“Sinners” is a film about Black Joy
By Phillipe Copeland
Images © 2025, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
From Blacula (1972) to the Blade franchise (1998–2004), Black vampire films aren’t new. But Sinners (2025) may be the blackest vampire film ever made. Driven by word of mouth and a nerdy video from griot Ryan Coogler, Sinners is taking the box office by storm. It is a cultural phenomenon on par with Coogler’s previous creation Black Panther. Reactions have been nothing short of euphoric. Has a horror movie ever made people so happy? Maybe this reaction is because Sinners is, among other things, a story about Black joy and resisting the monsters who show up at our doors. Kleaver Cruz, founder of the Black Joy Project, observed that
Black Joy is not … dismissing or creating an “alternate” black narrative that ignores the realities of our collective pain; rather, it is about holding the pain and injustice … in tension with the joy we experience. It is about using that joy as an entry into understanding the oppressive forces we navigate through as a means to imagine and create a world free of them.
From its opening moments to its postcredit scenes, Sinners invites viewers to face the realities of collective pain, hold the tensions of joy and injustice, and imagine a freer world. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Photo by Eli Adé
It is the 1930s and twin brothers Smoke and Stack return to the Mississippi delta after a period as gangsters in Chicago. Their plan is to turn an old mill into a juke joint, Club Juke, a refuge for people laboring under the weight of Jim Crow. Over the course of the day, they assemble a team to organize an opening night. These include, Chinese American grocers Bo and Grace Chow, Hoodoo practitioner and Smoke’s former lover Annie, sharecropper Cornbread, and blues musicians Delta Slim and Sammy “Preacher Boy” Moore.
Opening the juke joint can be seen as a form of cultural organizing. Spirit House, a Black women–led tribe in Durham explains that cultural organizing
requires nothing of its practitioners other than to come as fully and authentically as they are. It asks that we set the table with the food our grandmothers made every Sunday, that we sing the songs of welcome we learned from elders, that we honor those who readied the ground before us.
Because cultural organizing is focused on resuscitating Black bodies, minds and spirits, Spirit House uses the acronym CPR to describe what they do. C stands for culture, “utilization of ancestral technologies passed on despite distance and time.” P stands for practice, striving “to embody the values of freedom, accountability and equity.” Finally, R stands for ritual, which “requires a deep love and respect for what our ancestors and forebears have done to survive and thrive.” In other words, cultural organizing through CPR is the art and science of Black Joy.
Audiences witness the power of CPR when an evening of drinking, eating, music, and dancing climaxes with Sammy singing a song that pierces the limits of time and space, life, and death. Spirits of the past and future join revelers at Club Juke in a moment of ecstasy that transports the characters and the viewers bearing witness. And yet, as warned during the opening voiceover, power like this can also attract evil. Before the night is over, instead of the revelers facing the ordinary terror of Jim Crow, they end up facing vampires. Head vampire Remmick follows the sound of Sammy’s voice like the smell of blood. He and his companions want that power for themselves.
Sinners heightens the horror through its attention to everyday expressions of Black Joy. Grace pulling her husband Bo onto the dance floor. Stack’s awestruck reaction to hearing Sammy sing for the first time. Delta Slim enjoying the taste of a cold beer on a hot day. The joy of intimacy between lovers is also a recurrent theme. From Sammy and Pearline sharing smoldering looks on a train platform to Annie breathing “Your body remembers me” to Smoke. The simple joy of a sunrise. These deeply humanizing moments defy the dehumanization of racism, making you care even more for these characters. You want them to enjoy a night of freedom, then you watch it taken from them. The pain is visceral.
While there are no monsters in real life, there are monstrous systems that terrorize, consume, and destroy like Jim Crow. There are also people who commit monstrous acts to uphold these systems like the Klan. Bob Marley, referring to oppressive institutions as “Babylon system,” put it this way:
Babylon system is the vampire, yes! (vampire)
Suckin’ the children day by day, yeah!
Me say de Babylon system is the vampire, falling empire,
Suckin’ the blood of the sufferers, yeah!
Building church and university, wooh, yeah!
Deceiving the people continually, yeah!
Me say them graduatin’ thieves and murderers
Look out now they suckin’ the blood of the sufferers (sufferers)
The vampires in Sinners embody the oppression Black folk have long endured. Like Remmick, this violence sometimes comes with a smile, concealing the intent to exploit and extract. From cotton fields to popular culture there is a big difference between consuming the fruits of Black labor and valuing the lives of Black people.
Though the vampires transform a night of pleasure into one of terror, Sinners does not allow evil to have the last word. We get to see death reunite Annie and Smoke’s family. And Stack and Mary are liberated to love through becoming vampires. Like the power of Sammy’s music, Black Joy is portrayed as nothing less than supernatural.
Sinners could not have come at a better time. The sun has set on America’s “racial reckoning.” Police violence is as bad as the day George Floyd was murdered. The Supreme Court has struck down race conscious admissions. DEI programs are being rolled back from colleges to corporations. Our history is targeted for erasure from websites to museums. Our books are being banned. Hard won civil rights gains are being undermined. Sinners reminds us that even in moments like this we cannot allow anyone to take our joy. We must keep dancing, singing, loving, living, and fighting until the sun rises again.
Dr. Phillipe Copeland is a clinical associate professor at Boston University School of Social Work. He is a theorist, educator, and practitioner specializing in antiracism, trauma, and social change through cultural change. His writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Hill, and Word In Black.
Published May 2025