People paid to come in. Sammie still played his own song.
Reflections on Ryan Coogler's Sinners (2025)
The vampires in Sinners don't drain you and leave you dead. They turn you. You wake up something else. That's the whole metaphor right there.
Colonialism didn't just take land. It demanded you stop being who you were.
This is the film's sharpest point. Remmick — the lead vampire — is Irish. Colonized himself. In one breath he tells you how his people were crushed. In the next breath he wants Sammie's music. Wants his songs.
History is full of this. The oppressed get a taste of power and do the exact same thing to the next group down. And most of us navigating the modern world operate within systems built on that extraction — sometimes benefiting, sometimes resisting, often both at once. The cycle is the trap. The film doesn't let anyone off the hook. Not Remmick. Not the audience.
And the pitch is always beautiful. Join us. You'll be stronger. Immortal. We'll share our knowledge. Remmick even offers to turn the local bigots so bigotry won't be a problem anymore. Generous, right?
Same pitch. Every time. The only ones thriving are the ones at the top.
Religion was the delivery mechanism. European settlers weaponized their faith as a tool of colonization. Manifest Destiny. Pro-slavery theology. God's created order. Remmick says it plainly in the film. The colonizer's religion was the tool.
And the resistance? It's not the colonizer's religion that saves anyone in the film.
Annie does hoodoo. Everyone dismisses it. Superstition. Nonsense, they said. Smoke — the non-believer — dismissed Annie's mojo bag as worthless. Until it saved his life.
The vampires come. Prayers don't stop them. The church doesn't stop them. Institutions don't stop them.
Annie's hoodoo does. The marginalized knowledge. The practices passed from grandmother to grandmother. The stuff the dominant culture spent centuries calling primitive.
That's the resistance. Not a counter-army. Not political power. The ancestral knowledge that survived because women kept practicing it when everyone around them called it nonsense.
The colonizers don't want to destroy the blues — they want to possess it. Strip it of its roots, keep the sound, discard the people. The blues is the ultimate weapon in the film. The unbroken thread connecting a displaced people back to who they are.
The blues didn't die because the mainstream industry consumed it. It survived because the people who made it kept making it. For themselves. For each other. In juke joints and front porches, regardless of what the industry did with it downstream.
Spiritual stubbornness as the ultimate resistance.
Nobody. That's the whole con.
"Primitive" was never a description. It was always a weapon. A word invented to create a hierarchy where none existed.
Hoodoo encoded African botanical knowledge that kept communities alive across generations of enslavement. The blues carried the entire emotional archive of a displaced people in twelve bars and a bent note.
None of that needed "civilizing." It was already complete.
So who called it primitive? The people who needed it to be primitive. To justify taking everything else. Remmick doesn't say "your culture is worthless." He says "join us and you'll be more." Same implication. What you have isn't enough. What you are isn't enough.
That's how it actually works. Not with force. With shame. That micro-pause where you calculate whether something from your world is "presentable" in theirs — that's the judgment, internalized. Nobody's judging you at that point. You're running the colonizer's code on your own hardware.
Stop taking the exam. Stop asking whether the blues is holy or sinful, acceptable or dangerous. Just play. Not for the church. Not for the vampires. Not to prove anything.
Because it's his song.
Here's the trap the film doesn't resolve.
Sammie chooses the blues. But the blues became rock and roll. Rock and roll became an industry that erased its origins. Elvis took what Robert Johnson built and the whole world called Elvis the king. Play your song in the open and it gets consumed, repackaged, sold back to you.
But Sammie doesn't stop playing because the vampires want his music. He plays harder.
There's a difference. Building something shaped by what the market wants — optimized for engagement, stripped of anything too specific — versus building something from your actual way of seeing the world, with your philosophy in its bones, and letting the market encounter it.
The selling doesn't contaminate the making. Unless you let it come first. That's when you get turned.
Across cultures, trade existed long before colonialism reframed it as something that required permission.
Build it. Sell it. Even to colonizers. But build it in your voice first.
The juke joint had a door. People paid to come in. Sammie still played his own song.