Bored of the Dance: Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

First things first: Today, Monday, May 5th, is the final order cut-off for DC Pride 2025. I wrote a Blue Snowman story that I love from the bottom of my heart, and I hope you'll read it – go ask your comic store to stock it and save you a copy now.

Second: This post contains detailed discussion of the plot of Sinners, so if you haven't seen it yet, feel free to save this newsletter for later.

This is nominally a newsletter about horror movies (still?) (I guess?) and yet, I feel like a douchebag pitching you my review of Sinners. It’s a movie by Ryan Coogler, starring Michael B. Jordan, about a vampire raid on a blues club in 1932 — it’s pointedly not made for white approval, and does not need some white dude with a newsletter to explain it. 

However, Sinners is also a movie about how the worst thing anyone could ever be is a white Irish-American step-dancer, and with this, I — a white Irish-American who had step-dancing at my family reunions — fully agree. 

Emily St. James has written a newsletter discussing the symbolism of the vampires in Sinners — I opened it just as I was sitting down to write this one — and she’s right that, as symbols, they are multivalent and messy. This is a good thing. The current era of horror, as I and every other pretentious white man with a newsletter will tell you, suffers from the audience expectation that it must be about something — after The Babadook (the monster is the stress of single motherhood) and Get Out (the monster is white entitlement to Black bodies) we expect every single monster to be a clear and coherent metaphor for some societal ill, whether that serves the story or not. 

It’s not that I think monsters are meaningless, or that horror shouldn’t contain political commentary — horror is invariably political, because it’s about transgression and taboo — but good symbols tend to contain many meanings. Dracula was published in 1897, and we are still debating whether the titular vampire is a metaphor for the threat of immigration (yes) or a collection of barely disguised anti-Semitic stereotypes (yes) or a reflection of a recent tuberculosis epidemic (yes) or a thinly veiled admission of Bram Stoker’s own queerness (absolutely) or a jeremiad about the evils of feminism and/or sexually assertive women (yep, that too). 

So it is probably okay — in fact, it is perfectly in keeping with vampire tradition — for the vampires in Sinners to mean many things, which can be roughly boiled down to “IDK white people???” without quite exhausting the topic. 

It does seem likely, though, that in a blockbuster vampire musical, where much of the combat is conducted through white vampires and Black blues musicians playing music at each other, the vampires stand for… music. Specifically, the way the dominant culture sucks the vitality out of marginalized people’s culturally specific art forms, and reduces them in the end to kitsch.