Sinners: how real stories of Irish and Choctaw oppression inform the film

Warning: this article contains minor spoilers for Sinners.

Sinners is a vampire film set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi, a time of harsh segregation and racial injustice. The vampire is Irishman Remmick (Jack O'Connell), who is drawn to the blues music played at the Juke Joint, a club set up by identical gangster twins, Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan).

We first encounter Remmick as he is being chased by a band of indigenous Choctaw vampire hunters, who corner him in the shack of a couple who happen to be part of the Ku Klux Klan. The Choctaw’s claim that Remmick is not who he appears to be falls on deaf ears and the couple soon become Remmick’s first victims.

Remmick is soon drawn to the Juke Joint, where the music of blues guitarist Sammy “Preacher Boy” Moore (Miles Caton) is said to reach both ancestors and future generations. Keen to feast on the club’s patrons, Remmick tries to draw them outside by singing an Irish ballad from the mid-19th century, The Rocky Road to Dublin.

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The Rocky Road to Dublin tells the story of an Irish man leaving his hometown of Tuam to travel to Liverpool. Tuam was the location of a Catholic mother and baby home, where the bodies of over 700 babies were found in 2015.

Remmick uses the song to invite the Black Juke Joint patrons to join him and the others he has turned into vampires, offering them the chance to escape Jim Crow Mississippi.

If Remmick was truly offering freedom, however, he would have tried to tempt them with a song of liberation, such as Oro Se Do Bheatha ‘Bhaile, which was the rebel song sung by the republican army as they overthrew the oppression of the English during the Easter Rising in 1916.

Instead, the music he chooses, although catchy, is a story of exchanging one form of suffering (life in Tuam during the height of English oppression) for another – life on the English mainland where the ballad tells of victimisation and violence.

The Choctaw’s hunting of Remmick is particularly interesting. The real Choctaw sent money to the starving Irish during the English-induced famine of the 1840s, when they were themselves experiencing genocide.

Given that the Choctaw are historical allies of the Irish, by identifying that Remmick is not who he seems, they highlight that he does not represent the Irish spirit of resistance. Instead, he represents the spirit of oppression and his choice of music underscores this.

Choice of setting

Sinners is set in the early 1930s, a decade after the liberation of Ireland and five years after the founding of the Tuam mother and baby home. Perhaps Remmick needed new feeding grounds since Ireland was finally throwing off the oppression of the English. Where better than the deep south of the Jim Crow era to find oppression and those desperate to escape it?

Remmick claims to be attracted to the music of the oppressed but when hoodoo healer Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) is killed by Stack before she can be turned into a vampire, we see his true intent. Remmick is angered by her death because although it appears it is the music he is drawn to, in reality it is Annie’s strength he desires.

Annie, who is steeped in Black culture and can see the vampire’s real intentions, symbolises the way many Black women can resist a social system that is both capitalist and racist. This system doesn’t allow them to ignore the dangers it brings.

It is the strength and energy of Africa embodied in Annie’s traditional beliefs that Remmick truly seeks to possess, and he is distraught when she dies without being turned into a vampire.

Unlike Preacher Boy’s family, Annie has resisted the colonisation of her spirituality by the Christian church. Preacher Boy’s father encourages him to stop playing the blues because of its ability to call the devil. Through her ancestral practices however, Annie is able to recognise and resist the temptations of escape that Remmick offers.

Sinners is an interesting work by filmmaker Ryan Coogler that leaves a trail of crumbs for future instalments. The Choctaw vampire hunters are only on screen for two minutes, but they represent an interesting aside that needs to be explored in terms of the oppressed reaching out to each other against colonialism.

Annie, immersed in her African spirituality, resists oppression by calling on the strength of ancestors. It’s a powerful reminder that when we know where we come from it is hard to sell us a story of redemption that is ultimately another form of oppression.

Rachel Stuart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.