Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932, Sinners follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack,  who return home after working for Al Capone in Chicago to open a juke joint with the money they’ve earned. They recruit their cousin Sammie, who is a guitarist who plays the blues and the preacher’s son, to perform on their opening night, alongside some other cast of characters to attend. The blues atmosphere of the juke joint is changed when Remmick, an Irish vampire who is drawn to Sammie’s out this world’s music, tries to turn all the attendants into vampires as well. In the end, Smoke dies taking out the KKK which shows up the next day, and Sammie returns to church, where even with his fathers pressures, is unable to give up music and goes on to become famous.  Sinners mainly focuses on the themes of racial prejudice, freedom, religion, and the power of artistic expression. This essay argues that the element of perseverance through oppression by using cultural expression as resistance in Jim Crow South using Remmick, Delta Slim, and Sammies characters in Sinners is done effectively. 

     The film establishes early on through Annie’s narration that there are “people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future” (Sinners). Sammie ends up being one of those people, whose blues music draws the vampire Remmick to the juke joint. The vampires represent the way oppressors once again try to take away from their cultural identity, as Remmick states that he wants the attendants of the juke joint to join him and provide him with their music rooted in Black cultural identity. Remmick wants Sammie’s gift to be used for his own means, which reflects how Black cultural expression historically has been coveted by outsiders. As Pushpakanthan argues in her article, “Remmick wanted to turn Sammie into a vampire like him rather than preserve his artistry; all to serve himself a chance of being with his people. Forming a cycle of exploitation, the once exploited is now exploiting.” This shows Remmick as not just an individual villain in his own right, but now a product of the same colonial violence he now perpetuates, making him a symbolic representation for the colonial powers that have historically targeted Black people and their culture. In the film’s climax, Sammie uses his broken guitar to kill Remmick, destroying the vampire with his obsession. This specific example is the most obvious version of perseverance through oppression using music, because Sammie defeats the main villain with the guitar, and then returns to church with the broken guitar and ultimately chooses to go against his fathers wishes and stick to blues music. The broken guitar can show how control on cultural expression can occur, but still retain its power. This act of resilience can also be seen as refusal to let his cultural identity, himself, to be consumed by exploitative people. 

     Ryan Coolger is able to also get the idea of  blues music, so specific to Black culture, allowed for self expression in relation to oppression, using the character of Delta Slim. Delta Slim initially doubts Sammie’s abilities, but very quickly embraces his talent and mentors him on the cultural significance of the blues. After recounting the lynching of his friend, Slim starts slamming the dashboard and humming to himself to deal with the pain of losing his friend and turning it into music. The blues, which is something he is known for, can express deep grief for him when he once performed for white people, the same blues they used as just fun entertainment, while they themselves don’t like the people performing it. “Throughout history, Black artists have created and shaped entire musical genres, only to be excluded from the recognition and economic benefits that follow. The movie uses this tension to expose how Black creativity is often celebrated while Black individuals themselves continue to face discrimination and marginalization” (Schroeder). This idea is shown clearly with the conversation Delta Slim has with Sammie later on in the movie where he says, “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion. Nah, son, we brought this with us from home. It’s magic, what we do. It’s sacred, and big” (Sinners). This shows the cultural connection for African Americans and their ancestors through music, where institutions such as the church were imposed onto them by the European colonizers who brought them there. By contrasting the blues music with religion, this is able to demonstrate that aspects of identity were imposed on people through oppression and the only truth, while others were preserved as cultural survival at a time where other forms of expression were not acknowledged and community was needed. 

    The ending of the movie also demonstrates the theme of cultural expression as perseverance through oppression because even after Sammie experiences the trauma of being the sole survivor of the vampire attack at the juke joint, he continues to play music. The scene after the credits shows him decades later as an old man, still playing the blues. As Schroeder states in his article, the blues used and celebrated in Sinners serves as “a reminder that art can be a form of survival. For many Black communities, the blues was a way to process trauma, express grief, and maintain a sense of identity in a society that constantly tried to erase it” (Schroeder). In this movie, Sammie knows that his family, like his father and his cousin Smoke, disapprove of his passion for performing the blues, but he continues to do so and disobey their wishes because inherently he is going against the white man’s tradition values imbedded into society and embracing his heritage instead. This notion affirms Sammie’s decision, as his continued dedication to music reflects a commitment to preserving identity rather than abandoning to fit in with the expectation around him. This is reinforced as well in the post credit scene, where Stack and Mary offer Sammie an infinite life of playing music by becoming a vampire, but he again refuses because he would rather have an authentic legacy than to join in his oppressors and live on forever. At one point in the movie, Remmicks offers an alternative life; immortality, freedom from the racism of the Jim Crow south, and an audience for his music forever. Sammie refuses it, and instead kills Remmick in the end with his guitar, which makes the point symbolically clear; the instrument that is tied to Black heritage and cultural expression ends up  being a weapon against the oppressor. Sammie in the end averts from assimilation from pressure from others to hold true to how he wants to play music. 

    I’m an architecture major, so the way Coogler had the sets made for this movie really show the life of small town Mississippi that is segregated in nature. This is important because Sammie constantly takes interest in leaving such a rural area to go Chicago which he views as less segregated and more progressive. In the beginning, we see Sammie pulling up to a small, all black church separated from the rest of town, showing that community is still made around religion. The set design of the town’s layout, which is segregated across the streets as both predominantly white and predominantly black, shows the segregation back then, and the Chow’s owning two different stores to appeal to both. The South during this time did have issues like red lining and segregation shaping the way communities functioned, so the way the town’s layout was built appeals to historical accuracy. The long winding roads that Stack and Sammie ride along with cotton fields being all that surrounds them, and workers still working the field on the side shows that the South still hasn’t escaped its past, and the film makes sure to remind the audience of that.  The juke joint is the main setting of the second half of the movie, and the twins make sure to transform the old mill into a communal space, which shows reclaiming the past of labor and racial exploitation into a place with its own identity tied to the Black people who run it. From the way the set was built, it shows  From a production standpoint, Ryan Coogler went out of his way to use visual design to show the film’s themes of segregation and freedom through the established environments of the South during Jim Crow. 

   Through the threat of vampires like Remmick, Delta Slim’s experience with the blues, and Sammie’s choices at the end, the film argues that cultural expression in the Jim Crow South was a considerable act of resistance in showing humanity and its perseverance through oppression. The sets of this movie demonstrate the architecture of the location and time period, and make the setting actually feel like a small town in Mississippi. Overall, Sinners as a movie, succeeds as a horror and period piece with themes of Black cultural identity.

 

Work Cited: 

Pushpakanthan, Suvi. “The Impact of Colonisation Shown Through Sinners.” Inspire the Mind, 8 July 2025, www.inspirethemind.org/post/the-impact-of-colonisation-shown-through-sinners.

Schroeder, Bruno. “Blues as a Voice of Resistance and Identity in Sinners.” Medium, 26 Mar. 2026, medium.com/@brunoschroeder_98986/blues-as-a-voice-of-resistance-and-identity-in-sin