Happy Tuesday, friends! First, some exciting news. For the rest of Women’s History Month, you can shop my curated list of novels written by women with a sweet discount on Bookshop.org. Take 15% OFF* these select titles when you enter code BSO15 at checkout, valid until April 1, 2026. *Discount off list prices, and excludes Ebooks. Bookshop.org is a better way to buy books online. Every purchase on Bookshop.org supports local, independent bookstores. Click here to shop: https://bookshop.org/lists/all-the-girls-are-girling-women-s-fiction. Happy reading! Now, on to our regularly scheduled program.1
Everyone who’s known me for any meaningful amount of time knows that I love vampire stories. From Dracula and Interview with the Vampire to Blade, Twilight, and The Originals – I’m a sucker for the undead😉. The best vampire stories go beyond supernatural lore and forbidden romance to wrestle with what it really means to be human and what is lost when we lose our humanity. Ryan Coogler’s Academy Award-winning Sinners is no different, joining the tradition of films exploring the unique sacredness of the human spirit and earning the highly coveted title of Mina’s Top Movie of 2025.
I’ve seen Sinners at least 12 times, including twice in theatres. That’s how much I love this movie, y’all. I went into the theatre for my first viewing totally clueless, not having watched any trailers beforehand. All I knew was that it was a Black vampire movie, and I thought, “Say less!” Friends…to say I was shocked is an understatement. I went in expecting some horror and maybe a bit of cheesiness with some religious allegory thrown in to justify the film’s name. I didn’t expect to be moved to tears or to feel more deeply connected to my Southern Black American roots and ancestors than I had in years.
Sinners mainly takes place on a single fateful day in Clarksdale, Mississippi, sometime in 1932. After a tumultuous stint in Chicago, the Smoke Stack twins are back in their hometown with stolen money, stolen liquor, and a crackpot idea to start a juke joint. With the help of their younger cousin, Sammy “Preacher Boy” Moore, the twins enlist an assortment of characters to bring their juke joint dream to life. But the booze, dirty dancing, and blues music summon more than one type of devil that night.
One of the film’s key themes is the supernatural power of music, which connects us to each other and to our ancestors, and simultaneously serves as a conduit to the spirit world and a tool for processing grief and injustice on the earthly plane. Y’all…when I tell you Ludwig Göransson put his whole foot into this score and soundtrack and THEN some??? Each composition perfectly captures the emotions of its paired scene, and the movie wouldn’t have packed as heavy an emotional punch without it. My absolute favorite scene in the film is when Sammy’s rendition of “I Lied to You” summons the spirit of both ancestors and descendants who fill the juke joint with traditional dancing and music.
Interestingly, it’s not just the music itself that conveys the movie’s message, but also the dialogue surrounding it. The movie opens with a character delivering a monologue about musicians whose music was so powerful that it thinned the veil between the earthly and spiritual realms. Sammy’s father, the local preacher, further highlights the spiritual nature of music when he begs Sammy to give up blues, a.k.a. “the devil’s music,” and dedicate himself to playing gospel in church, foreshadowing the conjuring of the vampires who turn Sammy’s jukebox dreams into a nightmare. The eldest Mr. Moore is also an example of the cultural effects of colonization—his deep Christian indoctrination has caused him to view any non-Christian traditions as inherently evil.
On the topic of colonization, Coogler says the quiet part out loud when speaking on Christianity and its history of violently erasing indigenous spiritual practices across the globe. The head vampire, Remmick, is Irish and uses his oppression at the hands of Anglo-Saxon Christians as a means of connecting with the community and convincing them to join his crusade. Ironically, it is ultimately Hoodoo, a mix of various African traditional spiritual practices and indigenous rootwork, that provides the community with the knowledge and means to defeat the vampires.
Vampirism itself can be seen as a type of colonization—removing the victims from their original identities as humans and bathing them in a culture of darkness and bloodlust. In fact, Remmick is drawn to the juke joint precisely because becoming a vampire separated his soul from his ancestral spiritual connections, and he hoped to use Sammy’s music to connect him with his lost culture. However, in doing so, Remmick himself becomes a colonizer of sorts. Those he turns into vampires are reduced to shells of themselves, with their knowledge used to Remmick’s benefit in exchange for promises of freedom and equality that may never come.
Sinners captured the illusion of choice that so many colonized people face, often referred to as having to choose the “lesser of two evils.” The vampires share that the KKK is planning to come and murder all of the partygoers at sunrise and that they can either die spiritually by becoming vampires or die physically at the hands of white supremacists. How do you decide what to do in moments like this? Do you willingly give up parts of who you are in exchange for what few opportunities are offered to people like you, or do you stick to your guns only to have your culture and possibly your life forcibly taken away? A choice between the lesser of two evils is no real choice at all.
Although there are several heartwrenching moments in the film, the post-credits scene is the one that brought me to tears. Miles Caton’s and Alice Smith’s “Last Time I Seen the Sun” plays softly in the background as Sammy, now in his 80s, says, “Maybe once a week, I wake up paralyzed, reliving that night. But, before the sun went down, I think that was the best day of my life.” As a descendant of enslaved Africans in the Southern US whose grandparents were sharecroppers, I couldn’t help but feel kinship with all the characters who lost their lives and suffered so much, all because they wanted one night of freedom. Just one night of fellowship without having to worry about sharecropping, the KKK, or segregation…and of course, the vampires had to f*ck it up!
One thing about me: I LOVE when people do their homework and execute projects with intention, and the Sinners team did just that. Ryan Coogler hired twin consultants for Smoke & Stake, a Mississippi Delta Chinese consultant for the Chows, a Hoodoo consultant for Annie – hell, he probably even hired a consulting consultant so he’d know who to hire! The result is an original movie that incorporates elements of the supernatural while remaining grounded in culture.
Sinners really hit home for me as a Southern American Black person who loves music, vampires, and tales of the indomitable human spirit. The film’s setting is so similar to the landscapes I grew up around that it could’ve been filmed in one of my uncles’ backyards. I still see the effects of Jim Crow in the way my grandparents approach the world to this day, and I can’t help but feel awe, pride, and humility at being descended from a group of people who survived physical, spiritual, and emotional warfare and still came out on the other side producing beautiful, meaningful art. How lucky am I to be able to continue that tradition even a tiny bit with my writing, y’all?
Shout out to the ancestors, to cousin Ryan, to the entire cast and crew, and to the white homie Ludwig. Y’all really did your big one with this!
Yours in freedom,
Mina
P.S. Thanks for your patience, friends! I originally meant to send this newsletter last Tuesday, but #they tried to take me out with food poisoning. Yet, still I rise! Still kicking, still writing, and still yours in cinema.
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