History & Film | The Devil You Might Know: Sinners
WRITTEN BY MICHELLE MCGILL-VARGAS
I love horror movies, especially the classic Hammer or Universal horror films featuring the likes of Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi. My Saturday evenings are usually spent watching campy flicks like Dracula’s Daughter or Curse of the Werewolf. For me, the best ones have great origin stories explaining the monster’s motivations.
Horror is such an intriguing genre! Monsters drive the exploration of taboo topics. Vampires serve as a metaphor for sex. Frankenstein deals with science gone awry. Mummies and ghosts speculate on life after death. Werewolves are all about the wild and untamed beasts dwelling within us all. Horror is a safe space to experience these things, which is why I love Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. The movie’s horror flows organically from the historical context in which it is set. Neither overshadows the other. And with a variation of the monster’s motivation, a fresh new take on vampire films emerges.
Horror flicks written, directed, produced, and/or featuring Black actors are gaining traction. Though I’m not a fan of the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, Blackula, starring the late Willam Marshall (who also happens to hail from my hometown of Gary, Indiana) is a horror favorite. Aside from the awe of seeing a Black vampire, the origin story was different: Mamuwalde, an African prince, and his bride visit Count Dracula to stop the slave trade in the 1700s. Dracula, of course, refuses, and turns Mamuwalde into a vampire. The rest of the story takes place in then-contemporary Los Angeles, following the same premise of the vampire eating his way through the populace while seeking to reunite with the reincarnation of his lost love.
Black horror also tends to skew a bit to societal issues affecting Black people that are almost as terrifying as the monsters shown on the screen. Count Dracula in Blackula is not only a vampire, he’s also a slave trader. Sinners uses the vampire genre as the canvas to address both fictional and societal horrors.
Sinners is the story of Elijah and Elias Moore, infamously known as the Smokestack Twins (one is called Smoke; the other is Stack) in their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi. It is set in 1932 during Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the Great Migration, the time when many Black Americans left the Jim Crow South to find opportunities in the north and west. My grandparents did the same, leaving for midwestern steel mills. The Clarksdale depicted in the film, according to friends, is just as their grand- and great-grandparents described: barefoot and pregnant sharecroppers picking cotton under a blazing sun. Blues music and attending church, salves for the farmers’ souls and spirits. Automobiles and horse-drawn wagons crowd the wide dusty road in town. And of course, there’s the Klan. The Smokestack Twins did the opposite, returning south after a stint in Chicago, and laden with a suspiciously large supply of money and booze. Better to be around the devil you know, the twins offer, as the reason why they came back. Their goal: make money using liquor stolen from the Mob to open a juke joint. With a suitcase full of money, the twins purchase a sawmill from a white man (with a promise to shoot any of his Klansmen friends who cross onto their property). Then Smoke and Stack get to work. They employ an ensemble of friends and family to assist with the set up, including their cousin, Preacher Boy, who longs to leave the South for a chance to play the blues on a guitar he believes belonged to the twins’ deceased father.
Both Smoke and Stack are played by Michael B. Jordan (Creed, Black Panther) who successfully delineates the two on the screen through costuming (one is accessorized in red while the other dons blue), demeanor, and speech. Smoke presents as the leader and older brother whose mind is set on business and protecting his foolhardy twin. When some of the sharecroppers in the juke can only pay with wooden nickels, Smoke insists on cold hard cash. Stack, on the other hand, is the slick-talking one with a smile on his face and a ready quip on his lips. He tempers his brother’s anger about the wooden nickels, reminding him that the farmers need this brief respite from the cotton fields.
The twins’ disparate personalities are defined by their interactions with the people they collect for the juke. Smoke demonstrates his business savvy when he teaches a young girl to negotiate over how much he should pay her for watching his truckload of booze. He haggles over prices with the Chows, a Chinese-American family who run a couple of general stores in town. Without a second thought and in full view of onlookers, Smoke shoots two men attempting to steal his truck. His tough exterior cracks just a bit when he reunites with Annie, a Hoodoo practitioner and the mother of his deceased child, who agrees to fry fish at the juke.
In a different part of town, Stack and Preacher Boy secure the labor for transforming the mill. Veteran actor Delroy Lindo plays Delta Slim, a hard-drinking blues musician who agrees to join them in exchange for a bottle of ice cold beer and a promise of more. Stack’s jocular personality and dirty innuendos scare up a few more hands from the fields to clean and set up the place. Stack is also avoiding heartbroken Mary, a married white woman whose half-Black mother cared for the twins after their mother died. Just like with Smoke, Stack’s interaction with Mary shows the audience a different, more serious side of him: he struggles with shunning the woman he loves in order to protect her from those violently opposed to interracial relationships at the time.
A brief interlude between the preparation and opening of the juke joint introduces the audience to Remmick the vampire. As the sun begins to set, his smoldering body drops from the sky like a lead balloon in front of a cabin in the middle of nowhere. He begs the cabin’s inhabitants to save him from a group of Choctaw vampire hunters. When the hunters subsequently arrive at the cabin, their warning to not let the stranger in is too late. With this, some vampire lore is retained. The vampires can’t be in sunlight. They must be invited inside. Their bite/saliva turns their victims into vampires. The difference in this iteration is that blood is not what draws Remmick and his two new converts to the juke. It’s Preacher Boy.
In what I believe to be the most mesmerizing part of the film, the blues Preacher Boy plays summons the spirits of musical ancestors. Shadows of African drummers, old school hip-hop artists, Chinese folk and Native American tribal dancers appear among the juke’s patrons. But Preacher Boy’s power also summons the vampires. Remmick is a collector of memories and talents. His desire to possess Preacher Boy’s musical gift is a nod to the historical appropriation, and at times outright theft, of Black music. When the twins heed Annie’s warning and refuse entry to the vampires, Remmick uses his Irish background (though there are some hints that he is a much older vampire) to try and convince everyone they are on the same side when it comes to American oppression: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so to speak. Yet it is one twin’s weakness that ushers the monsters inside.
Surprisingly– or maybe not– the title of the movie applies to more than just the vampires and the Klan, who make their expected appearance near the end of the film. Preacher Boy eschews joining his father in the pulpit (hence his nickname) for a chance to play at the juke. Delta Slim is an affable alcoholic. Pearline, who caught Preacher Boy’s eye, and Mary cheat on their husbands in the back rooms of the juke. Bo Chow is insinuated as a gambler.
With all that, can the term antihero can be applied to the Smokestack Twins? Antiheroes are deeply flawed main characters we’re supposed to root for. They straddle the line between right and wrong. In their minds, the ends justify the wicked means they are engaged in to accomplish their goal. But the dirt the twins are known for happens off-screen and in their past. The audience is led to believe the twins are bad, that there is an ulterior motive to opening the juke joint. But without spoiling the movie, I wonder whether the ending makes them good or still bad, but justified.
The Smokestack Twins aren’t completely bad, though. The pair served in World War I. Given their actions near the end of the movie, they couldn’t have been cooks or truck drivers, roles Black soldiers were mostly relegated to. Though it’s not mentioned in the film, I like to think the twins were Harlem Hellfighters, the 369th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard who spent more time on the front lines than any other American regiment during the war. Henry Johnson, a real-life Harlem Hellfighter, was one of the first African-Americans to earn France’s highest award for valor, and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. I wonder if Smoke’s confrontation with the Klan is an homage to Johnson and the Hellfighters. Or maybe I’m trying to impute some goodness onto them.
But that’s just one bright spot. The twins killed their father. They rubbed elbows with the Chicago Outfit, alluding to the provenance of their suitcase full of money and truckload of quality booze, not the cheap stuff brewed in bathtubs at the time. Their devilish reputation precedes them. But there are reasons for their actions, and the audience feels justified in rooting for their redemption and/or success, even before the vampires arrive. Much like the George Clooney character from Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Til Dawn, the Smokestack Twins come into the movie with heavy baggage and then become the heroes needed to fight off the actual evil in the movie. Whether or not that evil is solely the vampires is debatable.
Given the time period and setting of Sinners, there is a lot of history and themes to unpack that can’t fit in this space. Even the lyrics in the two musical portions– one by Preacher Boy and the other by Remmick– are metaphors for something much deeper than what’s presented on the screen. This horror movie is not solely a vampire flick touching on the usual vampire tropes and themes. Contrast this to the long-awaited (third?) remake of Nosferatu, which was visually stunning, but basically the same story as its predecessors. One viewing of Sinners isn’t enough to catch everything the film slips to the audience. Though the movie is still fairly new, it should be added to the canon of excellent horror storytelling.
About the contributor: Michelle serves as the Registration Chair for the HNS North American Conference and is a Board member of Midwest Writers Workshop. Her debut novel, American Ghoul, was released in 2024 by Blackstone Publishing.
Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 113 (August 2025)
