Vampires are elastic metaphors. They can become sex, religion, disease, death. In the 1800s, they were the anxieties of the Industrial Revolution. In the 1980s, they were AIDS. In Sinners, vampires are whiteness. They are also the cops, the music industry, segregation, and gentrification. They are model minorities, mixed-race folks, and the Irish “becoming” white. They are the KKK never truly leaving, only shape-shifting.
In the film, vampires break up a party. I saw Sinners the day ICE raided the Colorado nightclub, recalling the history of Queer bar raids. As a Gay immigrant, the vampires became authoritarianism, which requires not only fear but the extinguishment of joy. The power of the vampire metaphor is that it lands differently depending on the viewer and the era. In our fragmented media, a $100 million movie needs to be a lot of things to a lot of people, and Sinners’ success is due to its chameleon nature.
Much of the marketing has focused on the different formats the film is being shown in. And how you watch it certainly affects its impact. I was in a small New Orleans theater, full of Southern Black and Brown moms on a Tuesday afternoon. It was an absolute pleasure. Had I seen it in 70mm IMAX in San Francisco on a Friday night with teenage white boys, the movie would’ve been bigger and louder, but many of the jokes and symbols would have gone over the audience’s head.
Above all, Sinners is about Black history, joy and music, a powerful installment in the current Black horror renaissance. In a literal barn-burner of a scene, it charts how Black music has been passed down through generations, how the Blues transforms pain and vice versa, and how it has resisted the siren song of whiteness in America. As he did for Afrofuturism in Black Panther, Ryan Coogler now does the same for the history and symbolism of the Jim Crow South.
Like science fiction, the horror genre can lighten weighty themes, sugar-coating tough ideas with humor and jump scares or drenching our most difficult truths in blood.
How media defines how we see ourselves: Analog Cruising and POST.
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