“I KNOW THE TRUTH HURTS, SO I LIED TO YOU”: FAMILY, VAMPIRES, PERFORMANCE AND RACIAL RELATIONS IN SINNERS (2025)

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the racial horror film Sinners (2025), set in the American South of the 1930s, where two Black brothers—Smoke and Stack—confront the menace of an ancient vampire. This monstrous figure, the antagonist Remmick, whose mission is to forge a vampiric family through violent transformation and blood, exposes mechanisms of cultural and ethnic assimilation. In turn, the protagonists’ aspiration to build a bar that serves as a refuge for Black communities opens a space to explore kinship structures marked not only by racial tensions but also by attempts to construct a community grounded in diversity and collective resistance. Family, therefore, emerges in a double register: on one side, as an invitation to assimilation; on the other, as the groundwork for an insurgent community. The film thus urges us to reflect on the complexity of racial relations as they intersect with familial and kinship dynamics. Sinners ultimately stands as a powerful artifact for thinking through racial violence and the alternatives to its perpetuation, pointing toward the possibility of insurgent community and the fabulation of futures not bound by the sterility of subordination, but animated by the creative potentials of Black agency and resistance.