Ryan Saw Sinners and Really Wants to Talk About It

Somehow, Maya and I avoided all the spoilers and finally made a date night to see Sinners in the theatre last night. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, and I’ve got a lot to say.

Now, I know I’m probably not breaking any new ground here. I’m sure historians, music scholars, and Southern studies professors are already putting together entire course syllabuses around this movie. And rightfully so. But I loved Sinners so much that I feel compelled to put some thoughts down. It speaks to so many things I care about. I love that it’s set in the Mississippi Delta, specifically Clarksdale, which is close to home for me. I’ve made many trips down there, visiting the Delta Blues Museum and have caught a few sets at Ground Zero Blues Club. I love walking around and looking at all the murals and artwork. The music, the setting, the subject matter - it all hits home for me. This movie didn’t just entertain me, it moved me.

Lately, I’ve been reading Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music while working on my Blues: Lore & Legends anthology comic. Because of that, Sinners felt like it was made just for me. As a horror thriller, the movie is powerful on its own. It delivers eerie tension and emotional depth, but what really struck me was how deeply rooted it is in Southern history, Black folklore, and the spiritual and cultural legacy of the Delta. The more I think about it, the more I realize how layered and meaningful this film really is.

My wife even leaned over to me at one point and whispered, "That looks exactly like the panels you've been drawing." She was talking about my comic story Flames, Fate & a Wicked Woman, where I re-tell the famous story about B.B. King running back into a burning juke joint to save his guitar. Watching Sinners, I saw echoes of the same firelight and fear, the same tension between what we run from and what we can't leave behind.

The movie touches on so many of the themes I’ve been studying and exploring. It addresses assimilation and forced religious conversion to Christianity, both for African slaves and Irish immigrants. It brings in Hoodoo and West African spirituality, referencing powerful figures like Papa Shango and Papa Legba. These elements are not just flavor or aesthetic. They form the spiritual backbone of the story and remind us of the hidden beliefs that survived beneath the surface of the dominant culture.

There’s also a reverence for the blues that runs through the whole film. It doesn’t just use the music as a soundtrack, it treats it like a character. You can feel the myth of Robert Johnson and the crossroads hanging in the air, along with the age-old idea of the blues being “the devil’s music.” Robert Johnson, of course, was the inspiration behind the Thrill mascot Crestwood Blues. But the film doesn’t reduce these ideas to clichés. Instead, it reclaims them as expressions of identity, resistance, and memory.

In another one of my stories, The Last Fall of Tommy Hawk, I incorporate Choctaw spiritual beliefs to explain the origin of the Muck Monster. I was pleasantly surprised to see the film include a brief but meaningful nod to the Choctaw people, who originally inhabited the land where the story takes place. The film acknowledges that the ground itself carries memory, and that those who once protected it are still present, even if only briefly.

Sinners also addresses the trauma of the Jim Crow South, the violence of the Klan, and the push and pull of the Great Migration. It captures the weight of sharecropping poverty and the systems that kept people bound to the land long after slavery had ended in name only. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think of Alan Lomax, who recorded the voices of blues musicians for the Library of Congress while being hunted by the FBI. His work preserved a history that institutions wanted to erase, and that same tension - between truth and suppression - is alive throughout the film.

There’s even a spiritual struggle within the film that reminded me of Son House, who battled with his roles as both preacher and bluesman. That duality - sacred and profane, holy and haunted - is deeply present in the characters who populate Sinners. It refuses to give us easy answers and instead asks us to sit with the contradiction.

For anyone who loves horror that digs deeper, music that carries memory, and stories that wrestle with history instead of hiding from it, this movie is worth your time. I’ll be watching it again. Probably more than once.