The Horror Track presented “Sinners: The Devil at the Door,” a discussion of the movie Sinners at 4PM on Friday in Hyatt International South. The packed panel included Anthony Liggins, Hanako M. Ricks, Lisa Harrison, Michael Collins, and Jotham R. Austin, II, along with moderator Karen Bembry.
All the assembled panelists agreed that calling Sinners a horror film doesn’t do it justice. The movie is “like an onion” and each time you watch it, it’s possible to find something new and different. It’s a study of Blues music. It’s a cultural commentary. It’s an indictment of white supremacy and religious control. And everyone agreed that it is brilliant from top to bottom.
The way I have described Sinners to those who haven’t seen it is as a study of racism in the Jim Crow-era south but with vampires. The panelists echoed that summary when they emphasized that the everyday violence of surviving white supremacy is the true villain of the film. Racism and white supremacy are, in many ways, scarier than the vampires. The panelists commented that the vampires were also offering a new kind of slavery by joining the collective and couching it in terms of love and fellowship, terms often used within the Christian traditions.
There were several conversations among the panelists about the nature of sin. In fact, the question, “Does Sinners comment on how faith can be twisted into a form of control” that got the strongest reaction from the audience. There was a general affirmative murmuring throughout the room. I got the sense that more than one person in the room had felt manipulated by faith at some point in their lives, including the panelists. One commented that faith can be a very powerful manipulator in the wrong hands and declined to say anything further.
On the nature of sin, there was also general agreement that there wasn’t a character in the movie that was without sin. But the point that the movie makes is that a lot of people think they know what a sin is but your own prejudice shapes what you consider to be a sin. What can be destruction in the eyes of one person can be salvation in another. The movie is fascinating on many levels, and I suspect we will be talking about it in years to come as we continue peeling back its layers.
