Warning: This article contains movie details about Sinners. Reader discretion is advised.
The first thing that comes to mind when prompted with the genre horror is most certainly within the lines of paranormal and jump scares. As a child, there would always be chilly sound effects that echoed in my ears as I hid behind my dad’s arm. The suspense would seep through my dreams and I would find myself being chased by Sadako or Annabelle.
Bounded by ignorance, I was stuck with the narrow concept of horror: the ghost was attached to the character because of abuse – jump scare. The antagonist was possessed by the devil – jump scare, followed by suspenseful music, then the thrill of exorcisms. Plot twist; the ghost still remained in the boy’s body as they travelled to a new home. It’s formulaic and repetitive, with paranormal activity as its main concept. Simply overdone.
Later on, the horror genre transcended into literary feats that required critical thinking or a keen eye to fully understand the “A-ha!” moments when the final reveal comes on the screen. It takes about two to three rewatches to finally catch the subtle foreshadowing and easter eggs. I still had my doubts as the suspense was carried by eerie violins that grew louder as the character walked closer to the rotten door, but Sinners (2025) has convinced me to consider widening my perspective about what it takes to create a horror movie through the use of music and culture.
Vampire movies were tainted by the hilarity of Twilight, igniting a bond between vampirism and glittery-skin romance. Sinners was anything but. Sure, there were erotics as performed by Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary and Jayme Lawson’s Pearline, but Steinfeld’s spit-take on Michael B. Jordan was fiery for the Hollywood plotline.
Ryan Coogler and the Works
Sinners Director Ryan Coogler has worked with Michael B. Jordan on dozens of projects, but branched out to develop a plot with twins that Jordan portrayed meticulously. It is Coogler’s debut in both the horror and musical genres, and there is no doubt that he is successful in both fields. His works with Jordan are all commendable, like Creed (2015) and Black Panther (2018),
Jordan is his alleged muse who thrives in cultural discourse and revolutions, and it is refreshing how Jordan portrayed these original characters. I cannot say that this is his number one performance, but the versatility of Jordan can be observed when playing two different characters in one scene.
Smoke and Stack are both sides of the same coin, but hold strong with their own defining moments. It was emotional and exhilarating to watch Jordan suffer through loss and immortality at the same time, exchanging blows between a sold soul to the devil and a man of sacrifice. Coogler knows how to work with his own culture to create a significant project, sparking a sense of originality in a field of templates and references. As he stated in Time’s Magazine Person of the Year (2018), “I wanted to make a movie for the people.”
The horror aspect of Sinners was not just vampires and hell. The 1953 Jim Crow era of despair haunted Smoke and Stack’s community. The benefit of immortality was essentially to escape the inevitable killing when the sun rose, when the supremacists targeted the clubhouse. Even vampirism saved them from a gruesome death, which is why there were added sympathetic elements on Coogler’s part when Rammick offered eternal life for those damned inside the building.
“We never wanted to say one character is right and the other wrong. You get into dangerous territory if you expect the art you make to change people’s minds. But if someone can catch a film and then go home and talk about it, that’s doing a lot.”
– Ryan Coogler on Black Panther
Will Sinners Overtake the Musical Genre?
The conflict was provoked by the heart of the singer, Sammie (Miles Canton), as the crowd jammed out to his original blues, “I Lied To You”. I would consider this as potentially the best scene of the movie, showcasing the transcendence of music throughout time and its influential nature on current Black music culture.
The haunted sound of Canton’s tone was riddled by the guilt of betraying his religion’s calls to damn the blues for its spiritual consequences, which attracted Rammick (Jack O’Connell). It definitely pulled me through the screen. Not only was Canton’s voice, which was portraying a helpless preacher boy, mesmerizing to the point of falling into the psychedelics of “I Lied To You”, but the visuals of the musical sequence were astounding.
As glorious as Canton and his show-stealing runs were, they cannot make up for the fact that this is not a musical on par with our movie-theatre classics. A musical-horror film is not too uncommon, and Jim Sharman and Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) could be considered the most successful concoction of musicality and horror, inspired by Frankenstein’s monster. However, only a handful of movies from this niche genre have become a glamorized Hollywood piece.
The unique element of Sinners that separates it from pieces like Sweeney Todd or even Little Shop of Horrors is that music was incorporated as the driving plot point that manifested the film’s events. Still, I would not put it within the same musical category as Les Miserables or Cabaret. The difference between Sinners and other musicals is that the actors did not break into a song to settle the fight, but performances are set and consciously done with some sort of purpose to entertain. All sounds were diegetic, and the dialogue was as is, without a tune or whistle.
This does not mark the movie as a failure, as it hits the box office with millions upon millions, but for the reviewers and critics to claim a brilliant “musical” being birthed is an overstatement. Would I have loved to see Michael B. Jordan sway and hum while theatrically throwing a punch towards his counterpart? Or Hailee Steinfeld turning into a siren of gloom when seducing Jordan’s Stack? Absolutely, but it was neither here nor there. Canton was by far my favorite face on the screen, and it is exciting to see his performances both on-screen and off-screen to further tranquilize the blues into our souls.
