Sinners Made Saints: Ryan Coogler’s Latest Film Rewrote the Narrative on Black Womanhood and Spirituality

Rome, Italy — Ryan Coogler’s Sinners isn’t just the next genre-defying blockbuster, it’s a spiritual reckoning and a cultural restoration. While the marketing may have teased a Southern vampire thriller, what Coogler delivered is something much deeper: a revolutionary reimagining of Black identity, where Black womanhood and African Diasporic spiritual traditions are centered not as curiosities or curses, but as sacred, redemptive forces. 

Sinners is a film that fuses horror, gospel, and ancestral cosmology. It invites viewers into a world where the battle between good and evil isn’t fought in heaven or hell, but in the back rooms of juke joints, at the banks of moonlit rivers, and in the hands of Black women who have long been society’s most overlooked spiritual authorities.

The Juke Joint as a Temple

One of the film’s most iconic scenes is a four-minute, single-shot sequence set in the SmokeStack Juke Joint in Mississippi. The camera glides through a time-warped dance floor as bluesman Sammie (Miles Canton) begins to play. As he sings, time dissolves and ancestors start to appear. African dancers, breakdancers, and modern-day revelers share the space in a communion that feels more like a ritual than a performance. 

“Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion. We brought this with us from home,” said Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) in a flashback during the performance. Here, it is clear to audiences that connecting with one’s spiritual roots is not deviant, the way mainstream media often portrays it to be. It is a blessing, and in that moment, the juke joint becomes a church, and the song becomes a sermon. 

Annie: A Hoodoo Priestess in the Horror Canon

If the juke joint serves as a church, then Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) is a priestess. As a spiritual guide and healer, Annie is the film’s heart. She is neither a magical sidekick, nor doomed matriarch. She is sovereign, strategic, and spiritually grounded, which in turn works in favor for the rest of the characters throughout the film. 

In one pivotal scene, which echoes throughout the rest of the film, even after her passing, Annie creates a mojo bag for Smoke (Michael B. Jordan), her love interest. This protects him from the Klan, the vampires, and from being bitten by Stack, his twin. 

Toward the end of the film, in the first post-credit scene, viewers learn that Sammie was only spared because Smoke made Stack, a newly-turned and bloodthirsty vampire, promise to let Sammie live out his life. This is crucial, as earlier in the film, we see Sammie try to pray Remmick and the vampires away, only to be met with them reciting the prayer with him. To his luck, Smoke, who was protected by the mojo bag, was able to stab Remmick and protect Sammie. 

It wasn’t the Lord’s prayer that protected him, it was the spiritual protection of Annie. 

Rather than portray Hoodoo and African spirituality as dangerous or exotic, Sinners honors them as systems of care, resistance, and protection. When Annie teaches others to protect themselves using pickled garlic, chantwork, and sigils, she is passing on tools, not curses.

A Cinematic Challenge to Christian Hegemony

Sinners doesn’t reject Christianity, but it critiques its weaponization. In a monologue delivered by Delta Slim, the film draws a clear line between institutional religion and spiritual liberation. 

“See white folks, they like the blue just fine,” Slim tells Sammie. “They just don’t like the people who made it.”

This line encapsulates the film’s central tension: cultural consumption without spiritual understanding. The vampires, who drain not only blood but creative energy, are stand-ins for colonial and capitalist systems that exploit Black expression while demonizing its origins.

Coogler complicates this binary further by including Choctaw vampire hunters and Chinese herbalists, suggesting that spiritual resilience exists across oppressed cultures, and solidarity can be forged across traditions. 

Not “Horror”, but Ritual on Film

Of course, the film features some appropriate gore. As a result, critics have called Sinners a horror film, but that feels insufficient. It’s a tale of how colonization is all-consuming– eroding not just bodies, but belief systems, memory, and spirit. 

In the film, Gospel, Blues, Hoodoo, and ancestral invocation are not just textures, they’re structure. These spiritual elements aren’t there for atmosphere or aesthetic; they shape the narrative arc, the characters’ motivations, and the stakes themselves. The film’s post-credit scene perfectly portrays this. 

It isn’t a final shutdown or a jump-scare ending. Instead, it’s a spiritual choice: Sammie, offered immortality, walks away. He chooses human life, brief as it is, tethered to memory and spirit. 

This act reframes power– not as the ability to escape death, but the ability to face it with spiritual integrity and ancestral grounding. Sinners isn’t about defeating evil through violence alone; it’s about reclaiming spiritual agency in a world that has tried to strip it away. 

That’s what sets it apart from the standard horror genre. It’s not just about fear– it's about faith, reclamation, and the sacred enduring of Black identity. Calling Sinners a horror film misses the point. It’s ritual disguised as genre, and in that, it becomes something far more radical. 

Cinema as Ceremony

In Sinners, Ryan Coogler has done something that many filmmakers have tried but few have achieved: he has made a film that feels less like entertainment and more like inheritance. 

It doesn’t just put Black women on screen, it centers their spirit, genius, traditions, and survival. It asks the audience not to fear African spirituality, but to listen to it. To honor it. To learn from it.

And in doing so, Coogler hasn’t just made a horror film or another vampire thriller, it's a hymn. A call to remember. A reminder that, for Black audiences, surviving has always been a spiritual act.