Sinners, a Great Vampire Movie

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Its current IMDb user rating is an excellent 7.8

^^^ Fair enough. I think Ryan Coogler is very creative but in an effort to build up the characters he might have dragged the first half of the movie so hence the IMDb user rating of 7-8 rating vs a more realistic 8-9...

I also suspect from watching reviews on youtube (there's literally hundreds) a lot of folks were expecting a full on vampire flick. But Remick's character doesn't actually arrive till halfway in the movie. Also watching horror fans reactions in real time I could see a lot of them either did not understand or felt comfortable with Jim Crow landscape of black Mississippi in 1932. As with "Lovecraft country", no amount of horror compares to 400 years of terror black Americans lived through. I'm guessing that wasn't a lesson horror fans wanted, they just wanted to see vampires.

Coogler's creativity is weaving a tapestry of realtime interplay between cultures in ethe backdrop of vampires is very clever. there's a spiritual element that likely went over people's heads that only makes sense if you have lived experience of being African American or Irish. the Irish culture/music/spirituality element was for me the most interesting (Coogler pays homage to his Irish ancestors). Irish folk in Ireland, posting on social media, definitely appreciated this. Both vampires and Halloween have their origin in pre-Christian Irish folklore (People mistakenly associate Vampires with Romania but that wasn't the inspiration for Bram Stoker who was Irish) . I won't say more as I will give away an important element of the film.

Coogler did his research. The earliest European stories on vampires come from Irish mythology of the Abhartach that dates back to 450 AD. Bram Stoker, who is also Irish, based his novel Dracula on this Irish legend of a cruel Irish Chieftain that drank blood kept coming back from the dead. But because Dracula was so popular and influential, because he set his novel in Eastern Europe and framed it within real East European history with Vlad The Impaler, people wrong think Vampires come out of East European mythology, when it actually originated from Irish mythology. So Coogler was not only paying tribute to how blues music influenced modern genres of music and how African traditions influenced African American culture, but he was also paying tribute to the Irish origins of vampires. Not only did the Irish have the earliest stories of vampires, they set up all the rules of vampires.

Indirectly connected
Halloween is also Irish.

On this night the veil between this world and the ‘otherworld’ was most thin, and spirits could cross into our world.

The masks and bonfires were used to scare spirits away. In Irish it was called ‘Samhain’ (pronounced ‘sow - in’)

I enjoyed it.