Sinners: what the vampire film reveals about supremacy and cultural appropriation across the Americas

The vampire story at the heart of Sinners opens up bigger questions about supremacy, cultural appropriation and resistance across the Americas. Zoe Marriage, Professor of Security and International Development at SOAS University of London, and Pauliana de Sousa, a capoeira professional and research consultant, bring their shared work on Brazilian arts, development and security to this reading of the film.

The Oscar-nominated movie Sinners is about more than vampires. It explores supremacy and the ways it exploits, appropriates and controls. In the film, racialised and marginalised communities are cast as ‘sinners’ by a society that criminalises and alienates them. It also shows how these communities navigate and contest the limited space available to them within systems of supremacy.

The Oscar-nominated movie Sinners is about more than vampires – it explores supremacy and the ways it exploits, appropriates and controls.

The storyline takes place over 24 hours, in which glimpses are given of the protagonists’ patchwork of loss and grieving for times, places and people. Religion, which shape-shifts in different cultural settings and practices, provides solace for some and exclusion for others. 

The film focuses on the significance of art – in this case music – to Black identity and community, and on the threat that such beauty can attract from outside. Its centrepiece is a blues performance by Sammie, a young blues prodigy and preacher’s son in Mississippi, played by Miles Caton. 

Through Sammie’s blues performance, Sinners shows music as a force that connects past and present, the old world and new world, and the living and the afterlife.

At the juke joint, his music dramatises a power that stretches across past, present and future, the old world and new world, and the living and the afterlife.

Capoeira, slavery and cultural appropriation in Brazil

These themes of supremacy and the appropriation of arts of African and indigenous heritage are relayed through experiences across other parts of the Americas.  

In Brazil, the Afro-Brazilian art of capoeira captures loss, longing and an ancestral homeland in its music, movement and ritual. It recounts histories of slavery and liberation, and developed among the under-classes in the early 20^th century. 

In Brazil, capoeira carries memories of slavery, resistance and an ancestral homeland through music, movement and ritual.

The fight in capoeira is tactical – operating through ruse and deceit in the space dominated by the stronger. For many practitioners, religion and spirituality are present in the rendition of Catholic incantations, and in the rhythms and prayers to the Candomblé pantheon of West African gods. 

Sinners is set in 1932. In Brazil, this was an era in which the dominant white classes were forging a new national identity in the wake the Brazilian Revolution and the establishment of the Second Republic. Whitening had been promoted through policies relating to immigration and inter-racial marriage in the late 19^th century, and the extensive racial mixing informed the notion of ‘racial democracy,’ which denied that race was relevant to opportunity in Brazil. 

Within a decade samba, an art practised by Afro-descendants, had become mainstream Brazilian culture. Restrictions on the once-illegal art of capoeira were lifted, and it was taught in military academies and increasingly to white, middle-class students. 

Black arts are celebrated amidst massive inequality and while police violence in racialised communities claims thousands of casualties a year.

These developments did not end racism in Brazil and set the stage for discussion about appropriation – by North Americans and Europeans, and most recently by Israeli capoeira players abusing capoeira’s resistance narrative to frame their victimhood. 

Debates about appropriation take place against a backdrop of a state and society that continues to criminalise, exploit and diminish people of Black and indigenous heritage. Black arts are celebrated amidst massive inequality and while police violence in racialised communities claims thousands of casualties a year.  

Why vampires are a metaphor for supremacy across the Americas

In the case of Sinners, the real force of its historical setting is to prompt the audience to reflect on continuities. In the USA, the policing by ICE operates like a vampire, instilling fear and distrust in communities and preying on the vulnerable. 

In the USA, the policing by ICE operates like a vampire, instilling fear and distrust in communities and preying on the vulnerable.

People are arrested on account of their apparent race or accent as extremist politics are normalised and broadcast by repetition and spectacle. In the Middle East, the USA asserts its supremacy through its explicit valorising of North American life over the lives of others, and through the exploitation of resources and manipulation of chaos and division. 

Do vampires exist? In Sinnners there is an explicit denial of the KKK a couple of scenes before the audience spies a white hood and cloak in a family home. 

The use of vampires provides a powerful analogy in unwrapping the contagion and participation that supremacy requires to operate.

The use of vampires provides a powerful analogy in unwrapping the contagion and participation that supremacy requires to operate. The vampires extend their reach by demanding to be invited into the space of their victims, who are then attacked and become vampires themselves. 

Those who escape are scarred – in Sammie’s case literally – by the devastation that exploitation and control impose. As such the analogy also provides for a detailed and painful examination of the varied costs at personal and collective levels that resistance involves.

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