Blood, History, & Other Curses — How ‘Sinners’ (2025) Rewrites The Gothic Vampire Trope

Ryan Coogler, the endlessly innovative mind behind Black Panther¹ (2018) and Creed² (2015), is once again making waves for his latest and arguably most ambitious creation: the Southern Gothic blockbuster Sinners³ (2025).

A record-breaking, Hollywood-crushing supernova that has shocked critics and audiences alike, Sinners isn’t just out there breaking box office records or Hollywood’s studio system with Coogler’s unprecedented deal with Warner Bros; it’s breaking the mold in a world filled with remakes, reboots, and safely played studio bets.

By daring to bring a wholly original idea to life, Sinners delivers a superbly crafted Gothic vampire narrative that honors the roots of its genre while reshaping them for a new era.

‘The Gothic Reborn’ — From Horror To Haunting Legacy

The Southern Gothic has long been defined by its crumbling settings, grotesque characters, decaying legacies, religious overtones, and explorations of moral corruption — all simmering under the weight of social, familial, and historical trauma. The Gothic genre is often haunted by the sins of the past and populated by outsiders, misfits, or deeply flawed figures (in many cases, vampires) whose suffering reveals deeper truths about the human condition. Coogler knows this genre well, and he weaponizes it.

In Sinners, he subverts its most beloved (and popular) vampire tropes, recasting the grotesque not just as monstrous, but mournful; the haunted not just as victims, but participants in a legacy they cannot escape. The result is a work that feels at once familiar and foreign, nostalgic yet radical, frightening yet deeply tragic. Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932, Sinners follows twin brothers (and career criminals) Smoke and Stack (both brought to life by Coogler’s longtime friend and collaborator, the multifaceted Michael B. Jordan) as they return to their hometown following a set of Chicago misadventures.

Hellbent on turning a rusty, old country sawmill into a juke joint — sold to them by none other than a Klansman — the twins recruit their hauntingly talented guitarist/Blues singer cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), who is eerily warned against pursuing this venture (and his music) by his preacher father. “You keep dancing with the devil, and one day it’s gonna follow you home,” he tells Sammie, and all of us watching, to brace ourselves for what the juke joint opening night has in store for us.

As the opening night arrives, and the twins reunite with their estranged love interests — Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke’s wife, and Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Stack’s ex-girlfriend, who also happens to be White (something unheard of given the time period), and upon Sammie’s request, encourage him to take the stage. He enchants the audience with a Blues piece detailing his father’s disapproval of his desires, which is so heartfelt and powerful, it conjures up spirits of the past and future, eager to reconnect with their roots. However, not all of these spirits are good, and most of them are certainly not human.

Early on, the film establishes that some musicians put such soul into their music, they have the power to conjure spirits, and in Sinners, the evil spirits allured by Sammie’s beats are not just your “regular” spirits, but vampires; vampires stuck in some sort of purgatory, who through Sammie’s music feel reconnected with their roots.

But these aren’t the stereotypical vampires we grew up watching; they’re a much more sinister, gut-wrenching, and complex iteration of the fanged creatures found in classic literature — to see just how deep Coogler’s bite goes, we must dig up the Gothic graveyard where it all began.

‘Decayed Bloodlines’ — The Literary Roots Of Gothic Horror

So, where do vampires come from? Not from shiny boarding schools or small-town high schools, that’s for sure. The vampire, in its earliest literary form, was never meant to sparkle. It was born out of nightmares — out of centuries of folklore, superstition, and fear of disease, decay, and desire.

The earliest English-language vampire tale, The Vampyre ⁴(1819) by John Polidori, introduced the aristocratic monster: a parasite cloaked in elegance, feeding on society from within. Bram Stoker’s Dracula⁵ (1897) followed suit but layered on themes of immigration, sexuality, contagion, and moral panic.

These were not just monsters — they were metaphors. They stood for everything the Victorian psyche repressed: lust, illness, foreignness, corruption, even queerness.

But what both stories share — and what Sinners understands so well — is that vampirism is never just about blood. It’s about guilt. In these early Gothic tales, to become a vampire was to become trapped in a cycle of sin and shame, doomed to relive one’s past transgressions across centuries. They weren’t gods or romantic ideals. They were tragic, decaying figures — lonely, haunted, and cursed.

However, as the vampire evolved on screen throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, it shed its association with filth and fear and took on a new role: the seducer. From Lugosi’s cape-swirling charisma to the velvet-and-leather allure of Interview With The Vampire⁶ (1994; Neil Jordan) and the eternal heartbreak of Twilight⁷ (2008; Catherine Hardwicke), vampirism became less about rot and more about romance. Immortality was no longer a curse but a dark fantasy — offering eternal youth, wealth, beauty, and power. Pain was aestheticized; death, eroticized.

Coogler’s Sinners takes this romanticized image and drags it back into the shadows. In his hands, the vampire is no longer a glittering object of desire but a decaying specter of emotional and historical weight. His creatures are not beautiful — they’re broken. These vampires return us to this original DNA.

Unlike their modern cinematic cousins, who seduce or save, the creatures in Sinners are neither sexy nor heroic. They are echoes of unresolved grief, manifestations of generational trauma, and reminders that the past — particularly in the Gothic tradition — never really stays buried.

‘The Curse Rewritten’ — Sinners, Time, & The Psychological Burden Of Immortality

Another inevitably glamorized aspect of vampirism in modern media is the idea of immortality itself; the seductive power of eternal youth and beauty that comes with a flesh frozen in time. But the truth is, it isn’t the flesh that is frozen in time, but the soul itself; a soul trapped in a limbo of grief, uncertainty, and never allowed to move on from whatever haunts the darkest depths of their existence.

In Sinners, Coogler reimagines the curse of vampirism not as a seductive gift, but as a hollow bargain — a trap masquerading as liberation. The flesh-hungry undead lure the town’s most broken and burdened souls with the promise of immortality, tempting them with an escape from the grief, guilt, and bodily suffering that consume them.

For characters like Mary and Stack, the bite seems to offer a way out: Mary is still reeling from her mother’s death, while Stack is paralyzed by the loss of a love he never truly recovered from. To them, the promise of eternal life suggests the end of mourning, of shame, of longing — a rebirth into something powerful, painless, and pure.

But that’s the lie. Immortality in Sinners is not a transcendence of pain but its echo chamber. Those who turn don’t become gods — they become ghosts of themselves. Mary and Stack, once so human in their ache, now drift through the world as husks, unmoored from time and meaning.

The sensuality and liberation vampirism seems to offer — whether sexual, emotional, or existential — is quickly revealed as illusion. They haven’t escaped their suffering, only traded one prison for another. The curse, then, is not just fangs and bloodlust, but the unbearable weight of eternity stripped of hope.

But Sinners doesn’t just reshape the consequences of immortality — it reimagines the very identity of the creature that offers it. To understand the full weight of Coogler’s reinvention, we have to look beyond what the vampires do and consider what, exactly, they are.

‘No Fangs, No Capes’ — Reimagining The Vampire’s Identity

Well, to be fair, these vampires do have fangs (because how else would we know they’re vampires, right?). However, Sinners purposely discards the vampire’s familiar trappings — the brooding sexuality, the aristocratic elegance, the marble-skinned invincibility — and rebuilds the creature from the inside out.

In Coogler’s vision, the vampire is no longer an ageless seducer or Gothic nobleman perched above the peasants it feeds on. Instead, it is something far more grounded and far more unsettling: a being forged from emotional wreckage, defined not by its dominance, but by its fracture.

Rather than romanticizing the vampire as a symbol of forbidden desire or elite alienation, Sinners rebrands it as a liminal entity — caught between worlds, between lives, and between selves. These creatures are not powerful, but pitiful; not sleek predators, but rotting echoes of the people they once were.

Their bloodlust is not erotic or empowering, but compulsive and grotesque. They do not live in mansions; they haunt backwoods, decaying juke joints, and memory-drenched places too saturated with grief to let go of the dead.

In stripping the vampire of its cinematic polish, Coogler recovers the Gothic at its most raw and psychological. These are monsters of trauma, not allure. They do not terrify because they overpower us — but because they mirror us. Their monstrousness is not their otherness, but their familiarity.

The vampire of Sinners is not an outsider looking in, but a former insider who has become permanently estranged from the world it once knew. In this way, Coogler doesn’t just deconstruct the vampire myth — he humanizes it, and in doing so, makes it all the more horrifying.

Sinners (2025) — A New Chapter In Gothic Cinema

Sinners is more than a Southern Gothic thriller — it’s a pivotal moment in the evolution of horror cinema. Coogler’s film honors the roots of the genre by digging deep into its foundational themes: decay, guilt, madness, and the inescapable weight of history. But rather than repackaging Gothic tropes with surface-level aesthetics, he strips them down and rebuilds them into something visceral and devastatingly human.

By peeling away the glamor and alluring aura that has come to define modern vampirism, Coogler revives the creature as it first appeared in classic literature: a tragically devastating figure of torment, not seduction; of tragedy, not triumph. In doing so, Sinners doesn’t reject the Gothic tradition — it resurrects it.

The result is a haunting, original work that proves Gothic vampire horror isn’t just alive — it’s evolving. And with Sinners, Coogler doesn’t just contribute to that evolution. He redefines it, also proving that just like Coogler’s vampires, audiences are dying to sink their teeth into some bold and original storytelling. And now, thanks to Sinners, the gates have been opened for creators everywhere, yearning for a piece of the action.

Footnotes

1. Black Panther. Directed by Ryan Coogler. United States: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2018. ↩︎
2. Creed. Directed by Ryan Coogler. United States: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2015. ↩︎
3. Sinners. Directed by Ryan Coogler. United States: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2025. ↩︎
4. Polidori, John William. The Vampyre. The New Monthly Magazine, 1819. ↩︎
5. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Archibald Constable and Company, 1897. ↩︎
6. Interview With The Vampire. Directed by Neil Jordan. United States: Warner Bros. Pictures, 1994. ↩︎
7. Twilight. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke. United States: Summit Entertainment, 2008. ↩︎