Vampires

WARNING: LIGHT SPOILERS  FOR SINNERS (2025)

The first time we meet the vampires in Sinners, they’re singing.

They’re a trio who show up at the door of the juke joint—well-dressed, coordinated, polished. They start to perform, trying to charm their way in. And on the surface, it works: the harmonies are tight, the style convincing. But something’s off. The music is lifeless. It’s all mimicry, no spirit. Technically correct, emotionally vacant. They’re corny. Because even if the notes are right, the soul is missing.

There are a lot of scenes in this film that deserve their own essays, and a lot of people have written beautifully about what Sinners is doing. But for this post, I want to focus on just two scenes—because together, they say something profound about the moment we’re living in, and about something I’ve witnessed in my own life.

I grew up between worlds. A ‘third culture kid.’ American, but not entirely. Yemeni, but not entirely. And it wasn’t until I went back to Yemen as a child that I really understood what it meant to come from somewhere. That I came from people. That I came from continuity. From tribe. From memory. I can name my fathers thirty generations back—and not as some kind of memory challenge, these things are preserved in my culture and give us a living connection. Many of the people in that chain have stories, biographies, legends. It’s a type of rootedness that few in the modern world experience. It’s a privilege that gives me a particular perspective and Sinners, for me, struck to the heart of that.

When I was 13 my family sent me to live in Yemen, that experience filled a void I didn’t know I had. And ever since, I’ve watched the American condition with a different kind of clarity. I see how so many people here are starved for something real. How they grasp at fragments of other cultures, trying to stitch together a sense of meaning, a sense of self. I understand that hunger, because I was there. But I also understand damage caused by a dominant culture consuming other people’s roots.

You see it clearly in the juke joint scene. It’s not just that the vampires are imitating Black culture—it’s that they expect imitation to be enough. They believe performance alone will grant them access. But what they bring is lifeless. And the room knows it. 

That’s the first scene… then there’s the second scene. Which really brought it all home for me. 

The trio are outside the juke joint singing an old Irish folk song. And it’s completely different. The voices carry something ancient, something buried. It’s beautiful. Heartbreaking. Real. Somewhere deep inside the monster, there’s memory. There’s a trace of the human. And in that moment we know that what they’re really after isn’t blood. And the choice of an Irishman is deliberate. Historically, the Irish in America were among the first immigrant groups to fully trade in their cultural distinctiveness for acceptance into the dominant culture. In doing so, they assimilated so deeply into the American project that they often became its enforcers. The film uses that history to great effect.

And this is what makes the vampires in Sinners such a potent metaphor. Their violence isn’t the violence of the colonizer, the racist, or the state. That kind of violence is present in the film, but it’s embodied by other characters—the city leadership, who turn out to be Klansmen. The vampires represent something else. Their violence is one that maims the body but preserves it. The person, almost in their entirety, remains. What is destroyed, though not entirely, is the spirit. They still talk like themselves, they still walk like themselves, but they’ve now been absorbed into the hive mind, which I believe is a metaphor for the dominant culture—the monoculture, as some have referred to it. They are themselves, but now hollowed out, filled only with hunger.

So yes, as many have accurately pointed out, this is a film about cultural appropriation, something I’ve explored on this blog before and also framed around another wonderful Ryan Coogler film. But, what Sinners does is so so so much more than just depict cultural appropriation—it dissects what fuels it. It examines the deep spiritual void that drives this hunger, that causes them to imitate.

That, to me, is the ache at the center of the film. The real terror isn’t the fangs—it’s the emptiness. The void. The hunger to feel rooted, and the violence that comes when people try to shortcut their way back to meaning by consuming what others hold sacred.

When the vampires say, “We can all be together now,” it sounds like harmony. We know what they really mean and it’s terrifying.

I loved this film. I loved the layers. I loved the way it refused to be simple. The acting was phenomenal. Michael B. Jordan’s performance—playing dual roles—was especially impressive. Each character distinct, fully human, never caricatured.  The character of Miles—played by Joshua Caleb Johnson—was an unbelievable standout. And even more impressive that this is his first film.

When I left the theater I kind of wished the vampire stuff had never happened. I just wanted to sit with those characters longer, watch their lives unfold without being destroyed. Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to feel. 

Ryan Coogler is a singular voice. A hometown hero for me, as someone from the Bay. I love all of his films. He’s not just making movies—he’s pulling at the threads of what hold us together, and the intruders who tear us apart. 

He does remind us though… they only get in after we invite them.