By the spring of 2025, it has become clear that horror, long dismissed as the rebellious cousin of prestige cinema, is enjoying a renaissance. Films like Companion, Presence, Wolf Man, and M3GAN 2 have filled theaters with willing audiences and willing wallets. Yet despite their success, none have quite pierced the glittering armor of awards season, which so often favors a certain somber weight over the sharp, trembling edge of fear. Horror’s capacity to mirror societal anxieties, to channel cultural and political unease into something visceral, has remained, for the most part, unrecognized at the highest levels. That may be about to change. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan, arrives with the force of a reckoning. Only a handful of horror films have ever managed to secure a place at the top of the awards pantheon; The Silence of the Lambs being the last, in 1991; but Sinners seems poised to break the long dry spell. It has already captured critical adulation and, crucially, the box office, signaling that it is not merely a “good horror movie” but a significant cinematic event.
Coogler, whose collaborations with Jordan date back to Fruitvale Station and whose work on Black Panther recalibrated the expectations of genre filmmaking, crafts with Sinners something rare: a horror film whose scares are matched, and perhaps even exceeded, by its narrative ambition and emotional heft. If Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn turned the vampire genre into a carnivalesque bloodbath; entertaining, unhinged, and unapologetically vulgar; Sinners is its soulful, brooding counterpart: a meditation on belonging, legacy, and survival, stitched together with metaphorical teeth.
Set in the American South of 1932, Sinners follows twin brothers Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore, both portrayed with dazzling distinction by Jordan. Coogler quickly and deftly establishes their differences: Smoke, fiery and impulsive in crimson hues; Stack, measured and strategic, draped in blue. Returning from Chicago after a stint with Al Capone’s organization, the Moores dream of building something of their own; a juke joint on a reclaimed piece of land purchased, tellingly, from a local Klansman.
Their circle is rich with characters who could easily have stepped out of a Delta blues song: the prodigiously talented Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore (played by newcomer Miles Caton with the easy charisma of a future star); the weathered but wise Delta Slim (a pitch-perfect Delroy Lindo); and the women who anchor their ambitions, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) and Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), both of whom bring gravity and verve to their roles.
As the club opens and music fills the air; an ecstatic, defiant celebration of black culture; a group of white strangers arrives, bearing a strange request to share their own Gaelic songs. What follows shifts the film from human drama into full-throated horror, as vampires reveal themselves, slaughtering the revelers and laying siege to the juke joint. Yet Sinners is not content to merely riff on familiar tropes. Coogler layers the narrative with a devastating allegory: the vampires’ hunger for blood echoes the predatory violence of racism, their hive mind an eerie parallel for systemic hatred.
Perhaps the film’s most breathtaking moment comes during a seamless, extended tracking shot that sweeps through the juke joint, morphing across time periods: from tribal rhythms in pre-colonial Africa to the electric pulse of Woodstock, to the urgent beats of a 2025 nightclub. In a few minutes of virtuosic filmmaking, Coogler offers a visual thesis on the indelible, evolving impact of black musical expression; a reminder that cultural creation persists, defiantly, through centuries of oppression.
Sinners also deepens the vampire mythology in inventive ways: here, the bloodsuckers share memories and consciousness, a chilling feature that adds both strategic danger and metaphysical weight to the unfolding battle. Throughout, Jordan is incandescent, delivering two performances in one, balancing violence and vulnerability in a way few actors could manage. Lindo, as always, imbues his character with a richness that transcends stereotype, while Steinfeld and Mosaku bring an urgency and tenderness to their scenes that ground the film’s more fantastical turns.
If Sinners falters at all, it is in its slow-burn setup, which lingers, perhaps too lovingly, over the brothers’ preparations and dreams before the horror explodes. But such patience yields dividends, giving us characters whose fates we genuinely mourn and whose courage we fiercely root for.
In a year already brimming with horror films vying for attention, Sinners stands apart; not just as an exceptional work of its genre, but as an exceptional work of cinema. It demands to be seen, not merely for its technical and narrative brilliance, but for the experience it offers: a haunted, heartful exploration of America’s most enduring sins and the undying will to transcend them.
