Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
During Easter we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, hoping for that promise of life restored, healed, and renewed. What then in recent pop culture could be more relevant than . . . vampires?
Perhaps you thought I was going to say, the final season of The Chosen?
The Episcopal priest Paul Zahl reportedly said that the most Christian movies are about vampires. The vampire’s modern fictional father, Bram Stoker, exploited the story’s sacramental and liturgical icons no less than its libidinous seductions.
Classic vampire movies are rooted in a sacramental worldview, and the power of the holy. They take evil seriously. Even though John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998) and The Blade films (1998-2004) mocked or naturalized the genre, they still wrapped themselves in the baroque cinema of Christian ritual and sacraments.
We may now be enjoying a golden age of Black American writers and directors using the horror movie to put all that heritage to use confronting the history of American racism. This not only includes Jordan Peele but HBO’s Lovecraft Country, and Little Marvin’s two seasons of Them on Amazon Prime.
Ryan Coogler’s new vampire movie, Sinners, follows the success of his Black Panther movies. Sinners does lots of things, maybe too many. His drama of a vampire attack descends on a start-up juke joint in rural Mississippi in the Jim Crow South of 1932. Coogler has chosen an era of almost overwhelming drama in American history: after the Great War, then the Red Spring of 1921, the resurgence of the KKK in and outside the South, of Black Americans escaping Jim Crow and share cropping to set forth on the Great Migration. By 1932, the year before Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, the Great Depression was reaching its nadir for all Americans. It’s almost an overdetermined setting for dread.
I’ll concentrate on the movie’s final third where Coogler plants the story firmly in a spiritual struggle. You discover the outrage, opportunism, and hard-earned skills of twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who served in an all-Black combat unit in World War I (the US Army wasn’t desegregated until after 1948). They learned their anger from the Jim Crow South, their killing skills from modern combat, and their entrepreneurial aggression working for Al Capone in Chicago. With a load of money they return home to turn an old barn into a nightclub.
In modern vampire tales the leader of the undead often comes from outside America. Coogler’s Remmick is white, but not Eastern European; he’s Irish. He’s immigrated to the US to recruit not an “army” of bloodsuckers, but to create a community. Remmick began life in Ireland’s colonized poverty, and so identifies with Mississippi’s Black citizens. He seems to preach a twisted, frightening but seductive version of the Good News. Offer us hospitality—invite us inside—and we’ll make you powerful, unafraid, immortal. The world’s old bigotry we suffer and perpetrate will evaporate.
Coogler subtly reminds us that Mississippi’s citizens are not only African American and white, but Chinese, and members of the Choctaw Nation. The vampire community doesn’t see ethnicity, skin color, class, or gender, recruiting Black, white, Chinese, everyone. They share one another’s minds and memories, Remmick pleading, “I want your stories, and I want your songs. And you’re going to have mine.”
This promise of resurrection and a new world of unity, of life everlasting sounds like Revelation 7:9 describing the vast range of assembled people of all origins, races and languages. As morning prayer in the Book of Common Prayer declares, “O God, you have made of one blood all the peoples of the earth, and sent your blessed Son to preach peace to those who are far off and to those who are near.”
The Irish vampire promises an immediate transformed world. When the inhabitants look around at the world of 1932, in and outside America, the vampire’s immediate gift of new life and the end of prejudice seems so compelling. What is the evidence that racism, assault, degradation, and the KKK’s terror campaign—all present in Coogler’s movie—will end anytime soon? As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time:
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death, ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
The vampire conquest of death seems like a parody. The price is blood, life, and its peace won by ravenous violence. And what about the church? One of Coogler’s main characters is the son of a pastor leading a small congregation. In the few brief scenes the church seems more an outpost, perhaps a hiding place against the world’s terrors rather than the staging ground from which we send one another to live out the Gospel. The church in Sinners is mostly shackled and ineffectual.
The movie’s spiritual hope rests in music, the juke joint its parish. In one of the most heartfelt scenes you’ll see in a movie, a young blues guitarist conjures the past and future of African and African American music, from the blues to funk to hip hop. The music summons the vampires who begin performing their own Irish and Scottish folk tunes. Both traditions highlight suffering and loss, homesickness and longing. People collect around the music, whose rhythms and stories form a symphony binding them to ancestors and descendants, offering a healing far more enticing than the church’s hymns. The music depicts communities linked. The African origins of the African-American spiritual tradition, the DNA of most American popular music, parallels the experiences of oppression, loss and resistance found in the Celtic folk tradition.
A vampire movie must climax in a fight between the living and undead. The survivors in Sinners prepare for death by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Shockingly the vampires join them, as Remmick explains, “My oppressor gave that to me too, but I still find it a source of comfort.” Coogler was raised in the Black Baptist church and attended Catholic school, and all this feels like a picture of Good News more powerful than evil, enduring beyond betrayal and assault, uncorrupted by the exploitation of indigenous peoples.
The vampire invasion is a bloody revolution, a conquest. By coincidence I saw the movie as I was reading the Mennonite theologian Gordon Matties’ commentary on Joshua. Matties describes how Joshua is a story of an apparent conquest, highlighting the human and spiritual cost of violence. He explained how easily God’s Word– delivering the Covenant and the Land, even to define “Israel” in relation to the “nations”–had evolved into claiming that God commands sacred violence and demands the annihilation of the enemy.
In Sinners we experience impatience with God’s justice, generosity and mercy. We’re tempted to turn our hand to the sword and speed things up. We confess Christ’s promise that “the Kingdom is within you” but the world doesn’t often look or feel like that.
The penultimate part of Sinners lets us vicariously imagine life without bigotry, fear of death, disunity. But like all human solutions it costs us. I guess the “sinners” in the title are everyone who longs for justice, redemption, and healing, for reconciliation and still struggles impatiently with what it will cost us.
The Christian Gospel haunts us with its own costs: the cost of Christ’s own life, the cost of following Jesus by bearing our own cross to the place of our death, of dying to ourselves, that living is Christ and dying is gain. The movie starkly sets at odds the desire for justice, for utopia, and our willingness to turn to violence to resist the world’s cruelty. We tire of disappointed hopes and of doing good. We long for faster and less painful responses; we want solutions. Psalm 115, especially verse 8, reminds us of our tendency to make idols of the often hidden God we confess and worship. We Christians even resort to idolatrous versions of the very Icon of God, Jesus Christ. Our community, the church worldwide, won and secured by the life, death and resurrected Christ, must fight against manufactured versions of our Savior and the Good News.
Jesus before us passed through this way of life to death. Once he told his followers that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood (John 6). Many rejected such repulsive commands. So Jesus asked the twelve, “’Do you also wish to go away?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’” As hard as these words are, our lives depend on them.
Those in Christ face the duty of being “living sacrifice[s], holy and acceptable to God” demanding our love be genuine: patient, hospitable to strangers, not returning evil for evil, zealous only in care for one another and others. But Paul knew this was hard, so very hard: “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18). Is it really possible? The promise rests not on our capacities, but our hope and trust in divine power and graciousness enlivening us with God’s own power of love towards peace. The prayer for the morning from the Book of Common Prayer concludes thus:
Grant that people
everywhere may seek after you and find you; bring the
nations into your fold; pour out your Spirit upon all flesh;
and hasten the coming of your kingdom;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
