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đŸ˜± Sinners: Ryan Coogler's Musical & Historical Influences

Director Ryan Coogler spoke to us about the synergy between "the devil's music" and his new vampire film, Sinners.

Author

Michael Ahr
January 28, 2025

Tuesday Edition January 28, 2025

The cat is out of the bag, and the undead free from their coffin. After months of speculation, writer-director Ryan Coogler can confirm his first horror movie is also a vampire flick, and he has the trailer to prove it. Yet when he sat down with an assortment of the press Monday, he revealed to us that it might also be his most personal film.

“My maternal grandfather is from Mississippi, and my Uncle James who passed away while I was finishing up Creed [is] also from Mississippi,” Coogler tells us about the roots of the film. “The seed of it started with that relationship with my uncle. He would listen to blues music all the time. He would only talk about Mississippi when he was listening to that music.”

While Coogler cites plenty of horror influences for his 1920s Southern Gothic fright night — From Dusk Till Dawn and Salem’s Lot included — Sinners’ North Star is the story of his grandparents’ generation, and a heritage in the Jim Crow South that his family still to this day doesn’t like to talk about.

“The film deals with American music, blues music,” says Coogler, “which is if you know the story of Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, all of that is there.”

That story — which also informed another Sinners influence in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? — stems from the legends around two Black guitarists who played the blues so true some folks thought they had a devil in them. In the case of Tommy Johnson, who died in 1956, his brother claimed he once said he sold his soul to the white Devil at a crossroads to learn to play the guitar. Robert Johnson (who is no relation and died in 1937) also had that story erroneously attributed to him, perhaps because Robert’s own family judged him for going astray from church spirituals in favor of playing “secular” music and abandoning the life of a good Christian farmer.

“When you think about the vampire as it exists, it’s got an association or a counterpart in almost every culture,” Coogler says. “But it is the supernatural creature most associated with seduction, that’s most associated with choice. And that aspect is something that’s very present when blues music was also called the Devil’s music.”

Sinners starts up the band on April 18. More commentary from Coogler below!

— David Crow, Senior Movies Editor

Photo: Warner Bros.

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Sinners: Ryan Coogler Is Tying Vampires to the Blues and ‘Devil’s Music’

As director Ryan Coogler sees it, a vampire yarn such as the one in his new film Sinners naturally lends itself to something like the history of rhythm and blues, complete with the mysticism and menace of the South as well as how those sounds were demonized a hundreds years ago when Jim Crow was the law of the land.

Explore more of our Q&A with Coogler mentioned above as he expands upon the ideas of vampire lore across cultures, the “ancient” feel of horror stories, and the personal connections he has to the setting of Sinners.

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