“Sinners” is a hoodoo movie, deeply and unapologetically so. In making the film set in the 1930s Mississippi Delta, director Ryan Coogler and producer Zinzi Evans were intentional about displaying the real culture of this region I call home, and they leaned on scholars such as Yvonne Chireau to explore conjure as a sophisticated spiritual technology. For instance, we see the hoodoo in the sacred symmetry of twins Smoke and Stack, brilliantly played by Michael B. Jordan. Smoke and Stack mirror the Marassa, those divine twins in the Haitian Vodou and West African Yoruba Ife tradition who navigate the world as a singular, divided soul. They move with a grace older than the roads they travel, their every choice colored by myths finally given flesh, blood and consequence.
Here in the Black South, the speculative is more than a genre. To make a film that speaks of conjure or haints is to engage in a deep cultural reclamation.
This grounding brings a visceral magic to the screen. “Sinners,” for good reason, has been nominated for a record-breaking 16 Oscars, including for best picture.
Here in the Black South, the speculative is more than a genre. It is an inherited truth. To make a film that speaks of conjure or haints, as Coogler did, is to engage in a deep cultural reclamation. When “Sinners” embraces this, we see the ancient future in action: the understanding that ancestral knowledge is the key to navigating worlds yet to come. Coogler, who grew up in California, wrote “Sinners” to honor his Mississippi ancestors, including his uncle James, who loved the Delta blues and regaled the young Coogler with stories about his home. Coogler’s vision trusts the ancestors enough to let the spirits walk alongside the living, just as they always have in our free verse and folktales.
There is a persistent, hollow noise in our cultural discourse that dismisses Black American culture as a happy accident rather than what it is: a deliberate, brilliant construction. Our traditions are too often discussed as found items rather than legacies forged in unique crucibles. Our culture was born from blood and bone, and it has produced high art forms crafted by those who turned survival into a song. Nothing about Black Americans’ spiritual and cultural traditions are accidental, no matter our geography.
But place matters. Regional specificity is the antidote to the monolith myth that wrongly renders the Black culture in the Delta and the Gullah-Geechee Sea Islands and Appalachia as one and the same. Coogler captures the authenticity of the Detlta with his details, like the tamale sign in the backdrop, a quiet nod to the intersecting bloodlines — Indigenous, African and European — that created the creative genius of the Delta. Whether it’s the Chows, whose presence is an acknowledgement that Chinese families have long been embedded in the community fabric of the Delta, or the compacts made by the Choctaw leader Chayton ( Nathaniel Arcand), our history is itself a crossroads. When we see sibling relationships and rituals treated with reverence, we see Coogler’s refusal to whitewash our origins.
Perhaps most significantly, Coogler’s screenplay dramatizes the 1930 Delta’s spiritual landscapes with an elegant precision, refusing the easy binary of “demonic” vs. “devout.” We see it in the bitter resentment of the Irish vampire, Remmick — portrayed with frightening intensity by Jack O’Connell — who carries the scars of a native faith forcibly stripped away. He’s a contrast to Sammie Moore, played by Miles Caton, who emerges from the sanctuary of a praying family. This foundation of faith grants him the agency to choose his own vocation, proving the film is a meditation on the varied ways we reach for the divine to stay strong.
Nothing about Black Americans’ spiritual and cultural traditions are accidental, no matter our geography.
I think of the Mississippi Delta as a living, breathing archive, a landscape where the river’s curve mimics the spine of a people who refused to be broken. In the quiet theater of our lives, we often look for mirrors, but what we truly need are portals.
One of the film’s most breathtaking movements — the jook joint musical sequence — becomes such a portal. As the ancestors pulse alongside the living to the notes of Raphael Saadiq, Boo Mitchell and Rhiannon Giddens, it proves the difference between a ghost and a memory: one haunts the house, the other haunts the blood.
Black American cultural contributions are among the nation’s most significant exports, but the fruit is too often severed from its roots, and we see our rituals absorbed into the mainstream without a nod to the specific communities who nurtured them. We must demand visions such as Coogler’s that understand that the spirit remembers what the map forgets. American cinema needs more of this raw truth — stories that pulse in the blood and set spirits free. We don’t need endless remakes. We need the conjure, the haints and the original hope that comes from knowing exactly who we are. Coogler believes in the alchemy of cinema and sound, and in “Sinners,” he bottled that lightning, letting the frequency of the Delta resonate through the theater and into our hearts. By the time the lights come up, we carry the weight of that geography. Even when the world tries to wash the records away, the river remembers. Our stories are a laying on of hands, a calling up of a frequency that resonates in the marrow. They remind us that some magic is real, rooted deep in the soil and carried on the music, waiting for the right hands to call it forth. Vision made manifest is not just about what we see on a screen; it is about the stories we have always told ourselves to stay whole.
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning author, poet and editor whose work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and the genius of the Mississippi Delta. Her most recent book is "Mojorhythm" (Third Man Books, 2025). An Octavia E. Butler Award winner, she edited the World Fantasy Award-winning anthologies, "Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the Africa Diaspora," "Dark Matter: Reading the Bones," and "Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction." 
