Sinners (2025)

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You may not really see much of the shark other than shadows and fins, but he is demonstrably present right from the first scene.

We see the vampires in the opening scene of Sinners, when Preacherboy staggers into church and you have the flashes of the final fight at the club. There's at least one shot with fangs, which surprised me, since I thought Coogler would have wanted to sit on it.

So, if anything, there's more vampire in the first few minutes of Sinners than there is shark in Jaws. We see Chrissy get killed while skinny dipping, but never see what's responsible.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That, I completely disagree with. I can think of fantasy, comedy, romance, martial arts, superhero. etc, movies featuring fighting vampires. But the best movies transcend convenient genre labels in any case.

Vampires vs. the Bronx, which is nowhere near as good as this -- it's tough to play at the level of Ryan Coogler -- explicitly links vampires to gentrification, using each as a metaphor for the other.

Honestly, if you're not using vampires as a symbol for something else in your vampire story (VtM, notably, uses them as a metaphor for addiction), you're kind of wasting them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A good movie but I’m not sitting down and treating it like a western. It’s a depiction of the brutality of slavery wrapped in a western

Man, you have not seen many Westerns. The Searchers, Unforgiven, Once Upon a Time in the West, Shane, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and so many others want to talk to you. Also, both versions of Lonesome Dove.

Just like with horror movies, good Western directors have been using the format to talk about other stuff almost from the beginning.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

OTOH, it also confirms that Remmick was telling the truth, and that the KKK really were coming. If the vampires hadn't showed up, they (and probably anyone else still there in the morning) would have been lynched. Their dream of having their own place ("For Us, By Us", remember) truly was a soap bubble. That's the biggest horror of this horror movie, and maybe drives the central point home in a way the vampires alone couldn't. You can kill an exploiter, you can defend yourself from a murderer or stake a vampire, but you can't just kill an exploitative system and society that you're trapped in. The movie makes this point a little more subtly in other places, like the twins talking about how Chicago is like Mississippi, but with tall buildings instead of plantations. Or how the people attending the opening night didn't actually have enough money to make the juke joint profitable and sustainable. But the lynching squad showing up really hammers the point home.

Yeah, the twins' had been doomed from birth to awful ends. The slow burn opening was really about giving us the 1970s horror movie/Stephen King novel slow ramp of dread and realization that they're fooling themselves about beating what's coming.

If an Irish vampire didn't get them, the KKK would have killed them in the morning. If that hadn't happened, the Italian and Irish mobs would have eventually found them. If that didn't happen, Jim Crow would have, etc.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The KKK scene isn't 100% necessary to tell this part of the story, but it's a great way to show it head on rather than just imply it. Especially because it spells out that the KKK wasn't just coming to stop the twins or burn down the building. They were clearly ready to cause a violent massacre, the same as the vampires.

And Remmick, in his own way, was sincere about love and fellowship. There's just a really horrifying initiation fee.

The KKK don't offer anything but hate and destruction.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That's one of the things I really love about the movie... Eben though it's not supposed to be franchise material,there are several other stories that are compelling and I'd love to see explored - Chocktaw vampire hunters, the twins in the war, the twins in Chicago, what happened in between the end of the movie and the epilogue, Remmicks story, and more

Yeah, Coogler did a great job of hinting at a wider world but only showing us what was strictly necessary.

In another world, there would be a whole TV show based around Chocktaw monster slayers in the Jim Crow South, but Coogler just shows us enough to cue up the rest of the movie. In a world where we get bludgeoned to death with worldbuilding, whether or not it's truly necessary to the story at hand, it's nice to see just what's strictly necessary.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Wasn't that the first one (the one set in the late 1980s/early 1990s)?

That's the second one. The first one is the shootout.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I didn't get a good glimpse of the gold coins, beyond noting how polished they were. Were they supposed to be Roman solidii or something?

Remmick's Irish background was really intriguing, but I liked that Coogler didn't treat us to a cringeworthy "Irish people = Black people in the South" argument like The Replacements did. (And in The Replacements, it's clearly meant that they're not really understanding the Black experience as well as they think they do.)

 

[prabe]

That's the second one. The first one is the shootout.

Ah. IIRC the shootout was before the end credits (which I'm calling anything after that an epilogue). We're just using "epilogue" differently is all. No worries--I don't disagree as far as structure goes.

 

[chuckdee]

We see the vampires in the opening scene of Sinners, when Preacherboy staggers into church and you have the flashes of the final fight at the club. There's at least one shot with fangs, which surprised me, since I thought Coogler would have wanted to sit on it.

So, if anything, there's more vampire in the first few minutes of Sinners than there is shark in Jaws. We see Chrissy get killed while skinny dipping, but never see what's responsible.

Yeah, those were really the only jump scares, and I've never seen jump scares used exclusively in the beginning of a horror film.