A vampire film set in 1930s Mississippi may seem out of left field for director Ryan Coogler. But its personal ties to the story and explorations of race and belonging are consistent with his four other feature films, “Fruitvale Station,” “Creed,” and the record-breaking “Black Panther” and its sequel “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”
“Sinners,” Coogler told NBC News, is a tribute to his Uncle James, who “was the oldest male member of my family from Mississippi.”
“He meant a lot to me,” Coogler continued. “He passed away right after I was in post-production on ‘Creed’ and all he would do is play blues records.”
Coogler’s longtime friend and collaborator Michael B. Jordan plays twins Smoke and Stack, who leave the Mississippi Delta to fight in World War I and later settled in Chicago, where they are rumored to work with the infamous Al Capone. The brothers return to Mississippi with wads of cash to open a juke joint featuring their cousin Sammie (an acting debut for singer Miles Caton), who plays the “devil’s music” on his guitar while ignoring the warnings of his preacher father.
As the twins prepare for opening night, they add to the mix blues musician Slim (Delroy Lindo), as well as their love interests Annie, a root woman played by “Lovecraft Country” star Wunmi Mosaku, and Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary, who is perceived to be a white, among others.
In adherence to the strict racial divide of the time, white vampires, however, were not on the guest list.
Blues music is central to the film. “I was trying to understand why my uncle loved it so much,” Coogler said.
“When I got into it, in terms of researching it, it just blew my mind,” Coogler added. “I came to the conclusion that this art form is probably our country’s greatest contribution to global culture.”
Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson, Coogler’s University of Southern California Film School classmate, who has scored all his feature films, including “Sinners,” developed an appreciation for the blues from his father. The elder Göransson became a lifelong fan of the genre as Mississippi blues artists like Albert King toured Europe and stopped in Sweden. Witnessing his uncle's passion for the blues in someone who didn’t even hail from the U.S., stirred him profoundly, he said.
“I was on a blues trip with Ludwig and his dad, and it was his dad’s lifelong dream to go to Mississippi,” Coogler said. “This is a 70-year-old man from Sweden and we’re standing on the Dockery Plantation in the Mississippi Delta, and he has tears in his eyes. And I got tears in mine for two different reasons.”
That trip to the birthplace of the Delta Blues popularized by Charley Patton inspired Coogler to make “Sinners” as big and boldly cinematic as possible. The director struck out to show “how brilliant these people were, how they persevered, and how their culture went to these metropolises and dominated, and to dispel all the lies told about them.”
Omar Benson Miller, who plays sharecropper Cornbread, said he can appreciate this history personally, too.
“My family is from Mississippi, and I’m from a family of sharecroppers,” he said. “I was happy to bring that to the screen in this way, because these are hardworking people, and people who set the foundation for me to be able to have a cush job making my living telling their stories.”
Coogler uses the public’s fascination with vampires and horror to make a larger point. For him, the vampirism in “Sinners” is a warning to look beyond the moment and temporary gain. Because, if you don’t, you might just find that the quick fix to a problem “comes at an incomprehensible price” to the culture and future generations.
