Movie Post: Sinners

I just got done eating a dinner of scrambled tofu with tortillas and a side of fruit, and I am writing this post because I am still processing the movie I just saw, and writing helps me get my thoughts out. Honestly, I hope I get a good sleep tonight because I went to the 5 o’clock showing of Sinners and it was good but HELLA scary. To be honest, I don’t like horror movies. I had a traumatic experience as a kid going through Blockbuster (for those who were still embryos and fetuses in the belly around the time of Blockbuster and never got to experience its magic, it was an American video store chain that went out of business unfortunately. For a lot of millennials, it was a key memory of our childhoods and something we often looked forward to). While some Blockbuster stores did a good job of keeping the kids and family movies away from the horror movies, one Blockbuster store did the opposite. My dad, sister and I would walk in, and I would have a hard time going through the video rental store without having some sort of panic attack. Surrounding me were creepy covers of movies like The Silence of the Lambs, Child’s Play and Friday the 13th. Even though I tried to focus on finding a kid’s movie to rent, I was so freaked out that I just wanted to get the heck out of Blockbuster and go home and cry and curl up in fetal position. Okay, I may be exaggerating, but I certainly wasn’t exaggerating about the anxiety I would feel going into Blockbuster during Halloween because all of the scary movies were being heavily advertised throughout the store.

However, I took a chance and decided to watch Sinners. I had seen the trailer and thought, Oh, no, this is way too scary. I am not seeing this. But then someone I knew texted me and told me that they recommended I see it because it was a really good movie. And honestly, at the end of a stressful workday, I just wanted to do something fun and not have to think about work, so I was willing to push my boundaries to see a scary movie. As someone who is highly sensitive to violent movies and tries to not watch too many (although I have seen quite a few, like The Last King of Scotland, Pan’s Labyrinth and Gladiator) this was a huge act of bravery for me. For the past four or five movies I have seen since coming back to a real-live movie theater after the lifting of the SARS-COVID-2 emergency declaration (note: I am aware that COVID is far from over and is still fairly transmissible, so I wore my N95 mask throughout Sinners because I was next to quite a few people who were not masked. I only took the mask off when I was eating my Nutter Butters and drinking a few sips of water), a lot of these movies show red band and scary movie previews. And I either have a mini-panic attack and scamper down the steps to the restroom until I calm down, or I cover my eyes (and ears, because the horror previews are LOUD) and chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo to calm down. I thought, If I can’t handle watching movie previews for 28 Years Later, Until Dawn and Drop, I probably should steer clear of Sinners. Watching the trailer was probably a warning sign for me to not go, but I went anyway, because like I said, I was tired and burned out at work and wanted to do something that wasn’t work-related, and going to the movie theater is something I enjoy doing from time to time.

I kind of wish I had brought my knitting to the movie theater, but I wanted to make the 5 o’clock showing since it was a matinee and only $6. Evening showings of movies are usually more expensive, and the gas tank of my car was running low, so I stopped to get gas. I was able to also share about my Buddhist practice with the cashier at the gas station. Whenever I share about Nichiren Buddhism with others, regardless of what religion they practice, I always feel happier. When I went to the cash register to ring up my Nutter Butters and Dasani water, I also gave the cashier a card with information about Nichiren Buddhism and Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. I felt happy after giving him a card about chanting.

I went over to my seat in the farthest row from the screen. I learned my lesson several years ago when I went to a showing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with my dad the summer before tenth grade, and we got to the theater too late and all of the seats except for the ones at the very front of the movie screen were taken. So, my dad and I had to sit in row A, which was right in front of the screen, so we couldn’t really enjoy the movie because our eyes (and necks) were so strained from looking at the movie screen. It was so close that I really couldn’t zoom out and watch the movie from a comfortable distance. I left the theater with a headache, and a much-needed visit to the eye doctor in case my vision got damaged.

I found myself rather anxious at first about watching Sinners because I haven’t seen a lot of horror movies, and so I went into the restroom and took a few deep breaths. When I got into the theater house to watch Sinners, I found myself in company with a lot of people on my row, which in this particular instance was good, because I wouldn’t want to watch a horror movie alone in a movie theater. A comedy or drama, yes. Horror, no. I sat in the theater and followed suit when I saw my fellow moviegoers resting their legs on the recliners of the movie seats. I pushed the button on the side and rested my feet on the recliner. One of the previews I walked into was for a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio called One Battle After Another. When that finished, the preview for Final Destination: Bloodlines began. Thankfully, I knew what to expect because I “watched” the trailer. I put the “watch” in parentheses because “watching” a supernatural horror for me looks like closing my eyes/ covering the phone screen so that I don’t have to actually watch the trailer itself but instead listen to it. It allows me to be scared by the sound effects of screaming and jump scares rather than actually see the decapitations, impaling and other gnarly gruesome stuff that is shown in the trailer. The minute “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” by Etta James was playing, and the family was making lemonade in their backyard, I closed my eyes and groaned, “Ugh.” Of course, what do you expect? If you’re going to see a supernatural horror like Sinners, it’s only fair that the previews are scary, too. But I still found even just listening to the screams and other scary stuff in the Final Destination: Bloodlines trailer was enough to get my heart racing (in a stressful way.) I sat through the two minutes of that trailer with my eyes closed, and I’m sure glad I did, even though others around me watched the trailer. I have realized over time that my threshold for violence and gore in movies is going to be different from other people’s thresholds, so I am responsible for setting boundaries for myself around what kind of content or media I consume. Once I watch that kind of intense gory content, it’s really hard for me to un-see it.

But I am digressing, so let’s talk about the movie. The movie takes place in the 1930s Mississippi, and it opens up with a young man walking into a church, his clothes bloodied, and his face worn. The young man is carrying an acoustic guitar, and when he walks into the wooden church-house and his father, a preacher, sees him come in, you know that there has been some trouble and something traumatic has happened to this young man. Sammie, also known as “Preacher Boy”, aspires to be a blues musician. He has the talent, the voice, and the soul to become one. However, his father disapproves, and admonishes Sammie for his love of blues music, which his father considers to be immoral “devil’s music.” Sammy refuses to listen to his father, and his father warns him that he is “dancing with the devil” by playing blues music and that he is going to unleash a demonic force if he continues to play the blues. Sammie refuses to listen to his father, and sets out with his cousins, twin brothers named Smoke and Stack who come back to Mississippi after doing business in Chicago and decide to open a juke joint for the members of their community. Mary, who is a Black woman passing for white, is Stack’s ex-girlfriend and confronts him for leaving her. Stack and Smoke recruit members of the community to help them open the juke joint, including a Chinese American couple, Smoke’s estranged wife named Annie and others. Sammie plays guitar for Smoke and Stack, and they praise him for his musical talent. While Smoke and Stack are getting ready for the big opening of the juke joint, a ragged young white vampire named Remmick jumps out of nowhere and arrives at the home of a white couple. He convinces them that he needs to stay with them because he is escaping a dire situation and is helpless. The couple ends up believing him and takes Remmick into their home. Remmick then turns them into vampires. Meanwhile, at the juke joint, Sammie gives a soulful blues performance on his guitar and the sound of his guitar summons Remmick and the now-turned vampire couple.

Remmick and the white couple approach the juke joint and try to convince Smoke, Stack and the people of the Black community running the juke joint that they want to join the party and play music for them. At first Smoke, Stack and his friends don’t trust these vampires, but then Mary decides to go talk to them since she passes for white and can somehow figure out whether these people are who they say they are. However, things take a turn when Mary comes back to the party after talking with the vampires, having turned into a vampire herself. She kills Stack and turns him into a vampire. Remmick turns the other Black people at the joint into vampires, leaving Smoke and Preacher Boy to fight off all of the vampires. The scenes where the people turned into vampires was pretty gruesome and terrifying, but somehow, I was able to sit through all of these bloody scenes. Not that I didn’t think it was gross, but I had read about the movie content on Does the Dog Die and Kids in Mind before seeing Sinners, so I kind of knew what to expect. I know, you think, reading a parent’s guide before going to see a movie takes the fun out of watching the movie. But to be honest, I don’t like jump scares, so knowing which violent content I could expect when seeing the movie helped me feel somewhat (if not totally) prepared for all of the scary stuff that happens in the movie.

Even though it was a scary movie and I tried to do something relaxing after watching Sinners, it truly was a powerful film. I saw Ryan Coogler’s directing work for the Black Panther movies, which Michael B. Jordan also stars in. Also, I love the actress Hailee Steinfeld, so that is also partly why I wanted to go see the movie (she was in a coming-of-age movie I really love called The Edge of Seventeen, where she plays Nadine, a clinically depressed teen who hates high school and loses her best friend when her friend starts dating Nadine’s brother. I have seen it three times and it still touches me each time.) One thing I really loved (and that made me want to get up and dance) was the movie’s film score, produced by Ludwig Goransson, who produced the film score for the Black Panther movies. I bobbed my head, I sang along, and I swayed to each blues song that the character, Sammie “Preacher Boy”, played on his guitar. I didn’t grow up listening to blues that much, to be honest, but as I have gotten older, I have developed more appreciation for the blues, especially after watching the movie Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. I have started getting into B.B. King and Muddy Waters lately. A famous blues musician makes a cameo at some point in Sinners, and as he strummed, played and belted out the blues, I felt as if the musician was pulling out the pain from my soul and casting a spell on me, because I was practically dancing in my recliner seat to the blues music. The movie shows how powerful blues is in the tradition of African American music. The movie takes place during the 1930s in the Jim Crow South, and music is a key avenue for the Black community in the film to express their pain, their joy and other human emotions. Music feeds the soul, and as I was watching the people dance in the juke joint, I felt like these people in the movie were feeding my soul through their powerful performances of the blues.

Honestly, the last vampire movie I saw was Twilight, so I really wasn’t prepared for how terrifying those vampires in Sinners were actually going to be. Unlike Edward Cullen, the vampires in Sinners don’t sparkle. They look terrifying, and I know a lot of you reading this are probably rolling your eyes, like If you are going to be scared of vampires, then why the heck did you even go see this movie?!? As someone who doesn’t watch a lot of movies with blood, I was surprised that I was able to sit through the entire movie without closing my eyes when I saw the characters bleeding and baring their vampire teeth and sucking the life out of the human characters and turning them into vampires. The blood gushing out of people’s bodies was intense, but I think what helped me get through the gross bloody scenes was reminding myself that at the end of each day, Hailee Steinfeld, Michael B. Jordan, Omar Miller and the rest of the Sinners cast are not real vampires. They are human beings who are doing their job as actors to make us feel all the fear and other emotions that come from watching a suspenseful movie like Sinners. And no one is actually dripping blood or having graphic wounds. It is prosthetics. Doesn’t make it any less scary, but it was a great thing to try and tell myself while getting through Sinners. Also, mad props to the makeup and special effects team on this movie.