I’m pretty sure there are thousands of posts by now on this topic, though I’ve not read many, but after watching this film a few times, I’ve come to my own conclusions about various aspects of it, but the one theme that keeps coming back to me is religion, since it’s something that resonates with me, especially, from my own life experiences. If you’ve not watched the movie already, there will be spoilers so if you read past this point, that’s your fault, not mine.

To get straight to it, it starts with Sammy’s father (Pastor Jed), who calls out to his son, who walks into the church bloody/beat up/hurt, and his reaching out to his son is juxtaposed by a quick jump-scare of the vampire Remmick (both doing a similar pose). Initially, my mind focused on it being a contrast of “good vs. evil”, the father concerned about his son and the evil trying to get his son…but then I started to see the bigger picture.

There’s not much difference between Pastor Jed and Remmick, because a father would usually be more concerned about the physical and emotional pain his son was immediately experiencing (like his mother Ruth was feeling before his father asked her to sit back down when she was about to comfort her son). All his father was concerned about was his son’s “sinning” ways, and then later on (although actually “one day earlier”) all his father cared about was bringing his son’s guitar into the church, knowing Sammy would come looking for it there, and tell his son he wanted him to help him with his sermon (not simply just to read scripture, which the pastor could do himself, but to use his son’s musical skills to influence the church as he desired). Some might say it was for “playing for the Lord”, but pairing his father’s actions and words–which never focused on his son’s feelings or ever seemed to care beyond how Sammy’s actions would make him look to his congregation, then it’s clear that his father just wanted Sammy to do as he wanted for selfish reasons, disguised as religious piety. The flip side of the intentions of Remmick, the vampire, might seem the opposite as the evil entity, but a selfish pastor and a selfish demon seem pretty much the same in intention, overall. In Remmick’s case, he wanted Sammy’s music abilities to conjure his community and ancestors (similar to Pastor Jed wanting Sammy’s music to influence his congregation).

Another interesting parallel is what Delta Slim AND Remmick said about enslavers/colonizers (both who happened to be the British, historically, with regard to the ones who enslaved and took Africans from West Africa to what would become the future USA, and the those who before time that had come after the pagan Irish, colonizing them and converting them). Both Delta Slim and Remmick mention how “they forced their religion on them”…speaking of the British, though of two different time periods but with similar actions (though the Africans got the worst of it in the larger scope of time, especially via transatlantic chattel slavery and all the way through Jim Crow, Civil Rights era, COINTELPRO, Reaganomics, and now modern-day MAGA). And while Remmick as an ancient vampire did experience horrors of his past before he was turned by whomever was a vampire back then, he became no better than them by now terrorizing another oppressed people and using his whiteness to both gain access but also appropriate Black culture for his own benefit, which was really no different than the KKK and other everyday white supremacists, whether they wore sheets or regular clothes.

The Black church similarly didn’t provide Sammy any refuge as they only mirrored how their white oppressors viewed Black secular music…as evil and demonic and against God, and labeling as the same the spiritual traditions like HooDoo (which even as an African-American spiritual tradition still has a direct connection to practices that come directly from Africa). To call on the ancestors was demonized by both the white enslavers and the Black church, which was indoctrinated by their oppressors, and was not the same Christianity as was practiced by Africa before any form of colonization occurred; various European Christian Crusades that came after (under the guise of salvation through forced conversion) actually killed, enslaved, and colonized millions of people over time…but none of that was considered savage or demonic? The demise of the “sinners” in the juke joint wasn’t their own actions but because of the white characters of the movie, triggered by the white-passing Mary, who even though she wasn’t a bad person prior to being turned, was oblivious to what her actions might cause because of her privilege of being viewed as a white woman, even going back to her interaction with Stack at the train depot and speaking loudly to where if a Klansman had heard the conversation, Stack could have been attacked by a white mob, same as Delta Slim’s story about his friend, Rice, who was also lynched at a train depot. Her disregard of the larger consequences of her actions to her Black friends was the domino effect of their downfall by the vampires. And if not for them, then it still would have been due to the Klan who were coming for them in the morning.

I’m sure there were those of the Black audiences who judged and felt that HooDoo and the secular Blues music was the downfall of the juke joint crowd, but Ryan Coogler clearly showed that the true healing power was Sammy’s music, whose musical lineage predated the religion of their captors and Christianity itself, just as the spiritual traditions passed down to Annie–the saving power–also came from ancient African times that predated Christianity…both hers and Sammy’s powers were the true and pure forces that were not tainted by the true evil, which was white supremacist imperialism, which went all over the world destroying, subjugating, converting, controlling, and appropriating everything and everyone in their path that they could. This is not an opinion, this is DOCUMENTED history across millennia, going all the way back to the Ancient Greeks appropriating the knowledge they took from the Black Africans in Kemet they learned their “Greek Philosophy” from (the country which they renamed Aegyptus, which was anglicized to Egypt, which remains that name to present-day).

Now, the crazy thing is that the original spiritual traditions of ancient times that was practiced by great African civilizations who also created the ancient wonders across the continent that still stand today (and others that were stolen and are still being displayed in Western museums to this day), is still considered evil and demonic by millions of Christians. Even the popular franchise of Tarzan movies from the 1930s (the first of which came out in 1932, which is the same year that “Sinners” is based in) depicted Africans as primitive, bloodthirsty, godless cannibalistic savages…and yet, in comparison, performing Christian symbolic rituals of eating the physical body of Christ and drinking his blood via Communion is still considered “pure” and “holy”??

I’ve watched many YouTube reactions to the movie where many were wanting Sammy to “put his guitar down” like his father had said, but didn’t get the bigger meaning of why he didn’t, and then you could see some still felt conflicted (in a positive way) seeing him live out his dreams, just as they demonized Annie and her spiritual practices but then had to acknowledge she was the MVP and that her magic actually helped save some of them (and would have saved ALL of them had they listened to her advice from the jump).

It’s a movie, yes, but it’s based on a lot of truth and history in this so-called real world we live in. Putting things into perspective, the title of “Sinners” seems more like sarcasm than an actual description, in the sense that those in the film deemed “sinners” were less so than those who were considered to be “righteous”. And for all the evil that Remmick represented, there was still truth to things he said, even beyond telling them about the imminent Klan attack. When he was mock-baptizing Sammy, with the “congregation” of vampires as witnesses, and telling him about his colonizers who “told lies of a God above and a Devil below”, he wasn't actually wrong. Even the symbology of Delta Slim, the self-proclaimed sinner who actually “shed his blood” as a “sacrifice” to save his friends, didn’t get past me, either. There were many layers to it just as Ryan Coogler explored through Kilmonger in ‘Black Panther’, where even as many of Kilmonger's actions were wrong and intentions skewed, his reasoning to arm oppressed people of African descent to liberate themselves was still a sound tactic but just needed the level-headedness of a T'Challa (although T'Challa's tactics, alone, caused the weakened security of Wakanda by trying to be diplomatic). The best way forward would have been a combination of their ideologies.

Overall, I hope that both those with an open mind and those with a closed mind but whose mind’s door got lock-picked by some revelations in the movie, dig a little deeper and come to some or more of these realizations. Centuries of conditioning and propaganda is truly hard to break free from, but far from impossible; and this is coming from someone who was deeply religious, brought up in the church and indoctrinated to the extent that I studied the Bible extensively and could have become a pastor, myself, and was willing to die for my beliefs…until I realized I was more willing to live for the truth which led me out of the darkness of inconsistencies and uncertainties in that religion, into the light of my innate and ancient spirituality that was always with and in me…in us…long before religion even existed.

If that makes ME a “Sinner”, I gladly accept that title.

–Ahmed Sirour