Sinners: the anti-capitalist vampire film everyone is talking about

This article contains plot points for Sinners (otherwise how would we write about it)

For a creature without a reflection, the vampire has done a pretty good job of casting a shadow over the silver screen.

Only a few months ago, Nosferatu blackened cinemas, courtesy of Robert Eggers’ remake of the 1922 German original, inspired by Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. 2023’s Renfield and The Last Voyage of the Demeter also borrowed from Stoker’s classic to continue the Transylvanian count’s immortal presence on celluloid. Now, Ryan Coogler’s 1930s-set Sinners offers a new take on the genre, centering a multiracial community in Jim Crow-era Deep South where an Irish bloodsucker darkens the door of a Black-owned juke joint.

Coogler joins the far too short list of Black filmmakers who have tackled the supernatural subject, from William Crain’s 1972 Blacula to Eddie Murphy’s 1995 Vampire in Brooklyn and Spike Lee’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (a 2014 remake of Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess). Yet, by picking up the baton, the Oakland, California-born writer-director of Black Panther is reinvigorating the vampire trope: challenging colonialism, Christianity, and the nefarious lure of capitalism.

​“In investigating this [film], being where I’m from, it made me question everything,” Coogler tells THE FACE. ​“I’m from the block where the Black Panthers started. I’m from a place that is very cognisant of capitalism and its effects. So that would be in my work, whether I thought about it consciously or [not] – I’m putting myself out there.”

Vampire fiction is well known for, um, getting its teeth into the ills of capitalism: ​“If we think about blood as a symbol of money or economy or capital, Dracula represents a critique of capitalism in the sense that it takes but doesn’t give back,” notes Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, author of The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction and assistant director at the Institute for African American Studies. His words echo that of Karl Marx who once wrote, ​“capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

It’s fitting, then, that Sinners invites an anti-capitalist reading at a time when a growing unease of capitalism is prevalent across both left and right. As actor Delroy Lindo, who plays musician Delta Slim, tells me: ​“Any entity that sucks from any other entity for its use [or] any entity that says, ​‘I see you, but I can’t appreciate you, I have to take from you,’ is destroying you.”

While vampiric characters often accumulate wealth as much as blood – take the immense financial security of Louis in Interview with the Vampire, Deacon Frost in Blade and the Cullens of The Twilight Saga (nice house) – Coogler goes against the grain.

His lead vampire, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), has a few gold coins to his name and the weight of British oppression on his back as an Irishman whose land was once stolen from him. It’s because of that subjugation that Remmick, despite his murderous ways, has deep empathy for the community he targets, made up of Black, Chinese and mixed heritage people carrying the pain of Western imperialism and colonisation: ​“I wanted a vampire who had been affected by this shit,” says Coogler. ​“Nobody’s more shrewd than a person who’s been fucked over.”

Unlike solitary master vampires who seek to enslave humans, Remmick advocates an inclusive vision in which the oppressed come together as a vampiric community built on equality. But, as Lindo points out, his manifesto has its flaws: ​“We’re going to create this utopia, but there’s one little thing we got to do – we got to kill y’all,” he says. ​“And not only do we have to destroy you, we have to destroy you violently.”

Still, Sinners’ examination of community does continue the trend set by Black writers in the vampire genre. In Jewelle Gomez’s 1991 The Gilda Stories, the first Black lesbian vampire novel, the writer envisions a multicultural network of vampires who do feed not to kill – but to exchange telepathic gifts in return for blood: ​“To extract capital from the economy, eventually people have to die,” notes Jenkins. ​“Whereas Gomez is suggesting that may not be so.”

Remmick’s concept of community might not be ethical, sure, but what he and the film have in common with Gomez’s protagonist is a scepticism of Christianity and its moral positioning: ​“Gilda says, ​‘This is not the religion of my mother,’” Jenkins continues. ​“That becomes an interesting dynamic on the propensity for African Americans to be Christian. I see the vampire, particularly Black vampires, engaging audiences to think about the role that religion plays in everyday life.”

Sinners eagerly positions African paganism in a positive light through Annie, a Hoodoo healer played by Wunmi Mosaku, while establishing the tension between the church, its congregation, and the music they find solace in. It’s a story told mainly through Preacher Boy Sam (Miles Caton), a young musician, whose desire to play the blues puts him in the crosshairs of both the church, which condemns his music, and the vampires looking to exploit his gift.

​“We were people who came from a place where music was not to be bought and sold – it was a way of life,” Coogler explains. ​“So the moment you start trying to sell it, we are putting the concept of ownership in transfers, turning a system of healing into property, to a people that have been turned into property on land that was someone else’s land that has now been turned into property.”

Blues is the soulful foundation of Sinners, and delving into its African-American legacy – one shaped by ​“Chinese American, Irish American, and the Choctaw [people]” – helped Coogler bolster his message of cultures coming together, and taking a stand against oppressive capitalist powers.

​“The concept of community is the thing that fuels all of it,” Coogler says. ​“The most powerful characters in this movie are fuelled by that concept. The vampire, for me, had to be looking for that.”