Warning – Major spoilers for Sinners below
Sinners puts a new spin on vampire movies, but the Ryan Coogler-directed horror movie also includes some magic elements that might go unnoticed on first watch. In Sinners, Michael B. Jordan portrays identical twin brothers Smoke and Stack, two former Chicago gangsters who return home to Mississippi Delta to open a juke joint in 1932. Despite getting the money together and starting off strong on their first night in business, Smoke, Stack, and their friends find themselves facing a very unexpected attack by a horde of vampires, forcing them and a cluster of survivors to make a stand in the juke joint and fight them off until the sun rises.
Sinners opened to a phenomenal reception and strong commercial performance on its opening weekend, and marks the latest success in Coogler’s frequent partnership with Jordan following 2015’s Creed and 2018’s Black Panther. At face value, Sinners is a gripping vampire horror movie in a period setting with strong action, scares, and storytelling, but there’s another detail that hasn’t gotten as much attention in Sinners — that being the presence of Hoodoo lore and magic in the movie’s story by way of Smoke and Stack’s friend Annie (Wunmi Mosaku).
Sinners Makes Some Subtle Hints To Hoodoo Magic
Annie’s backstory as a Hoodoo witch of the delta region is kept relatively subtle in Sinners, with the movie emphasizing it the most prominently in the introductory sequence delving into Hoodoo lore and in Annie’s own (admittedly second-hand) knowledge of vampires. With that said, Sinners sprinkles in quite a few hints that Annie’s magic is the genuine article, as first seen in her reunion with Smoke. Annie specifically insists to Smoke that her magic kept him and Stack safe during their military service in World War I and in their time as gangsters in Capone-era Chicago. What’s interesting about this scene is the audio and picture quality undergoes a noticeable shift into a storm-like look and feel. This is the first hint of Annie’s Hoodoo magic as being rooted in nature, but Sinners takes it further.
After Cornbread (Omar Miller) is turned into a vampire and tries to re-enter the juke joint, it’s immediately clear to Smoke, Stack, Annie, and everyone else that something is off about him, including his sudden insistence that he be explicitly invited back into the club (an allusion to vampires not being able to enter a building without an invite in traditional lore). In this scene, Annie strongly admonishes Smoke not to grant Cornbread’s request. Though Smoke appears to eventually humor Cornbread by handing over his wage for the evening, Smoke is quickly able to ward off Cornbread’s attempt to bite and turn him. While it would be easy to attribute this to a combination of quick reflexes and playing it safe on Smoke’s part, the movie also seems to be hinting that Annie’s warning played a role in Smoke dodging Cornbread’s bite attempt.
The third big hints to Annie’s Hoodoo magic is seen in Sinners‘ vampire-human showdown in the juke joint, specifically when Smoke and Stack go head-to-head. With the strength granted by vampirism on his side, Stack quickly overpowers his brother, only for Smoke to gain the upper hand and spare his brother on the condition that he leave their cousin Sammie (Miles Canton) alone to live his life. A detail easily missed by the naked eye can be seen when Annie’s bag glows blue and actually repels Stack from Smoke during his assault. It’s the quickest but also most blatant detail of Annie’s Hoodoo magic in Sinners, indicating that her magic is not only real, but an effective counter against vampire attacks.
[RELATED – Sinners Just Changed the Way We Think of Movie Post-Credit Scenes ]
Sinners Has More Overt Hint to Magic In the Dance Scene (Strengthening the Hints to Annie’s Magic)
Sinners doesn’t hint to the presence of magic strictly through Annie, but also gets Sammie in on the magic game. As Sammie plays for the crowd on the juke joint’s first night in business, he literally summons the spirits of both the past and present into the establishment. Right alongside ’30s era musicians and bar patrons, Sinners‘ big musical scene also includes contemporary rappers and rock musicians clad in modern clothing, along with people from other countries and eras in the past such as Chinese acrobats and other cultures.
Sammie’s narration also speaks quite clearly about the power of music to act as a kind of portal to both the past and present. However, Sinners makes it literal, and in fact the motivation of the primary vampire antagonist Remmick (Jack O’Connell), who offers to turn Sammie and his friends into vampires — having already turned Stack, his girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Cornbread, and many others — forever free of the racism and mortal challenges they face, in exchange for using Sammie’s music as a bridge to bring back his deceased loved ones from Ireland. In this way, Sinners places most of its magical and supernatural focus upon Sammie’s music and the vampires, while keeping Annie’s Hoodoo magic more in the background to be discovered by sharp-eyed viewers as another subtle layer to the film.
Wunmi Mosaku Has Spoken of the Importance of Hoodoo Magic to the Story of Sinners
In addition to its veiled presence in Sinners, Hoodoo was also a key building block for Wunmi Mosaku in crafting her portrayal of Annie. Speaking to THR, Mosaku stated that she “did a lot of research into the Hoodoo practice and faith and how it’s derived from Voodoo and Ifá, the traditional Yoruba religion.” Mosaku elaborated that it also played a role in Sinners‘ portrayal of vampires, stating that “[Annie] says it herself that she’s only heard about vampires. She knows about Haints; she wears Haint Blue, and her shop is colored Haint Blue. So I did more research into what she believed and what she definitely knew about fixing spells and roots and prayer.”
Clearly, Hoodoo was a pillar in crafting Annie as a character Sinners, but the movie’s decision to keep it comparatively subtle demonstrates the complexity of the film as a very different kind of vampire movie. Annie’s Hoodoo background provides some clarity to her and the other characters about what the vampires they’re dealing with are, but it also opens up the magic-based canvas of Sinners far beyond what run-of-the-mill vampirism could offer. In Sinners, Hoodoo magic can push back on vampire attacks with the same effectiveness as silver, garlic, and sunlight, and it opens a world of possibilities for its potential role in any follow-up to Sinners even as it’s kept mostly in the shadows.
Sinners in now playing in theaters.
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