Sinners: Black Joy Fights White Terror (Like Always) #1

Meet Me At The Crossroads

Picture this: 1932 Mississippi. The air’s so thick with humidity and hopelessness you could slice it with a knife. Cotton fields stretch forever, juke joints pulse with raw Delta blues, and the devil’s shadow lingers at every dirt-road crossroads. This is where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul for guitar mastery-and where Ryan Coogler’s vampire horror Sinners drags that myth kicking and screaming into the light. Two stories, same soil. Both ask: What’s the cost of survival in a world rigged against you?

Let’s start with Johnson. The legend’s been beat to death: middling guitarist vanishes, meets a shadowy figure at midnight, returns with skills that make angels weep. But here’s the thing — Coogler ain’t buying the devil did it all. “Blues wasn’t magic,” he told The Atlantic. It was alchemy. Suffering transmuted into sound”. In Sinners, that alchemy becomes literal. When Michael B. Jordan’s twins, Smoke and Stack, build a juke joint in their hometown, the music doesn’t just attract drinkers-it summons vampires. “The blues in this film are the spell,” Coogler said. “They’re the weapon and the wound”.