Sinners (2025), directed by Ryan Coogler. Poster: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Academy Awards 98 on 15 March 2026 must have been a crowning. Entering Ryan Coogler, Sinners is a vampire film set in 1932 Mississippi, had already achieved what no film in Oscar history had ever achieved: 16 nominations, one more than the long-standing record of 14 held by All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land. By night’s end it had taken four trophies, including Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan and a historic first for cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw — the first woman ever to win in her category. The fact that the film lost Best Picture to One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson is virtually an aside.
Nearly one year after its theatrical debut, Sinners still does not feel like a movie, but like something that is going to happen.
Two twins, one juke joint, and a very long night
The first original screenplay by Coogler begins in the Mississippi Delta, with gangster brothers Smoke and Stack, both of which are played by Jordan in a dual role, the Academy finally acknowledged, coming back to Chicago to start a juke joint with their cousin Sammie, a young blues prodigy. By daylight the joint is besieged by a charismatic Irish vampire (Jack O’Connell) and his ever-increasing army. The opening hour is like an hour in the sun with the period drama. The second tears your throat out.
The music does the talking
What lifts Sinners above the standard genre exercise is how completely Ludwig Göransson’s Oscar-winning score is fused into its meaning. In the film’s most-discussed sequence, The playing of the sammy literally invokes spirits – the Black music traditions that preceded the blues and the genres that evolved out of the former. Coogler is arguing: blues was not music. It was a cultural memory, the thing that was free to African Americans to keep themselves alive. That history must be made to feel that before you can be appalled by what is threatening it.
Vampires as cultural appropriation
There Sinners is stinging. These vampires have no simple desire to feed. They desire to steal away – music, people, culture. Juxtaposing the monsters in the film with Coogler as a metaphor of white extraction of Black art, film scholar Anthony Michael D’Agostino (2025) also interprets the controversial ending of the movie, in which Sammie rejects immortality and retains the blues, as Coogler’s late-arriving mission statement of how Black artists can adapt and reclaim without being consumed.
This has long been the case with the vampire genre. According to Baker, Green and Stasiewicz-Biekowska (2021), since the nineteenth century, these tales of vampires became a carrier of fears regarding predatory power: colonization, occupation, economic predation. Coogler belongs to that line, except that he is dragging it to distinctly American territory.
A new chapter in Black horror
Sinners comes into a renaissance of Black horror through the work of the director Jordan Peele and Get Out (2017), and sustained by a wave of other directors such as Nia DaCosta. According to researchers such as Pinedo (2020) and Hauke (2021) the newest wave of critical race horror has employed the metaphors of the genre to conceptualize racism as the monster, making it a reversal of the previous race horror that typified the twentieth century. Coogler carries on that tradition, with what Get Out lacked: a period setting, a musical, a Klan finale, and a juke joint full of folks you come to love.
Honest objections
Not everyone is sold. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman liked the movie but felt the siren song of the megaplex lure Coogler out of the Scorsese-like down-to-earth Fruitvale Station. The Wall Street Journal was more critical, claiming that Coogler is still constrained by the conventions of the Marveldom. The tonal shift between period and vampire siege is jolting and some viewers do not feel that the latter part of the film deserves the former. These are rightful grievances – and Sinners is a better movie because it can contain them, having grossed $369 million worldwide on a $90–100 million budget anyway.
Sinners’ historic 98th Academy Awards run. Graphic by author.
Why this matters
An original R-rated horror movie is the film that almost single-handedly battled through the year of sequels and reshaped the dialogue around awards. That sends a message to studios, to audiences, to the next generation of Black filmmakers, that a film can be insanely bizarre, highly political, and a packer of a multiplex.
The vampires had gone after the blues. The blues won.
References
Baker, D., Green, S., & Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska, A. (2021). Vampiric transformations: The popular politics of the (post) romantic vampire. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 35(2), 171–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2021.1936822
D’Agostino, A. M. (2025). Mouths & mirrors in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Film Quarterly, 79(2), 7–14. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2025.79.2.7
Hauke, A. (2021). Black im/mobilization, critical race horror, and the New Jim Crow in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, 3(1), 33–53. https://doi.org/10.47060/jaaas.v3i1.48
Pinedo, I. (2020). Get Out: Moral monsters at the intersection of racism and the horror film. In K. Paszkiewicz & S. Rusnak (Eds.), Final girls, feminism and popular culture (pp. 95–114). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31523-8_5
ZHANG QITING 
Lu Yumeng 
Han Tianyong