mississippi when he was listening to that music. And he had a profound effect on my life.”

Exploring that ancestral history through a popular form of entertainment like horror, with the vampires and the blood, and via glorious IMAX photography (a genre first for the type of movies to use 65mm IMAX cameras), is all meant to immerse modern viewers into a bygone time and place.

“The film for me personally was a reclamation of a time period and a place that my family doesn’t talk about much,” Coogler acknowledges, “because it’s a lot of feelings associated with our history. We go there, showing these people in their full… humanity.’” Full of life and full of music.

Sinners opens on April 18.

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