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In case you’ve been living under a rock, Sinners is not just a film anymore. With a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations and sold-out screenings that sparked genuine online history lessons about the Jim Crow South, Ryan Coogler‘s blues-soaked vampire film has become the conversation in cinema right now. And Deadline just sat down with the whole crew — Coogler,Michael B. Jordan, Wunmi Mosaku, and Delroy Lindo — for the kind of in-depth interview that horror fans specifically need to be reading.
Because here’s the thing, a lot of the coverage around Sinners has leaned into the history, the music, the awards sweep. All deserved. But we’re here for the vampires, the hoodoo priestess, the Devil in a stolen body, and what it actually felt like to build that supernatural world from the inside out. So let’s get into it.
The Villain Is the Devil. In an Irishman. And That Was Always the Plan.
For the uninitiated, the big bad of Sinners is the Devil himself, possessing an Irish rogue played by Jack O’Connell, hunting after the gifted young musician Sammie (Miles Caton). It’s a premise that sounds chaotic on paper and lands like a gut punch on screen. The supernatural threat isn’t incidental to the story, it’s woven into the mythology of the blues itself, that old crossroads deal made flesh.
Coogler describes the film’s approach to genre as instinctive rather than calculated. When asked what defines the magic of Sinners, he didn’t talk about category or concept. He pointed straight at the people around him:
“The magic of the film is my incredible cast. Getting all these talented people together, they are very lovely to be around, they’ve got different rhythms and they complement really well.”
That sounds like a deflection until you realize he means it literally. The supernatural elements of Sinners work because the human ones do first. That’s a lesson a lot of horror filmmakers could stand to learn.
Wunmi Mosaku as Annie: The Hoodoo Priestess Who Steals Every Scene She’s In
If you’ve seen Sinners, you know Annie is the one you don’t mess with. She’s a hoodoo priestess with a gun and a complicated history with Smoke (Jordan), and Mosaku plays her with the kind of quiet intensity that makes every scene feel like it could detonate at any moment.
What’s fascinating is how Mosaku and Jordan built that lived-in history from scratch. They did it with music, shared playlists, songs that captured where their characters were emotionally. And with a willingness to get genuinely vulnerable with each other. Jordan described the trust that had to be built before the relationship could breathe on screen:
“It was a lot of vulnerability. I think it was understanding that this movie is Ryan, and it’s coming from him. And knowing him for such a long time and understanding that I am a vessel for a lot of his expression. And I want to always honor that and understand where those things are coming from, so I can bury them into the character as seamless as I can.”
There’s a specific scene Mosaku highlighted that gives you a window into how that supernatural world was built beat by beat. After Stack’s death, Smoke is in shock, and Annie comes to him. Mosaku sat beside Jordan, held his hand, and then they talked afterward about the fact that they’d both been holding back out of mutual over-respect for each other’s process. The conversation unlocked something:
“It was really like, oh, actually me and Michael now know each other well enough and trust each other well enough… to know that there is no wrong answer now. That there’s just a free rein to be creative and express what we are truly feeling.”
For a film where the supernatural is always pressing against the edges of every scene, that kind of actorly freedom isn’t just nice to have, it’s what makes the horror feel real.
The Garlic Scene: Where Comedy and Vampire Lore Collide Beautifully
Here’s the behind-the-scenes story you didn’t know you needed.
There’s a scene in Sinners where the characters eat garlic in a circle. A vampire defense measure, for those keeping track at home. On set, the “garlic” was actually white chocolate carved to look like cloves. Giant white chocolate cloves. That everyone had to convincingly eat.
Jordan, who was wearing gold fronts and could barely chew, described the chaos:
“I got gold fronts in and sh-t, so I can’t really eat with them in, and I’m chilling and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how the fu-k this is going to work out. I can’t even talk at this moment.’”
But it gets better. Lindo, playing Delta Slim, apparently became the unofficial chocolate ration officer:
“He started rationing the chocolate out to everybody. It was a whole exercise.”
And Coogler caught him fake-eating and quietly let it ride. Because as he explained, the ambiguity of whether Delta Slim was actually eating the garlic ended up serving the film’s central question of who among them might actually be a vampire. The chaos became craft. Jordan put it perfectly:
“It played to the whole suspicion of who was a vampire, who wasn’t, and stuff. So yeah, that just worked out a lot better than I thought it was.”
Delroy Lindo, Delta Slim, and the Sacred Horror of the Blues
Lindo’s Delta Slim is one of the most quietly devastating characters in recent horror-adjacent cinema. A veteran blues musician navigating the line between the sacred and the profane in a world where that line has teeth. To prepare, Lindo immersed himself in the actual musicians of that era: Son House, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner.
What he found wasn’t just musical research. It was a spiritual framework that fed directly into the supernatural world of the film:
“With a musician like Son House, really interesting because he was navigating throughout his life the relationship between the sacred and the profane. And that just resonated for me.”
The blues and horror have always been siblings, of course. Both are about confronting what lives in the dark. The crossroads deal, the Devil’s bargain, the thing that follows you home, these aren’t modern horror inventions. They’re baked into the mythology Coogler was working with. Lindo understood that instinctively, and it shows.
He also spoke about his relationship with Coogler as a director in terms that every horror fan should appreciate:
“One of the strengths, one of the things that I most appreciate about Ryan is the generosity of spirit, which gives to each and every one of his colleagues agency, we can talk to him.”
A director who listens. On a horror set. Revolutionary.
The Chain Gang Scene: The Moment the Film Became Something Else
For pure horror fans, the chain gang scene is one of the moments where Sinners becomes something genuinely difficult to categorize. Mosaku described watching it back as a kind of shock. The blues rising out of the scene in a way she couldn’t quite remember being in the script:
“I was like, ‘Wow, was that in the script? I don’t remember that being in the script.’ And just being completely in awe of their openness and their flexibility and their reception to the emotion that was being built up in the scene and Ryan not calling ‘Cut’ at the end of the monologue. It just took me by surprise.”
Ryan not calling cut. That’s the horror filmmaker instinct, right there. Knowing that the most unsettling thing you can do is let a moment breathe past where everyone expects it to stop.
She also pointed to a small change Coogler made in another scene that cracked the film open: switching a line from “Why are you here, Smoke?” to “Elijah, why are you here?” . Using the character’s real name instead of his street name:
“That was like, again, I thought it was a perfect script, a perfect scene, but then just calling him by his name broke the whole scene open to something else.”
In horror, that kind of small detail ,the real name, the true name, carries weight. It’s the difference between a mask and a face.
What Sinners Actually Is, and Why Horror Fans Need to Claim It
Coogler describes cinema as a quilt. Every filmmaker adding their square in conversation with those who came before. He name-checks Jordan Peele as an inspiration, alongside Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, and Barry Jenkins. That’s not accidental. Sinners sits in a tradition of Black filmmakers using genre to excavate something true about American history.
When asked what he’d like to make next, Coogler’s answer was simple: all of it. Every genre. He’s not a horror director. He’s not a superhero director. He’s a filmmaker who follows the story wherever it goes, including into the dark.
And right now, the dark is where his best work lives.
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