#50: Vampires be vampirin’
This week, as requested by one of my readers, I’m doing a deep dive on Sinners, the recent “vampire” movie (in quotes b/c it’s so much more than that), now streaming on HBOMax.
This is a lot like one of the lessons I teach in The Craft, my 10-week writing workshop for creatives and service providers. I’m currently enrolling for the 2026 cohort. Learn more here and here.
Quick, Reader! How do you stop a vampire??
Garlic!
Holy water!
Wooden stake through the heart!
They can’t come in unless you invite them!
See? You know. We ALL know. That’s part of what makes vampire movies fun; we’re all in it together.
Which is why, halfway into 2025’s Sinners, I’m transfixed, but also confused:
“Isn’t this a vampire movie?”
So far it’s about the SmokeStack twins — Smoke, and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan — who have returned to their hometown in the Mississippi Delta to set up a juke joint after doing some shenanigans in Chicago.
Sinners is a movie about ancestors and extraction. It speaks to Black creativity and spirituality; it’s a commentary on the brutally anti-Black racism that runs through this country’s veins.
But mostly, it’s a movie about the blues.
During the first half of the movie, there’s not a fang in sight. No double puncture wounds. No mysteriously ill characters with a sudden appetite for raw red meat.
Eventually, the vampires arrive with their red pinprick eyes and creepy Irish folk songs, and NOW our main characters are faced with the familiar, all-night battle for survival.
Out come the wooden stakes! The garlic! The sinister entreaties to “let me in!”
Instead of crosses and holy water, though (or maybe in addition to; I don’t recall), the vampires are also put off by a Hoodoo bag, a small cloth pouch filled with magical items (roots, herbs, strands of hair) that offers protection to its carrier.*
The “rule” is the same — a holy article or symbol carries the power to repel or hurt the (unholy) vampire — but Sinners takes this very well-worn trope and lets it say so much more, without ever coming out and saying it.
To me, that’s the ideal application of “you’ve got to know the rules before you break the rules.”
The vampires in Sinners serve as a vehicle for a deeper, older story. They didn’t have to be vampires for the story to work — they could have been zombies or Stepford Wives — but vampires are the perfect monster for THIS story, because vampires take.
They extract.
Just like colonists.
Just like slave owners.
Just like Christian imperialists.
Sinners adheres to the same basic structure as, say, 2024’s Salem’s Lot, a verrry straightforward and entertaining (though not very deep) entry into the vampire subgenre — and yet its creator, Ryan Coogler, used those tools to say something provocative and interesting.
Something we haven't heard before.
Behold:
🧛🏻♀️ Rule #1: There's always one super-smart character who knows the score before anyone else figures it out.
In Sinners, this is Annie, the Conjure woman played by Wunmi Mosaku. In Salem’s Lot, it’s a tweedy professor guy who gets his knowledge from arcane Christian texts.
One way Sinners deviates from this trope is that normally, this character is a Cassandra figure — nobody believes them at first, and that tension accounts for a good bit of the plot. Lots of people die because they don’t take the tweedy old guy seriously.
Nobody questions Annie, though. They may not like what she’s saying, but they take her at her word. In this way, Sinners shows us what Black community looks like — and how it can be a tool for survival.
🧛🏻♀️ Rule #2: A literal bloodbath in which all but one or two characters survive (here’s your spoiler, fyi).
In Salem’s Lot, it’s just two characters who drive off together; the end.
In Sinners, though, it’s a blues musician so talented that his music has the power to pierce the veil between past and present, calling out to both his ancestors and his future descendants (and also inadvertently attracting the vampires. Whoops.)
His survival, his refusal to trade his soul and his identity for a watered-down (one might say whitewashed?) version of eternal life also becomes the survival of cultural specificity — via the blues.
🧛🏻♀️ Rule #3: The vampires operate as a hive mind and/or shared body (which I always find deliciously scary).
This effect is similar in both movies — kill or injure the head vampire, and you get ‘em all. It’s a major plot point in Salem’s Lot, it's the whole point of the "final showdown."
In Sinners, it's less of a plot point than a vehicle for some incredible artistic effects, somewhat evocative of the zombie dance sequence in Thriller.
🧛🏻♀️ Rule #4: How to kill a vampire is always the same. Garlic, silver, sunlight, wooden stakes, etc.
We already touched on this with Annie’s Hoodoo bag, but there’s also a very symbolic and badass incident involving a guitar and the head vampire’s skull. 💀
Reader, notice how skillfully Ryan Coogler wields the tools of his craft.
Sinners is wholly original. It’s affecting and mesmerizing; watching it is like being under some kind of spell. And yet it feels firmly at home in both the Black horror canon AND the vampire subgenre.
Sinners’ underlying, familiar structure creates a guardrail for the wild ride it’s about to take us on. Settled comfortably in what we know (or think we know) about “vampire films,” we can strap in and let ourselves be led wherever Coogler wishes to take us.
This is exactly the kind of thing we talk about in The Craft — how writers like Ryan Coogler (or Toni Morrison, or Lindy West, or N.K. Jemisin, or whoever you're obsessed with) wield the tools and structures of writing craft to create something that is distinctly theirs...
And how you can wield those same tools to create something that is distinctly yours.
Also, the more you read (and think about what you read), the more you understand about how to write.
Horror movies rely on tropes for a reason. They work. They’re fun to play with. Leaning on them isn't unoriginal; those are just the tools of the craft.
And when you understand what your tools are, you can build anything you want.
Until next time,
P.S. Registration for The Craft closes November 12. We start on January 5, with calls on Tuesday & Thursday from 1:30–3pm Eastern.
*I’m not the person to lead a discussion on Hoodoo, West African religious practices, and American history and Christianity — or to explain what Ancestral Time is (I only partly understand it myself) — but if any of that sounds interesting to you, you should start by watching Sinners!
For this piece, I relied heavily on this interview with Dr. Yvonne Chireau as well as the analysis of my brilliant friend Dr. Tareva Johnson.