Ryan Coogler is diving deep into his roots with Sinners, a bold period vampire thriller that doesn’t just scare, it reflects history, culture, and grief.
The Black Panther director revealed in a new interview with The Guardian that this haunting new project was sparked by what he calls a “personal obsession,” stemming from his family history and his lifelong fascination with the Great Migration and blues music.
Set in 1930s Mississippi, Sinners weaves together an emotionally charged tapestry of horror, legacy, and identity. Coogler confirmed that the story, rife with themes of poverty, racism, the Ku Klux Klan, spirituality, and music, hits incredibly close to home. “I was bringing my whole life to it,” he said. “It’s a personal obsession of mine, this period of time when Black people were considering leaving the South en masse.”
But Sinners isn’t just an atmospheric thriller, it’s also a tribute to Coogler’s late uncle, who introduced him to the blues as a child. “I would find myself listening to blues records to remember him,” he shared. “That’s how I got inspired to explore and research, and that’s how I got to this movie.”
And yes, Coogler brought his longtime muse Michael B. Jordan along for the ride, this time in a chilling double role as twins Smoke and Stack. According to Coogler, offering Jordan something creatively daring was the only way to get his attention. “If you can offer him something that he hasn’t done before… you have a better chance of getting his interest,” he explained.
The two have a dynamic relationship that mirrors the complexity of the twin characters in the film. “Mike is very like Stack, in terms of his ambition. He’s a wild dreamer,” Coogler said, adding that their collaborative energy comes from their differences: “So we make a good pairing.”
Jordan himself credits Coogler with unlocking his potential as a leading man. “I was searching for that… Ryan was the first director to believe in that, and tell me I was a movie star and believed it and made me believe it,” Jordan said in a recent interview.
Sinners isn’t just a genre-bending thrill ride, it’s a deeply personal reflection on identity, grief, and generational memory, wrapped in the fangs of horror. For Coogler, it’s not just another film, it’s part therapy, part tribute, and part reclamation.
With Sinners, Ryan Coogler isn’t just creating a vampire movie. He’s crafting a blood-soaked blues opera that reaches back through American history, and dares to bite back.
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