On vampires

A few thoughts about "Sinners" and the state of the American bloodsucker.

Image credit: Warner Bros. pictures

Hi folks, and welcome new readers! I usually write pretty squarely about politics in this newsletter, but you’re catching me on a week where I feel like writing about vampires. I promise I’ll tie it back to the news eventually, if you even care.

So I finally saw Ryan Coogler’s Sinners in the theater this week, which was honestly the best cinematic experience I’ve had in years. I’ll add a caveat here that as a white woman who is definitely not a film critic, I want to tread carefully in terms of writing anything that could be considered a “review” of a movie that is about white supremacists literally and figuratively draining the life out of Black people and their culture. To read a writer who has more business writing about Sinners, I would direct you to Karen Attiah’s fantastic personal essay on the film’s Black challenge to white Christianity. All that said, as a longtime fan of vampire books, films and series—particularly those set in the deep South, where I am also from—I want to share a few reactions to this latest addition to the genre.

First, I should come clean about my vampire content consumption, which I think may surprise some people. I’ve obviously read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as an English major, and seen the 1992 film; True Blood, which is set in fictional Bon Temps, Louisiana, is one of my favorite series ever, so much so that I made an ex rewatch it with me a decade later (he hated); I watched the Pitt/Cruise 1994 movie Interview with a Vampire and recently watched both seasons of the new critically acclaimed TV adaptation of it on AMC; and perhaps most embarrassingly, I read the first four Twilight books and watched all the movies, some more than once. Suffice it to say I fucking love vampires. In addition to being inherently sexy/horny/virile monsters, the undead are great vehicles through which to explore themes of temptation and immortality and humanity and self-discipline and various societal parasite metaphors.

Considering that world of possibility, I find it very interesting to see how authors and filmmakers approach the vampire differently, even while keeping certain basics the same: they’re repelled by silver and garlic; you can only kill them with a wooden stake through the heart or by frying them in sunlight; they can’t enter your building without being invited. But there’s a whole lot of variation beyond that. In Twilight, vampires are highly sensitive, empathetic creatures, capable of self-restraint with the humans they love and just trying to live normal lives. They’re used as more of a romantic analogy than anything—to enhance the hotness of trying to resist a person you shouldn’t be dating by raising the stakes to literal murder and soul-evaporation.

In True Blood, the vampires—or “fangbangers,” as they’re called (derogatory) by local humans—live openly as vampires among the humans, thanks to a synthetic blood substitute that helps them be cool and not hunt people. They even have a PR spokesperson who goes on cable news to combat negative myths about their kind. The heavy-handed analogy there, which hasn’t really aged well, is that the vampires in Louisiana represent the underclass against whom the bigots discriminate, essentially replacing people of color in that category. The undead absorb the racism, even though they’re often depicted as wealthy white vampire men. Very hot ones, especially Alexander Skarsgård, the bad boy vamp, but still definitely white and privileged.

Image credit: HBO

So I loved all the movies and books and TV shows that came before. But Sinners, I think, is the first of the “bloodsuckers in the Deep South” genre to get the cultural vampire metaphor perfectly right. [SPOILERS AHEAD.] The film is set in the Mississippi Delta during the Great Depression. The original vampires in the movie—though they ultimately recruit more, thanks to using a passing white woman (Hailee Steinfeld) as a Trojan horse to break into the Black juke joint—are literal KKK members. The vampires have no redeeming qualities at all and are concealing their identities as they try to invade a building full of joyful Black people that the Klan’s Grand Dragon had sold to those people in order to murder them while they sing and dance together (in one of the most spectacular sequences I’ve seen in a film, ever). The vampire Klansmen are specifically targeting Sammie (Miles Caton), a young blues prodigy whose music performance is powerful enough to summon African spirits of past and future, to suck dry his cultural and spiritual powers.

I was not expecting the film to turn into a sort of dance-off between ancient white and Black cultures, as the vampires do a demonic traditional Irish jig outside the juke joint in competition with the African-inspired dancing inside, which the former are aiming to destroy and consume. But it’s certainly a powerful and bone-chilling analogy. And I would argue that it’s the best use of the trope in a film I’ve seen. I strongly prefer the “vampires as a metaphor for white supremacy and cultural appropriation” metaphor in Sinners to the “vampires as the real victims of bigotry” one in True Blood—or the real lack of salient commentary in Interview with a Vampire, though I did still really enjoy watching this tormented, toxic relationship between beautiful, immortal gay men unfold. Imagine trying to make a relationship work if it could *literally* last forever. Couldn’t be me.

To bring it back to politics, I have been thinking about vampires a lot as I read the news lately. (Seriously, I have.) I thought about them when Trump slashed the budgets for all national parks—a deeply publicly-loved service that produces far more revenue for this country than it costs in labor and upkeep—and canceled air quality testing for them this week. The idea, it seems, is that you make these free services for the American people and tourists exponentially worse, and then you produce a “solution” to the problem, which is privatizing the parks—aka selling them to billionaires like Elon Musk for pennies to make a profit. The same goes for the U.S. Postal Service and even Social Security, which has already moved its official communications to X, Elon’s Nazi platform, to force your grandmother to sign up for an account. Wreck everything to shit and then say, I’ve got just the guy who can fix this for us. It’s billionaire vampires sucking the bloodlife out of the federal government and the country in general and growing into bigger and stronger monsters each time they get their teeth into a neck.

The Trump family is profiting from a $2 billion crypto deal as he purposely flies the U.S. economy into the side of mountain right now. What would you call that? I’d call it vampiric.

Anyway, you should absolutely get your ass to the theater and see Sinners if you haven’t. And please feel free to let me know if you want me to write less on here about vampires and movies. <3