Ryan Coogler’s new movie Sinners is set in 1932. This means that its characters, including twin brothers nicknamed Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), might well have had the chance to see the movie Dracula, which was released the year before. It’s possible that Smoke and Stack would have been too busy working for Chicago gangsters to catch a movie; then again, John Dillinger died a couple of years later just outside a movie theater, so who knows. But when Smoke and Stack encounter a group of vampires later in the film, it’s Smoke’s former love Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), more connected to both religion and mysticism, who’s up on the lore: sunlight, stakes to the heart, maybe garlic.
Though the vampire figures who show up at the doors of the juke joint in Sinners have a ringleader, they present themselves as a collective – a hive mind thirsty to collect more souls, preaching a kind of equality amongst the damned. That is to say, they’re more of an army than the seductive loneliness seen in Dracula and its variations like Nosferatu. For those vampires, turning their victims seems secondary to draining them; sometimes impossible, even. Sinners follow a different tradition, of the vampire siege movie.
In some ways, the vampire siege picture is something of a utilitarian solution to the problem of how difficult it is to top Dracula – or make a Dracula-like figure scary after so many versions have graced the screen over the years. Unlike the Wolf Man or the Invisible Man, two of his eventual frenemies in the Universal Monsters series of the 1930s through the 1950s, Dracula is a specific person, his identity forever entwined with his monstrous status. The Wolf Man in the Universal series is usually Lawrence Talbot, true, but Talbot isn’t the final word on werewolfism, nor was he even the first at this particular studio; Universal did a werewolf movie called Werewolf of London in its early monster days, before The Wolf Man, while they didn’t do much in the way of non-Dracula vampire movies. For years, even as movie vampires branched beyond the Count, he towered above the others in his iconography.
The idea of a whole mess of vampires, rather than a figure of singular, Drac-like evil, seemed to gain more traction in the wake of George Romero’s zombie movies, which often feature human beings holed up in a western-style outpost. It stands to reason that vampires would make stronger opponents for this kind of stand-off; zombies may be relentless and inexorable, but they also can’t really strategize. Vampires, on the other hand, can be crafty in groups, a differently shaped form of manipulation than the solo Dracula model. The Stephen King book Salem’s Lot (adapted into a TV miniseries as well as a recent, quite bad feature version) uses a vampire collective, and The Lost Boys riffs on that a bit with its teenage vamp gang and “head vampire.”
But a pair of later vampire movies took the vampire siege closer to Assault on Precinct 13 territory, and feel like a stronger influence on what Sinners is up to, at least logistically. 30 Days of Night, from 2007, has elements of both zombie movies and alien movies, forcing a group of humans to contend with vamps who invite a small Alaskan town embarking on a thirty-day period without a sunrise. (The vampires are sort of like the aliens in Pitch Black, which themselves are knocked off from Aliens.) Even closer to Sinners is From Dusk Till Dawn, a Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino where a pair of criminal brothers happen upon a Mexican roadhouse that’s secretly a vampire-run trap for unwitting truckers and travelers. As in Sinners, a small group of humans with their backs to the wall must try to survive the night.
Sinners takes the vampire-siege movie in a new direction by emphasizing the cultural togetherness that the vampires encroach upon. In a non-monster movie like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, the bad guys are attacking a government-sanctioned facility; in Dawn of the Dead, backing humanity into mall survival functions as a dark joke, practically a ritual humiliation. In From Dusk Till Dawn, fair play or not, it’s the vamps’ territory that humans stumble into. Even 30 Days of Night, while technically an invasion, involves a perfect vampire feeding ground. The juke joint in Sinners, though, has just been spruced up and reclaimed for the Black community. Though the vampires are specifically not a one-to-one analog to a Ku Klux Klan type of hate group—the Klan rears its ugly head separately—they’re definitely encroaching on another group’s Jim Crow-era attempt to establish space for themselves.
And unlike Dracula-style vampire stories, vampire-siege movies place more emphasis on the zombie-like “turning” of victims, recruiting them into an undead army that’s typically more purposeful than the shuffling, mindless zombie masses. That factor makes Sinners more thought-provoking than a simple white-vampires-versus-Black-humans allegory; the movie feels like it’s addressing the knotty idea of American assimilation, while past vampire-related allegories have treated them (quite imperfectly) as aligned with minority groups, rather than a multiracial coalition.
Without giving too much away, Sinners also utilizes a typical vampire-siege reversal of the attempt to defeat evil. In many versions of Dracula, a group of men band together and combine forces in an attempt to stop him; movies about vampire groups almost always amount to the many making underdogs of the few, with the standard gathering of makeshift weapons. Even as they try to puff themselves up into vampire hunters, the humans are unavoidably the hunted, and the best strategy is to outlast, rather than out-muscle. Sinners makes that resilience part of its historical context. Almost inevitably, vampire-siege movies end with at least a few survivors; Coogler uses those slim odds to illustrate a grim and less supernatural form of miracle.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
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