What Becomes of the Undead, the Unfree, and the Unforgotten?: A Spiritual and Decolonial Reading of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners

A Note on Positionality

I was not born or raised in the South. I come to this story as a Black woman born in New England, raised in a family shaped by the Great Migration. But the South lives in me through memory, through blood, through stories I’ve heard my entire life. My father’s family left Walnut Grove, Mississippi for Michigan in 1944 when he was just a baby in his mother’s arms. My mother’s parents moved from Buena Vista, Georgia to Hartford, Connecticut in the early 1940s. They weren’t just moving—they were escaping.

On both sides of my family, I grew up hearing stories of racial violence, of survival, of what it meant to leave so you could live. My mother remembers stories of great uncles who were murdered—likely by white men, perhaps even Klan members—in Georgia and Florida for daring to start their own businesses. Economic autonomy was seen as a threat. Black independence was met with white terror.

On my father’s side, the violence was so pervasive that my grandparents felt they had no choice but to flee. My grandmother was a light-skinned Black woman. My grandfather was darker-skinned. When she gave birth to my father in Mississippi, he emerged with fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. My grandfather feared for his life—not only because of the everyday threat of lynching, but because walking through town with a white-looking baby could have made him a target for suspicion, accusation, or death. They left for Saginaw, Michigan, carrying trauma and a baby who did not look “safe” in Black arms.

This is the legacy I carry. Though I was raised agnostic and outside the Black church tradition, and though I was not born in the South, my ancestral memory is marked by its soil, its grief, and its survival. My interpretation of Sinners is informed by this legacy, as well as my academic training in Black feminist theory, decolonial thought, and spiritual practice. I don’t approach this film as a detached critic. I approach it as someone who feels the heat of those memories even without having lived them firsthand. This isn’t objective analysis.

This is inheritance.
This is blood memory.
And this essay is my offering.

Blood Memory as Decolonial Praxis

In April 2025, I went to see Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s latest film, and I still haven’t fully come back from it. Set in the deep South of the U.S. in 1932, Sinners drops us into a world already saturated with the rot of Jim Crow, racial violence, and post-plantation exploitation. Then it introduces vampires—not as monsters, but as metaphors, as messengers, as memory. The premise seems simple: a white vampire arrives in town and offers Black residents an unthinkable option: become undead and finally be free. Free from lynch mobs. Free from the exploitative chains of sharecropping. Free from a church that demands respectability in exchange for survival. This vampire proposes a world where Black folks can dance and sing and live outside the reach of white supremacy…forever.

Where blood isn’t taken, but shared.

Where white domination has no dominion.

I was floored.

Because I’ve always seen whiteness as vampiric. It feeds. It extracts. It consumes the labor, brilliance, and joy of Black people and calls it "civilization." Sinners names that truth out loud…and dares to imagine what liberation might look like outside that feeding frenzy.

What struck me immediately were the limited options visually laid before the Black town’s residents in the film:

• Incarceration: chain gangs and carceral slavery.
• Sharecropping: agricultural enslavement by another name.
• The Black church: not as spiritual liberation, but as an institution rooted in respectability politics. A place that polices pleasure, sexuality, drinking, dancing, and anything that defies the puritanical rules of “proper” Black behavior…

…And then came a fourth option: Vampirism.

Not as horror, but as refusal.

As transformation.

As a weapon against white supremacy and mortality itself.

I draw a direct line between vampirism and liberation, reframing the "undead" as a refusal of colonial mortality. This powerfully echoes Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work” and Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” where memory, flesh, and Black refusal interrupt white historiography.

But this film didn’t just move me because of the metaphor—it moved me because of the care and intention in every visual choice.

Representation and Colorism

Most of the cast are darker-hued Black actors. In a world infected with colorism, that matters.

It’s radical.

Michael B. Jordan plays Smoke, one of two twin brothers who fought in the first World War, traveled the country, and came home to the South to build something sacred—a juke joint, a space of joy and release. Smoke’s love interest, Annie, is a plump, darker-skinned Black woman with a natural hairstyle. Their love is quiet, deep, and heavy with shared grief: the infant daughter they lost before her first birthday.

It cannot be overlooked that Annie is also a rootworker. She had given Smoke a pouch attached to a necklace—something the audience learns she gifted him over seven years ago, before he and Stack left the town. The pouch is filled with sacred herbs and was blessed with sacred words of protection chanted over it by Annie herself. When Smoke returns and they reunite, Annie tells him that the pouch is the reason he has survived the most violent of situations: trench warfare in WWI, the wrath of his abusive father, and even the underworld violence of Chicago (there's a suggestive reference that he and Stack may have crossed Al Capone and somehow survived).

There’s a breathtaking scene in which Stack, who has been turned into a vampire, attempts to bite his brother—but can’t. The pouch repels him. An invisible, ancestral force pushes him back. That moment lingers in my mind: Annie’s rootwork, ancestral and matriarchal, is literally stronger than the will of a vampire to feed.

Stronger than a Christian cross.

Stronger than garlic.

This pouch, an infusion of African sacred protection and love, represents a lineage that predates colonial religion, that predates whiteness itself. It is the echo of a powerful feminine order that stretches back thousands of years to the soils and spirits of Indigenous African cosmologies. That moment wasn’t just magical realism. It was a reclamation of Black, ancestral feminine power.

Seeing Annie on screen—seeing her loved on screen—meant everything to me. Too often, Black women who look like Annie are erased from love stories. They are denied softness and not allowed to be beautiful. Mainstream media still runs on brown paper bag tests and whitewashed standards of desirability. When Zoe Saldana was cast as Nina Simone, I was enraged. Nina was a darker-hued Black woman who lived through the brutal intersections of colorism, racism, and misogyny—and the industry replaced her with a lighter-skinned actress in prosthetics.

So when I saw Annie and Smoke together, loving and grieving in equal measure, I wept. Because that representation isn’t just overdue.

It’s revolutionary.

Time Travel and Black Refusal: Sammie’s Song as Portal and The Sound that Cannot Die

Sammie’s scene where past, present, and future bleed together is a masterstroke. This sequence functions as a rupture in colonial time; an embodied refusal of linear progress. It aligns with Breny Mendoza’s critique of Eurocentric temporality in decolonial theories and W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” as an ongoing echo across time.

And I haven’t even said enough about Smoke and Stack: twin brothers who fought in WWI, traveled to Chicago, and came back South not because it was easier, but because “the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t.” They wanted to create something sacred: a juke joint for Black people to feel free, if only for a night. They understood that “freedom” in the North was just a new costume for old harm. That tall buildings can’t cover up anti-Blackness. That sometimes, the “deep” South’s honesty is less cruel than the North’s deception.

And then came the scene that gave me chills.

In the heart of the juke joint, Sammie “Preacher Boy” takes the stage. He’s quiet at first, humble. He carries his guitar like an offering. When he begins to play and sing, something shifts. His voice is ragged.

Holy.

Deep with ancestral sorrow.

It invokes something far beyond 1932.

As the crowd dances, the camera begins to fracture time. I see the towns’ people dancing with their ancestors: Indigenous peoples from across continents and centuries. I see dancers from pre-colonial Asia, African lineages, Native communities, all bleeding into the present moment, quite literally. The blood of the past, the rhythm of the future, the pulse of the present.

And then I see what Sammie’s voice makes possible. His sacred sound doesn’t just echo through the juke joint.

It transcends time.

I see DJs from the 1980s scratching vinyl, beatmakers from the 1990s looping soul into hip hop. A Black guitarist wails on an electric guitar in the 1970s. Street dancers break and glide. Bodies in futureworlds vibrate to the same pulse that Sammie channeled from the soil.

The scene doesn’t explain itself. It just moves.
Like spirit.
Like memory.
Like blood.

Just as Annie’s rootwork repelled the undead, Sammie’s voice awakens the unborn, with each holding the thread of Black survival across time.

Before They Were White: The Irish Vampire and the Memory of Empire

There’s a moment in Sinners that unfolds slowly, like a wound being named. Remmick, the white-presenting vampire, long a mysterious presence, finally speaks—his voice thick with an Irish accent, his eyes carrying centuries of ache. We learn that he is not just any white man.

He is Irish.

And his backstory matters.

He tells of how the white men in Smoke and Stack’s hometown—the KKK members, the plantation elite, the agents of racial violence—are the same kind of men who once colonized his homeland. That they, too, drained his people of culture, of freedom, of life. That they, too, were ‘culture vampires’ long before they wore white hoods.

This is not just exposition.

It’s a decolonial reckoning one may easily miss if the focus is only on how Remmick presents as white.

While many viewers understandably read Remmick’s desire to have Sammie’s singing voice embedded into his own memory, as colonial appropriation, I saw in his longing something else: an ancestral resonance, a hunger for shared resistance, shaped not by whiteness but by a rejection of it. Both readings can—and must—coexist. Historically, the Irish were not considered white when they first arrived in the U.S. in large numbers in the 19th century. They were racialized, seen as inferior, and often depicted as simian or subhuman in mainstream Anglo-American culture. Noel Ignatiev writes that Irish immigrants eventually “became white” by distancing themselves from Blackness, aligning with anti-Black racism in order to climb the racial caste system (Ignatiev, 1995). Nell Irvin Painter expands this analysis by tracing how whiteness itself was not a fixed identity but a constructed category, shaped over time to absorb select European ethnic groups—including the Irish—into a dominant racial hierarchy that required Black exclusion (Painter, 2010).

But before any of that, the Irish, like so many Indigenous and pre-industrial societies, had their own cosmologies, spiritual practices, and music traditions rooted in land and community. British colonization of Ireland brought forced conversion, cultural suppression, and the criminalization of Irish language and dance. The Irish jig, which the vampire performs mid-film, is not just entertainment: it is a memory of rhythm, resistance, and refusal.

When Remmick offers immortality to the Black and Chinese residents, it is not a hunger for power—it is a refusal to forget. He carries old gold coins, the kind minted before paper currency, long before America became America. He is a relic, but not of empire. He is a relic of the other side of history. One who remembers what it was like to be colonized. To have the sacred stripped away.

Whiteness, then, is not his inheritance. It is a performance he has rejected. This scene offers a rarely seen truth in American cinema: that whiteness is not a static identity. It is a structure, a system, a gate. And some people—like this vampire—once stood outside of it, and remembered what was lost when their ancestors traded survival for silence.

Remmick’s solidarity with Black freedom seekers is not redemptive—it’s ancestral. What stunned me most was not just that the Irish vampire refused whiteness—but that his bite offered something sacred. In Sinners, to be bitten is to receive not just immortality, but memory: the bloodline recollection of all who came before. When this vampire bites, he transmits a timeline of humanity before caste, before conquest, before racial hierarchies. His blood carries remembrance.

What if, the movies asks, vampirism could be a technology of re-indigenization?

Instead of consuming life, the vampire becomes a vessel of what was stolen. The Irish vampire, once colonized himself, does not seek domination. He bites to reconnect; to return memory to the bodies made amnesiac by colonialism. His blood, and those he turns, become carriers of the precolonial sacred: song, soil, sound, ritual, body.

There’s a moment early on when he visits a white couple (a KKK robe draped in the background) and I braced myself for a transformation into white supremacist vampires. But the film subverts this entirely. His bite is not an infection of hate. It’s a release. A restoration.

Later, when Remmick and the two newly transformed white vampire couple arrive at the juke joint, they’re turned away. Suspicion hangs in the air, and rightfully so. But they walk away, and begin to sing. And the sound is haunting, harmonic, and beautifully strange. It doesn’t replicate Black music. It carries the sonic residue of precolonial Ireland.

Of fiddles.
Of breath.
Of bone-deep longing.
It is not mimicry. It is memory.

What Sinners reveals is that the greatest terror of colonialism isn’t monsters. It’s forgetting. And through this memory-transmitting vampirism, Sinners dares to suggest that freedom– at least in 1932– is possible when we remember who we were before we were divided by caste and colonialism.

This is where time matters.

Our reading of Remmick in 2025 (post–civil rights, post–George Floyd, in an era of rising white nationalism and digital surveillance) must not be flattened onto 1932, where legal apartheid was sanctioned, and the danger of a white-presenting man entering a Black space could be life or death. The fear is not misplaced; it is ancestral. At the same time, I believe the film opens a speculative portal: what could solidarity look like when all options were violence, silence, or survival?

In 1932, repair might look like a shared ritual between two colonized beings whose oppressors wore the same face. In 2025, repair requires more: reckoning, refusal, and an end to the performance of innocence. But this doesn’t mean we cannot imagine different forms of connection across trauma. It means we must imagine them with accountability and memory at the center.

Sacred Black Joy and Grief

My language, saturated with reverence for Black love, grief, and sacred spaces like the juke joint, reminds us that liberation is as much spiritual and aesthetic as it is political. This is decolonial sociology in motion.

And I realized: Sammie’s gift—the ability to create sacred sound—is a direct refusal of linear time and colonized mortality.

His music is a gateway.
A conjuring.

A reminder that our joy, our beats, our soul voices cannot be destroyed. That we are still here, still moving, still drumming. Across generations. Across borders. Across death.

Smoke chooses not to become a vampire. His freedom is in choosing. To fight against the KKK, who arrive the next morning unaware that the many of the Black (and Chinese) townsfolk have all burned away in the sunrise. Annie, after being bitten, begs Smoke to stake her heart before she turns. She chooses death. She says she’ll see him soon. And she does. After killing all of the Klan attackers, Smoke removes the pouch which is his final act of agency—and allows himself to die. Shot, bleeding, but free. Free to reunite with Annie and their daughter in the afterlife. His freedom is choice.

That scene gave me chills.
That scene gave me hope.

Sinners doesn’t offer easy answers. It doesn’t let anyone off the hook. It offers a question soaked in blood and rhythm and memory: What are we willing to become to be free?

It’s not about glamorizing monsters. It’s about refusing to be prey. It’s about naming the real vampires; those who feed on us and call it order. It’s about imagining a world where Black joy, pleasure, grief, and transformation are not just allowed, but central.

I left that theater with my hands shaking and my heart wide open. This wasn’t just a film.

It was a ritual.
A reclamation.
A love letter to everything we’ve survived.

This, I now know, is what becomes of the undead, the unfree, and the unforgotten.

Works Cited

• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1961.
• Foley, Michael. "White by Law: Irish Assimilation and Racial Construction." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 19, no. 2, 2000.
• Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. Norton, 2019.
• hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992.
• Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. Routledge, 1995.
• Kendi, Ibram X. A History of Race and Racism in America in 24 Chapters. Vintage, 2016.
• Mendoza, Breny. "Decolonial Theories in Comparison." Journal of World Philosophies, 2020.
• Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. W.W. Norton, 2010.
• Perreira, Elizabeth. "Irish Jig and Colonial Legacy: Movement, Resistance, and National Memory." Dance Research Journal, vol. 42, no. 2, 2010.
• Quijano, Aníbal. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America." Nepantla, 2000.
• Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
• The Kirwan Institute. "Understanding Implicit Bias." 2020.
• Weiner, Melissa. "Decolonial Sociology: W.E.B. Du Bois's Foundational Contributions." Sociology Compass, 2018.