Free Only In Battle
Why Sinners is one of the most important movies of the 21st Century.
“In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest–and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle.”
-James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
“…black people in this country are schooled in adversity long before white people are. Blacks perceive danger far more swiftly, and, however odd this may sound, attempt to protect their white comrade from his white brothers: they know their white comrade’s brother far better than the comrade does. One of the necessities of being black, and knowing it, is to accept the hard discipline of learning to avoid useless danger, and needless loss of life: every mother and his mother’s mother’s mother’s brother is needed.”
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
Note: This essay contains major plot details from the film Sinners (2025).
I was not excited to see Ryan Coogler’s film, Sinners. I am not someone who enjoys or understands the appeal of horror, generally speaking. A jump scare isn't my idea of a good time, and I’ve found that real life has plenty of horror on its own. That being said, after hearing some early positive reviews, I decided to see the film on opening weekend, buying a last minute ticket to see it Dolby Cinema at my local AMC, mostly to support Coogler with my dollar, and to send a message to studios that the kind of original art made by creators like Coogler was what I wanted to see more of, even if, on the surface, it wasn't exactly my thing.
I sat through the first thirty minutes or so in a kind of trance. As I watched the film, a thought emerged. I say “emerged” because it was more like I was being told something, rather than something I was thinking on my own. The thought was clear as day: "This movie is Birth of a Nation." In the days since, this thought has been one I've wrestled with as I've seen the film two more times, in two different formats (70mm and IMAX).
Whether or not people realize it, Sinners will end up being one of the most important films of the 21st century. At its core, it is an American movie about the American South, a place that was the birthplace of American music, all three of which were built and held together by the strong hands and steely backs of Black women and men (and others, as the film pays homage to), despite all the ways their fellow Americans attempted to take all this away from them. Sinners is a tragedy wrapped in a horror film, the tragic flaw of our heroes being that they had the audacity to think they could build something “for us, and by us”, and manage to survive through the night.
The Birth of a Nation (1915) was released 110 years ago. The film and the book that inspired it, The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the South (1905), attempted to tell the American story as a antebellum romance, where the truth was erased in favor of the lies told by the early 20th century “Lost Cause” historians, mostly as a response to the political, economic and social gains Black Americans made during Reconstruction following the Civil War. The film also shaped American depictions of race, with the majority of black characters being played by white actors in blackface. On rewatch, the film is overflowing with camp and melodrama. In short, the film, like the book that inspired it, are both incredibly bad pieces of art, unless you’re into that kind of thing. I’m with Baldwin who argued in The Devil Knows Work, that The Birth of a Nation was really just, “an elaborate justification for mass murder”. That didn’t stop the film from becoming the most popular movie of the Silent Era, with 20 million Americans seeing it at the time, and then President Woodrow Wilson making it the first film ever screened at the White House. The film's popularity was not just due to its scale, its press materials boasting the most use of extras ever captured on film, but its success at rewriting American history, removing slavery as the cause of the Civil War, and “proving” that Black freedom and agency were dangerous to Americans in the 20th century.
Sinners, on the other hand, uses the tropes of horror to explore very real dynamics about American history, power, cultural and economic extraction, family, and love. In doing this, Sinners demonstrates that it knows its audience well, most of us being beset by brain rot, intellectually and historically malnourished, and that we as Americans, struggle to take our medicine without a bit of bubble gum, or in this case, popcorn flavoring, mixed into the bottle. Magic is truly what this film does, as it executes a deft sleight of hand, using music and horror as the gateway into deeper conversations about America, where we come from, and where we are now.
Where The Birth of a Nation refused to face the horrors of the antebellum South, Sinners educates the viewer about the realities of both the 1930s Jim Crow South and Jim Crow, Esquire in the North, in ways that a documentary would have to take more words, images, and interviews of college historians, have done to date. From the sprawling post-slavery cotton fields, where Black sharecroppers pick cotton barefoot in the dirt, working from sun up to sun down to meet the same kinds of quotas their enslaved ancestors had worked from sun up to sun down to meet, to the two-sided downtown street in Clarksdale, one side black and the other side white, separated only by a dirt road and the unwritten rules of American racial apartheid, to the Pullman train car behind two characters, notable for the Black Pullman Porters, who were the lifeblood of the American interstate train system, picking up bags and serving food and peanuts, and who were incredibly overworked and ended up creating the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, a union that was foundational for the work of the Civil Rights movement; the film is awash in real images and historical truths.
Specifically, the surreal musical scene, in the middle of the film, is a menagerie of musical genres, the majority of which originate from the African continent, brought to these American shores in the bellies of slave ships. It is the truest part of the movie, making more connections in one scene about the lineage of culture in America than most Americans have ever encountered outside of a college history class. It brought me to tears as I watched in the theater. It’s my contention that this scene is one of the most important scenes in film history. This scene and its song at the center of the film are a rare example of the unification of all things, a quantum moment in which all instances of a thing are depicted as existing in the same moment, and this is what I think will cause it to stand the test of time.
Making the final scene of violence a vampire attack also means that the film is able to depict the very real violence of the American South with the sheer veneer of genre on top of it, using the unbelievable, to depict the kind of violence that was very real in the South, in the form of lynch mobs and race riots. The use of genre also invites into the theater a viewer who may not see a movie showing a more realistic version of events, even though the horrors of the actual past were not far from those depicted in the film. The choice to make the main vampire Irish, and in doing so allowing us to hear the story of his fathers land being taken by the British, allows the viewer to wonder if perhaps America really is just the result of a group of one-hundred-year-war surviving, traumatized, passed over aristocratic third sons and formerly landless peasants blowing that same trauma through the bodies of other people, infecting those they subjugated, turning them with the dis-ease that had been inflicted upon them. All in all, the film uses genre to bypass the usual American apathy around discussing its racial and economic past, and does it in a way that viewers are forced to reckon with, even if they only attended the movie, expecting to see a vampire thriller. Sinners reveals to the viewer the truth to us all while telling us a lie. As Coogler told Tonya Mosley on NPR’s Fresh Air, the only thing untrue in the movie, is the vampires.