'Sinners draws from folklore and gangster films as much as it does from horror'

Ryan Coogler likes going big. Pretty much immediately after his critically acclaimed debut Fruitvale Station in 2013, he got beamed up into the Hollywood IP machinery. First, to breathe new life into the stale Rocky franchise with Creed, which he wrote and directed, and then, making Black Panther, making it the first Marvel film to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award.

Franchise films and in particular the comic book studio, given its cultural domination over the past decade and current decline, can be looked down upon as objects of lesser artistic integrity. More 'properties' than 'movies'. But it takes a filmmaker of a certain bombastic vision — like Coogler’s — to be able to reach excellence within the confines of a corporate machine.

So when his latest film, Sinners, out in cinemas now, was announced, I was curious. For the first time since 2013, this is not an adaptation, not part of a franchise. Sinners is Coogler on his own. And it’s got vampires.

Developed, written, produced and directed by Coogler through his new production company, Proximity Media, his franchise success has allowed the filmmaker an enormous amount of creative freedom.

Here he is once again working with his favourite leading man, Michael B. Jordan, who has appeared in every single one of his films. In Sinners, he is given double duty. Playing gangster twins Smoke and Stack, who return from Capone’s Chicago to their Mississippi hometown with a dream: open up a damn good dive bar.

As anyone who’s ever tried to open up a bar or worked in hospitality knows, it’s chaos. Unfortunately for the characters of Sinners, their brand of chaos involves vampires, led by the always brilliant, chronically underused Jack O’Connell, whose displaced Irish vampire Remmick is lured in by the excellent vibe and the musicianship of a young guitarist named Sammie.

In his first foray into the genre, Coogler is tapping into a current trend: blockbuster horror. I’m not talking about box office success here, but rather the very visual DNA of films like Alien: Romulus, Abigail, the A Quiet Place franchise and, to some extent, Nosferatu. These are films that demand a big canvas, a big screen, big monsters, big everything. Most of the time, though, blockbuster horror is running low on ideas, operating on the notion that thematic depth belongs only to the arthouse brand of horror.

Coogler’s experience in franchise and blockbuster filmmaking makes him better than most. While films like Abigail interpret bombastic horror as splatter, flinging gallons of blood to make their point, Sinners expands the frame (sometimes literally), weaving bodies, dead and alive, blood and fire, music and gore, past and present.

While Smoke and Stack have to manoeuvre around the familiar evil of the Ku Klux Klan, the unknown evil of the vampires poses a new kind of threat. Remmick does not care about segregation, he is an equal-opportunities demon.

In the film’s most extraordinary sequence, the vampire is seduced from afar by the music and dancing in the brothers’ dive bar. Coogler’s brand of blockbuster is rich with ideas. Sinners builds on the ancestry of Black musicianship and draws from folklore and gangster films as much as it does from horror films.

While Remmick and his rapidly expanding gang of vampires circle around the twins’ bar, the tension is building, the bodies keep piling, but the central ideas never waver. The bloodsuckers are attracted by their music, their culture, and will stop at nothing til they own it. Remmick is displace and alone in a foreign land, but can only reconnect with his forgotten culture and language through bloodshed and contagion.

Spectacle with meaning can be hard to pull off on explosions and splatter alone, but Coogler weaves them all together nearly seamless. While some of its characters ring sentimental at times, it’s the spectacle that etches itself into our retinas like a fiery afterimage.

Sinners in in cinemas and IMAX from 18 April.