Sinners.

When I was a teenager, my mom used to let me and my sisters pick a movie each from Blockbuster. We’d spend too long trying to pick our respective movies, would negotiate with ourselves and with each other to create a solid ensemble of entertainment for the week. I almost always picked something scary. Not gore scary because my OCD brain already has a tendency to imagine the worst possible outcome for any scenario—if, for example, I get a cat, what if one day I accidentally leave the door open, and the cat gets out, and on my way home from work, I see a flattened mark in the street, just to realize that it’s my very own—

So I avoid gore, but I loved a thriller, especially the kind that was popular when I was a teenager, movies where the world was always ending in mysterious and all-encompassing ways via a mist, a virus, a persistent darkness. People were trapped in buildings because the outside world was too much to endure. I watched them try to figure it out, and almost always, at least one of them survived, even if just so that the movie would not end in the nothingness of complete obliteration. (Once, in high school, only one of my friends stayed awake waiting for the characters to make it out of this particular filmic apocalypse, and she shouted when the movie was over, angry, because what was the point of watching this whole thing when no one had survived?)

All of this to say, I wasn’t going to see Sinners because it looked too gory. Vampire movies are inevitably bloody, and though I’ll take fantastical horror over realist horror any day, I don’t have much capacity for any kind of voluntary intake of violence these days. There’s too much going on.

But then everybody started talking about the movie. My friends starting talking about it and my friends’ friends and I overheard people talking about it at coffee shops, on the bus, and New York Magazine was talking about it and all of Instagram. I do not like scary movies, but even more than that, I don’t like missing out. I used to be someone who only wanted to watch something after it wasn’t popular anymore, but the older I get, the more I’ve become interested in being in touch with the conversation around something while it’s happening, to watch it unfold in real time.

I am really glad that I went to go see Sinners. It was a little scary but not too scary, very gory but in a way that probably won’t give you nightmares, and more importantly (most importantly?), it’s such a gorgeous ode to Black people and Black culture.

Okay, well, halfway through this movie, it turns into a campy vampire slasher film, which is fine and arguably very fun, but before that, you get all of these character portraits as the film assembles its team. These characters are not just vehicles through which we get to the vampire violence but are complicated and thoroughly thought through. They’re funny in their own ways and flawed. We get glimpses of who they are when they’re alone, but especially when they’re together, when they can play off of each other in dialogue that’s so imaginatively rendered that I keep rehearsing it to myself.

I don’t want to give too much away, in case you haven’t seen it yet, but I will say that I didn’t expect to sob in a Michael B. Jordan vampire movie set in the 1930s and that I, in fact, sobbed enough to feel embarrassed, to look around at the people on either side of me (strangers) and hope I wasn’t distracting them too much.

I was crying because I wrote a whole dissertation on Black representation and how often it gets flattened to better fit Hollywood’s main (read: White) audience’s expectations of Black people. I wrote about how important and striking it is when filmmakers and writers and other artists break through that ever-tightening mold. I wrote about it for months and then I was seeing it in front of me happening again, the miracle of making the art you want to make for the people you want to make it for. How refreshing it is to see yourself loved by and loving your own community on a public stage.

There’s an exchange between a main character and his longtime girlfriend that highlights the care and intentionality and protection offered by Black love—I sobbed.

There’s a surreal scene where all kinds of Black music are in the room at once, a character playing the blues opening up this whole Black cultural continuum, and suddenly there is hip hop in the room and Black rock in the room and R&B and blues, blues is all of this, all of this the blues. There is an zinging to Black music, an aliveness that has somehow rendered beautiful what was meant to devastate.

Ryan Coogler (who is only 38! how!) gestures toward this aliveness and has made this movie for Black people in a way that is striking and gorgeous and ultimately taken over by vampires but that’s okay too! There should be Black vampire movies! There should be any and every kind of Black movie—whatever we want to make, to see.

I watched it and didn’t have nightmares. I watched it and felt really loved. I used to love suspenseful, scary movies, would pick them up at Blockbuster every time, because there was something about both being uncertain of how something was going to work out and knowing that inevitably this movie would work out one way or another: they would figure their way out of the violence or the violence would consume them. In so many movies—horror or otherwise—Black people are forced to succumb, to be subsumed, by the violence they’re confronting. While Sinners comes to an end in both the expected and in unexpected ways, there is a sense of aliveness here, despite the difficulty, and this is worth seeing, again and again.

Image Credit: Ryan Coogler