The Sinners Who Sang: How the Blues Defied the Night

In my opinion, Sinners is a drama disguised as a vampire horror film, telling a story steeped in the colonial trauma of diverse ethnicities. Thanks to the masterful music, spectacular visuals, and brilliant dialogue, this racial narrative is highly entertaining, visually captivating and thought-provoking. I'd say that this is the second film of early 2025—after The Ugly Stepsister—that didn’t bore me and actually made me want to write something about it.

Two questions has lingered in my mind after watching it: Who are the "sinners"? And what do the vampires represent? If we examine the history of blues music and the exploitation and violence of racism across different social dimensions, these questions aren’t hard to answer.

Let me start with the film’s most crucial spectacle.

This is the climax of the movie and the most-discussed musical sequence. As the protagonist Sammy sings, performers from different eras and ethnicities begin appearing in the bar, all dancing and singing together.

There are African tribal singers and dancers from the past:

A rock guitarist from the future, whose music evolved from the blues:

Street dancers and rappers, core elements of hip-hop culture:

Chinese opera performers—martial wudan and graceful huadan:

Shamans evoking ancient witchcraft:

And Ballet dancers:

A true multicultural extravaganza.

Yet, at the heart of this performance is legendary blues music, said to bridge the living and the dead, the past and the future.Before this scene, Delta Slim delivers a key line to Sammy:

"Blues wasn’t forced on us like religions. No, son. We brought this with us from home. A magic we do, sacred and big."

In case you, like me, aren’t so familiar with blues history, here’s a summary I found online:

Blues is a musical genre created by African Americans in the late 19th-century American South, which blends African traditional music, Negro spirituals, and American folk music. It is characterized by call-and-response patterns, improvisation, and simple ballad structures, with the call-and-response fomat showing its deep connectoin with African musics. Early blues often narrated the lives of Black Americans, particularly their struggles with racism and hardship.

The emergence of Blues after the abolition of slavery is directly tied to Black liberation. It was first recorded in the early 20th century—the first blues sheet music appeared in 1908. Over time, it diversified into styles like Delta blues (rural) and Chicago blues (urban). Post-WWII, blues gained wider appeal, including among white audiences. By the 1960s–70s, it fused with rock to create blues-rock and spawned genres like R&B.

Hence, the Blues is unique because it is an organic cultural product of the African tradition and it is inherently rebellious against racism. Yet, over the past century, like many minority cultures, it was absorbed (and at times even appropriated) by white mainstream America. The music evolved, but the identities of its creators’ faded.

From an optimistic view, this reflects America’s cultural diversity—Black culture entering the mainstream. But through Sinners’ lens, it reveals the cultural violence of colonialism: absorbing and repackaging the colonized’s creations while erasing their authorship and thus marginalizing them once more.

The vampires summoned by Sammy’s music crave his blues talent. Their leader, Remmick, offers an alluring deal by painting an idyllic utopia.

But beneath this utopia lies a brutal truth: While all consciousness would be shared with Remmick, all souls are trapped in their own bodies. Memories and knowledge merge, but at the cost of losing one’s unique cultural identity. Much like the American Dream today—where performative diversity masks white dominance (Trump’s first election might’ve been a fluke, but his second, backed by Elon Musk and JD Vance, proves otherwise). Racism persists, only more insidiously now, its wounds harder to voice in a culture of political correctness. In this narrative, those who forget their roots and surrender their talents to the devil are sinners— and nearly every character does.

Take Michael B. Jordan’s dual roles as brothers Smoke and Stack. Raised on a Southern plantation, their rise to wealth in Chicago is implied to be violent. Their return isn’t about money but reclaiming identity—hence investing in a Black-owned juke joint.

Smoke resists vampires, dying in a fight against the KKK. He loses his life but keeps his soul, redeemed in an afterlife with his family.

Stack succumbs, gaining immortality but losing freedom. In the finale, he recalls his last sunset—the final hours of true liberty. His "sin" is paid for with eternal bondage.

Sammy neither submits nor fights to death. He leaves, guitar in hand, fulfilling his vow to Stack: "Drive your own ride back." He lives a full life, embracing death over vampiric immortality, soon to reunite with ancestors. Yet, abandoning his father’s Black religious community may be his own sin.

Thus, the "sinners" are those complicit with racism. Atonement means guarding one’s soul and ancestral ties—preserving identity in body and spirit.

Notably, the Irish characters aren’t colonizers. Vampire leader Remmick, an Irish exile from the 5th century (his family persecuted for Celtic paganism), symbolizes another oppressed group. The 19th-century potato famine forced millions of Irish Catholics to America, where they faced anti-immigrant bigotry. Hence, Remmick empathizes with Black suffering, unlike the KKK.

The Choctaw vampire hunters, meanwhile, represent Native Americans. The KKK dismisses them as "lighter Blacks," highlighting their marginalized status. The Choctaw were displaced from the Southeast to Oklahoma via broken treaties, some cheated, others forcibly removed. Those who stayed became sharecroppers on their own land.

Federal recognition only came in 1934, yet systemic oppression continued, as depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), where Osage wealth from oil invited white exploitation.

It wasn't until the early 1900s that the government began paying attention to the Choctaw people's plight. In 1934, the government passed the Indian Reorganization Act, which brought new hope to the Choctaw. They used this opportunity to gain federal government recognition, allowing the Mississippi Choctaw Indian Tribe to establish itself and begin moving toward self-development.

But under the inertia of racism and white colonial violence, the Choctaw's predicament wasn't truly resolved. Martin Scorsese's 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon focuses on this history: forced to Oklahoma, the Native American Osage tribe accidentally discovered oil on their land and became wealthy, attracting greedy white people who plundered their wealth through assassination, marriage, and poisoning.

There's also the Chinese community represented by the grocery store couple, facing their own distinct forms of discrimination and oppression. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1886 was a landmark event in the Chinese experience in America.

The first large-scale Chinese immigration to North America occurred during the California Gold Rush between 1848 and 1855. Later, more Chinese were recruited for major engineering projects, most famously the construction of America's first transcontinental railroad.

By 1860, the Chinese had become California's largest immigrant group. These Chinese immigrants were mainly healthy adult males who provided America with abundant cheap labor while barely using government public services like schools and hospitals.

However, as more Chinese flooded into California, especially in areas like Los Angeles, social tensions emerged. Eventually, the U.S. government enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, one of the most severe restrictions on free immigration in American history.

This history reflects an ironic reality: while Chinese people made important contributions to America's development, they could never gain recognition from white-dominated American society.

The Zhou couple in the film is a representation of the Chinese. They run a grocery store, moving between Black and white communities. Never truly integrated into the white community, they feel closer to the similarly discriminated Black community. In the end, they end up being transformed into vampires.

What will become of their children? The film provides no answer, which mirrors the current predicament of the Chinese community. As Trump's conservative ideology rises again, with China becoming the largest "other" and his best imagined enemy of choice for rallying national unity, Chinese people in America now face an increasingly awkward situation. Compromise or resistance? Who knows?

Finally, it's worth noting that, the film is anti-religious to some degree, or at least it opposes Christianity as a representative of colonizer culture. For instance, when Sammy is repeatedly pushed underwater by white vampires, that scene is almost an inverted "baptism" ritual. He isn't being given new life, but rather being forced to abandon his soul. And Sammy's estrangement and break from his father, who is a pastor, is also a critique of Christianity's role as a tool of racism and colonial culture.

This brings me to some areas where I think the film falls short: from the middle of the story, the plot becomes formulaic. The process of fighting vampires together isn't much different from The Vampire Diaries. But I think Sinners is good enough in that at least half the plot is full of tension. It proves to audiences that vampire stories aren't just for white people—people of color can completely rewrite and appropriate white cultural through new stories.

Just kidding—we have our own culture. But even if we meant to do it, and actually did, it'd just be for fun and rebellion. So why not?