Bluegrass, Irish Vampires and…16 Oscar Nominations?
- annalikeswriting
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
A tribute to 1930s blues, the Mississippi delta and the spine-chilling supernatural.
By: Anna Oswald
Released right in time for Summer 2025, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” was a torchbearer in Hollywood’s new wave of horror, placing just as much emphasis on history and culture as it does to the scare factor. The movie was immediately revered by audiences for its enticing storyline, complex historical folklore and its awe-inspiring, eclectic score.
Since its release, the “Sinners” buzz has done anything but dwindle. The movie was nominated for 16 Oscar awards, making it the most nominated film in Oscar history, and it took home four: Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), Best Original Screenplay (Ryan Coogler), Best Cinematography (Autumn Durald Arkapaw) and Best Original Score.
But who are the masterminds behind “Sinners,” and how exactly did they bring this masterpiece to life?
The film was directed by Oakland native Ryan Coogler, who is no newcomer to directing critically acclaimed films. He wrote and directed “Creed,” “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”
Coogler’s calling to filmmaking hatched when his father took him to see a Californian coming-of-age story (“Boyz n the Hood” by John Singleton) at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, a little over a decade before Coogler graduated from the film program at University of Southern California, the alma mater of Singleton himself. His work combines his early experiences with popular cinema, alongside aesthetic preferences he learned at USC.
While Coogler has always enjoyed horror, he has admitted that traditional European folklore is uncharted territory for him; however, as he told the New York Times, the making of an American horror story set in the past allowed Coogler to “bring fresh meaning to a character with which the public is exceedingly familiar.” His idea for “Sinners” came when he was listening to “Wang Dang Doodle” — a blues classic about a juke joint party (sound familiar?).
A beacon for “Sinners” was Coogler’s uncle, James, whom Coogler describes as “the oldest man [he] knew,” and who gushed about the San Francisco Giants, tales of the Mississippi and blues music. Coogler had often considered blues “old man music,” but after Uncle James’s passing, he played the blues to “conjure [his] uncle,” he stated to IndieWire. Hearing these songs again helped Coogler re-imagine Mississippi tales alongside his grief — a place he described as one of “fortitude…artistic wonder…[and] cultural wonder.”
While the characters (polar opposite twins Smoke and Stack, ready to run the Mississippi Delta just like Chicago, and “Preacher Boy” Sammie, underarmed for the life of his dreams with just his Dobro guitar) weave a living, breathing Mississippi narrative, one outlier many noticed in the film is the villain Remmick, a bloodthirsty Irish vampire played by Jack O’ Connell.
The centuries-old antagonist lived through years of oppression in his native Ireland. He then sets his eyes on the film’s “Preacher Boy”, Sammie Moore, due to his musical talent, which Remmick sees as a gift for the taking to grow closer to his Irish ancestors. Coogler admitted that he is “obsessed with Irish folk music.” In fact, he told The Wrap that “...it’s not known how much crossover there is between African American culture and Irish culture and how much that stuff’s loved in our community.”
Coogler also told IndieWire that he considers the Delta blues as “America’s most important contribution to global popular culture” and perhaps even “America’s most important artistic contribution to humanity.”
No grand film is complete without a spine-chilling score to accompany it. Few film composers can amount to the unique style and impressive range of Ludwig Göransson, who wrote the music for all of Coogler’s films, including “Sinners,” in addition to “Oppenheimer” and Christopher Nolan’s upcoming “The Odyssey.” Coogler and Göransson actually visited the Mississippi Delta during the early stages of shooting, accompanied by Göransson’s father — an avid lover of Delta blues ever since he saw a live performance in Sweden.
Ludwig Göransson was born in Sweden as the son of a guitar teacher. While his father's teachings veered him in the direction of pursuing a music career as a child, he considered his fate to be sealed when he heard “Enter Sandman” by Metallica at eight or nine years old. While he was interested primarily in heavy metal in his youth, he admits he was not aware that “all music — you know, even heavy metal — comes from the blues,” he told Classic FM.
Göransson describes the score for Sinners as “a very personal score.” It starts off very acoustically: Göransson wrote almost the entire score of the film exclusively on one of the few remaining traditional Dobro guitars in the world. As the story progresses, the score “transitions into heavy metal and orchestra and strings and big drums.”
The most notable song on the score is, without a doubt, “Magic We Do (Surreal Montage),” coupled with the scene showing the twins’ juke joint party metamorphosing into a mesh of different cultures and time periods. Göransson calls the song a “beautiful, surreal music montage” that gave him goosebumps when he read it in the script for the first time. This “out of body experience,” as Göransson describes it, begins as a performance, but then goes into “all these different music genres.” “It goes into the past, African music and it goes into the future with, you know … a DJ, a blues funk guitarist, electric guitarist playing”, in a “surreal, dreamy state,”he told Classic FM.
Göransson added that the iconic scene took around two months to plan and film, calling it a “very complicated IMAX shot.” Göransson himself brought his own rig and team to DJ during the scene, among dozens of other musicians and masked, adorned performers.
While the acoustic guitar lays the playful and traditional tone of the score, Göransson confirmed that the other instruments contribute to the “feeling of danger.” The strings and orchestra portray the development of raw danger itself, while the organ marks the transition between the characters’ pious status quo and the terrifying “element that portrays Remmick later on,” he stated. The guitar tones also shift from acoustic to electric as the plot delves deeper into hysteria.
Ending the evening of March 15 with a whopping four Academy Awards, every element of “Sinners” truly surpassed the parameters for an unforgettable film. The performances, the attention to colloquial detail, the interweaving of cultures and just the right amount of jumpscares made the film a new zenith in modern horror.
Anna Oswald is a Microbiology and Cell Science Major and French Minor, as well as an online writer for Rowdy Magazine.