Gently strummed from a guitar, spiritual hymns lift into the barnyard air and fill the dancers on the floor with harmonious vibrations. This is the sound of our souls poured into music and it resonates at such a deeply entrenched sacred level, the purest expression of humanity, warmly jangling and twanging with the richness of bending pitches, which howl and rise, and match the staccato tapping of shoes dancing against the wooden ground. Our bodies, too, are instruments, and they are made of music and dance and poetry and so much love, and all together, a group of dancers can produce their own chorus, their own rhythm section, to accompany the plucked-out pieces of soul cascading off of the guitar strings. And those syrupy down-south blues ever so sweetly build into a crescendo of American Music — the entire history — rooted in Black Expression and Black Excellence, and suddenly you’re taken with it too, you are a part of the music because the music is part of you and it always has been. The music is your tradition and your history and everything you’ve ever known and it’s all the love in the world, caressed from a guitar like the most sensual act of love performed for an audience, and it’s heaven and it’s hell, and it’s the human experience.

Horror is spiritual. Our relationship to horror exists at the moral center of our being. Horror is the genre by which we confront our faith, wherein the themes serve as clever catalysts for interior fear that thumps inside our hearts. It’s in horror that we can bravely venture into the human psyche and explore the confines of our spiritual plane of existence. Horror is a gateway through which we can move across the liminal space of the living and the dead and express our inner-most truth, which needs not be censored, and can be as wicked, as phantasmagoric, as grotesque, as only our spiritual experiences can be. It’s through genre that we can reach deep inside and pull light from our darkness and bring harsh beauty into the world.

From horror and music, we can evoke something profound at a deeply-rooted soul level. With Sinners, the new film from Ryan Coogler, the genre finds its weight in the down-home sounds of the Black American Experience. Sure. It’s a Vampire movie. But it’s one hell of a Vampire movie, that makes the traditional symbols of those movies so new and vital and alive that it feels as though something entirely innovative is happening. The originality of Sinners is built off the foundation of a richly cinematic text. Watching Sinners in IMAX, which is recommended although it’ll be perfect in any format, when the aspect ratio switches and the screen expands from its letterbox, it’s like the doors of a church have opened, and in walks a man with a broken guitar, looking like he’s just come home from war. And then the composer Ludwig Göransson’s sweeping score takes up all the extra space, and sound and vision are united in the sort of audiovisual majesty that only cinema can accomplish.

Sinners is a Jim Crow-era story about twin brothers Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) and Stack (also Michael B. Jordan in a dual role), who come back home to Mississippi, but it’s not quite how they left it. Some strangers have also come to town, with bluegrass banjos and piercing red eyes, allegorically telling a horror story about racism and of cultural identity. The story comes at a time where about a third of America, mostly White, wishes to return to the pre-Jim Crow-era of racial segregation and American isolationism. As such, Sinners lands with a walloping thump, tugging at our national heart strings and guitar strings at once, and ambling out a song about guilt, sacrifice, and ultimately, redemption.

Expertly composed at an audiovisual level, the images of Autumn Dural’s photography, the first ever filmed by a woman for a large format release, are so immediate and boldly striking. In her pictures, Dural captures the sweltering backwater homespun story of brothers returning to Mississippi but also understands how to convey community, inclusion, and concepts of segregation law, through thoughtful blocking and exposition that highlights an ensemble of performers, while balancing a suspense story, where we may not be able to tell who is alive and who is dead.

Dual roles are hard to nail down. It’s a credit to Michael B. Jordan, one of our best actors, that he can convey multiple modes of expression, playing two brothers, while also capturing their unique identities. Likewise, Ryan Coogler directs the hell out of his cast, and so aptly captures transformative performances, wherein we believe someone, when they’re alive and when they’ve become the living undead.

Sinners is the rarest kind of movie. One built upon spiritual principles that exudes heart and soul but can also contain multitudes, as it reaches into the darkness of history, and the equally dark projections of the present tense. As a horror film, Sinners captures a wide-ranging depth of expression and is such a rich text that ought to be celebrated as a new American masterpiece. When a movie can really move us and insidiously explore the moral fiber of an entire country through genre filmmaking, you know something incredibly rare and profoundly beautiful has happened. That’s Sinners: the grotesque soul and endlessly haunting beauty of American expression.

10/10