‘Sinners’ highlights Mississippi

The horror film draws on history, religion and folklore

Clarksdale, Mississippi didn’t just provide history and blues for director and writer Ryan Coogler’s hit film about art, Jim Crow and vampires. One of the Mississippi Delta town’s musicians contributed to the Sinners script, as reported by Reuters.

After a special screening in the town, which has no cinema, Coogler told the audience gathered in a community hall about the first time he described the film’s plot to a group of Clarksdale blues musicians he had asked to contribute to the score.

He said he hesitated when he got to the part about the vampires. He went ahead. Then, Grammy winner Bobby Rush filled the silence.

“I had a girl once that was a vampire,” the musician joked.

The line was given to Delta Slim, played by Delroy Lindo, a piano-playing character who brings both comic relief and depth to the movie.

Thursday’s screening and discussion came after Tyler Yarbrough, a community organizer and film buff in Clarksdale, wrote an open letter asking Coogler and Warner Brothers to bring the film to a town where people drive 80 miles (130 km) to Memphis, Tennessee to get to a cinema.

Warner Brothers outfitted the Clarksdale Civic Auditorium with a big screen, projector and sound system. There was even popcorn.

Path to ancestors

Sinners has been widely acclaimed by reviewers and filmgoers, who praised the film for its stars’ performances, its showcasing of African American art, and its wrestling with painful history and big ideas.

According to Variety, by the end of its opening month of April, Sinners had grossed $122.5 million in North America and $161.6 million worldwide.

At what was billed as a community screening, it was apparent the community was not just the geographical entity of Clarksdale. The audience came together around art and American history, including Jim Crow, the legal and often brutally policed racial hierarchy that subjugated Black people in America’s South.

Shelby Simes arrived at 7 AM from nearby West Helena, Arkansas, earning first place in a line that had grown to hundreds by the time the doors opened about an hour before Thursday’s 11 AM screening, the first of six scheduled over three days.

Simes said Coogler’s film, which she had already seen seven times, was particularly important at a time when what many see as the truth about the Black American experience has been criticised by President Donald Trump as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology.”

“They’re taking books off shelves,” Simes said. “They’re not teaching us properly in the schools.”

She said with Sinners, which is fiction but offers a realistic portrayal of the Jim Crow era, Coogler and his team made the past tangible.