"The blues is not about sadness. It's about survival." - Ma Rainey
Unlike here in Romania, he root of American horror is not Dracula. It the plantation. The original site of blood-draining, of bodies used up and discarded, of spirituals wailed into the fields. America is not the theatrical kind of vampire. It is something much cruder and bloodier, a shape-shifting organism that gorges on Black labor, culture, and spirit, leaving the bones to rot in shallow graves. Ryan Coogler’s feral new film Sinners knows this better than any American movie in recent memory. It drags the gothic South out of its moth-eaten clichés and lets it scream through the clenched teeth of a hundred generations. Its music, scored by Ludwig Göransson, paired with a carefully curated soundtrack, leads this reckoning, infecting every frame like a hoodoo spell muttered under its breath.
At the center of Sinners is Sammie (Miles Caton), a young Black musician scraping together a living across the poisoned geography of 1930s Jim Crow-era Mississippi. From shotgun churches and lynch mobs to dilapidated juke joints, he drags his battered Dobro through a haunted South, every note carrying the curse of theft. Along the way, he crosses paths with the Smokestack Twins (played by Michael B. Jordan), twin gangsters who have purchased an abandoned factory and turned it into the volatile heart of the film's unfolding chaos. The film stitches horror, crime, and Black Gothic aesthetics into a volatile reckoning with American history. But, despite its IMAX-shot grandeur, it’s the rusted and raging music that delivers its deepest cuts. It is the Delta Blues weaponized for the 21st century, a dirge for a nation built on stolen land and broken bodies.
Delta Blues emerged from the post-emancipation South as an autonomous Black cultural practice that documented and resisted new forms of oppression. Scholars describe how early blues performers created their own venues (juke joints, churches) to preserve African heritage under Jim Crow. In these spaces, blues became secular spirituals articulated through a distinctive blues voice that told of the everyday Black experience. This made Delta Blues more than entertainment. It was a powerful vehicle for cultural resistance and community preservation. Thus, Delta Blues has functioned historically (and today) as a living archive of Black memory and defiance, connecting present audiences to the struggles of generations past.
Ludwig Göransson, Coogler’s longtime collaborator (Black Panther, Creed) and a two-time Academy Award winner, approaches Sinners with a task fraught with self-reflection: how, as a white European, do you pay homage to the Delta Blues without becoming another cultural vampire? His solution is in measured restraint. Göransson does not smooth the blues into digestible nostalgia. He leans into its fracture. He records with period-accurate Dobro resonators, battered church organs, corroded field recorders, and wax cylinder distortions. His compositions, particularly in tracks like Filídh, Fire Keepers and Griots, Playin' Games, Tellin' Ghost Stories, and I've Seen Enough of This Place, bypass non-diegetic cinematics for auditory haunting. Pieces like Mount Bayou / Proper Black Folks, Free For A Day and Elijah weave cracked bottleneck guitar licks into an arsenal of refusal built out of broken strings and scorching slides.
If the score is the film's exorcism, the soundtrack is its resurrection, bridging a century of Black musical resistance. It places the old gods, Bobby Rush, Buddy Guy (who also plays a vital role in the film), Cedric Burnside, alongside the newer vanguards, Brittany Howard, Raphael Saadiq, Rod Wave, Alice Smith. The soundtrack weaves together older, crackling renditions of traditional blues with newly recorded offerings — Brittany Howard’s Pale, Pale Moon, Miles Caton’s Travelin’ — collapsing a century of music into a single, haunted continuum.
As Sammie drifts deeper into the Delta’s nightlife underbelly, the film’s music shifts from field recording realism into a ghostly living memory stitched into every broken plank and rusted chain—Caton’s interpretation of Travelin’ hums, channeling generations of forced migration. Brittany Howard's Pale, Pale Moon stretches a traditional gospel cadence across crackling distortion. Cedric Burnside and Sharde Thomas-Mallory's rendition of Wang Dang Doodle transmutes party music into an uprising. Rod Wave’s Sinners delivers trap flows laced with the DNA of the Delta. This Little Light of Mine, also sung by Caton with the DC6 Singers Collective, frames the film's opening as a warning of a light forced to burn under threat of extinguishment.
No project like Sinners can exist without confronting the bloody economics of Black art in white capitalist systems. From Elvis Presley gutting the blues for mass white consumption to modern exploitation by record labels, the memory of theft and appropriation looms. Coogler’s decision to foreground Black artists on the soundtrack, including Bobby Rush's fierce harmonica juke Juke, Rhiannon Giddens’ aching Old Corn Liquor, or Don Toliver's neo-R&B yearning Flames of Fortune, asserts that the blues belongs, first and last, to Black America.
Like America itself, the film’s vampires are far from traditional creatures of fantasy. They are the plantation owners, the gentrifiers, the record label executives, the white tourists gorging on plantation aesthetics while remaining willfully blind to the suffering within. Sinners weaponizes horror cinema to show cultural appropriation as vampirism literalized. In this reading, Sinners anatomizes the real-world structures Achille Mbembe identifies in Necropolitics: systems that control labor, life, and death, siphoning vitality for profit while aestheticizing Black suffering.
Sinners makes this hunger explicit through three pale, spectral figures of Irish descent, neither fully human nor fully mythic. At a pivotal moment, they confront Sammie with a chilling declaration: “I want your stories, I want your songs.” In Sinners, the vampires thirst not only for blood but for spirit itself. Cultural theft here is hardly incidental. It is ritualized violence disguised as desire. Even the soundtrack turns this hunger inside out, dragging the traditional Irish ballad Rocky Road to Dublin through a dark, drunken lament for extraction and betrayal — where the once-marginalized now mirror their oppressors, and the dispossessed are whipped into an ecstatic dance of subordination.
Where O Brother, Where Art Thou? served Delta blues as a quirky seasoning for white self-discovery, Sinners rips the skin off. The Coen Brothers’ film mythologized the South’s musical landscape through a Robert Johnson mythology, all while airbrushing its racial violence. Coogler burns that fantasy. This refusal to romanticize trauma places Sinners in conversation with a broader tradition of radical Black cinema that includes Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess, Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger, and Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou. Sinners echoes these films but adds its own detonation by viscerally collapsing the past and the present into one slow-burning rebellion.
In this framework, the soundtrack’s collision of past and present becomes insurgency itself, crystallized in the juke joint scene, the film’s transcendent midpoint. Sammie's spectral performance of I Lied To You, shot in one unbroken, trembling take, does more than merely entertain the crowd. Past, present, and future converge in a single communal invocation. Time folds. Memory sings. What Sammie stirs awake in that collapsing juke joint is a rebellion stitched across centuries.
In the end, the blues of Sinners is not the blues of sadness but the blues of refusal. It is the undead anthem of the enslaved who refuse erasure, the dispossessed who will not die quietly.
