The Medievalisms of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025)

Spoiler: Just like in real life, the monster is patriarchy

This piece contains spoilers for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) as it is a thematic dissection of the medievalisms I saw present within the storytelling of three distinct scenes: Sammy’s opening entrance into the church, when night falls and the monster emerges, and the final battle scene. Do not read on if you wish to avoid spoiling your first watch. 💜

Please note: I write with the assumption the reader has seen the film.

The tools which built the house

Medieval xenophobia is to modern racism much in the same way medieval misogyny is to modern patriarchy: manufactured dehumanization intentionally entwined with the structural fabrics of society to make indistinguishable the conditions of domination from the conditions of civilization. Each early manifestation enshrined as divinely transcodified precedence affirming the righteousness of an ideology founded upon hierarchical brutality—splattered across the disciplines.

Image via Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur f.100r, 1450-1470

Patriarchy depends upon dehumanization; upon demonizing immutable human qualities to support the necessity of the imposed hierarchy. The ‘well-established’ binary topos of light/dark good/evil language and imagery of late medieval English pageants and literature often served to (re)affirm such socially enforced impositions.¹ Within The Creation, and the Fall of Lucifer from the mid-sixteenth century Towneley Plays, a demon laments:²

‘We that were angels so fare 
And sat so hie above the ayere, 
Now ar we waxen blak as any coyll 
And ugly, tatyrd as a foyll.’

Where once they were fair and light, their demonic state is marked by a physical manifestation of folly easily identifiable to the lay-viewer by their darkened hue and blackened face.³ Folly, in its medieval state, was likened to sinfulness; wickedness; licentiousness; an individual divorced from morality. Within the framework of this topos, blackness became “satan’s livery.”⁴ As the day’s light grew long and spring bloomed into summer the celebratory pageants of Corpus Christi made clear which aspects of humanness were to be honored and which would be condemned to be considered monstrous within this medieval context: Mary was purified in god’s ‘madyn light,’ Eve’s demoniacally-encouraged libidinous lost Paradise, and Black became an indictment of sin.⁵

The Conception of Merlin - Référence Paris, Bibl. Mazarine, Inc. 1286 f. 008v

Lucifer’s fall is cloaked in this language of light dimming into darkness—‘my brightness is blackest and blue now’—while hell’s ‘mirkness’ becomes synonymous with night:⁶

‘In hell shall never mirkness be missing
The mirkness, thus name I for night,
The day, that call I this light
My after-works shall they be wissing.
And now in my blessing I twin them in two,
The night even from the day, so that they meet never…’

God warns the fair angelic light-bearers that they too can be burnt to black and suffer such fates should they abandon reason: “This grant I you, ministers mine,/To-whiles ye are stable in thought.”⁷ The angel’s light therefore represented far more than just moral goodness and/or purity, but reason realized. The fabliau, or story of trickery, of Sinners plays with this light/dark good/evil topos, drawing attention to the systemically imposed assumptions that rationalized brutality within the very bounds of white supremacist patriarchy itself.

Whipped into worship

Still from Sinners (2025) via Warner Bros.

With the sun in the sky Sinners quickly greets us with a tone setting tune; a familiar tune; a beckoning tune. A white church illuminated by the welcoming brightness of dawn’s glow as This Little Light of Mine gently drifts from behind closed doors. The church’s flock is cloaked in a sea of white cloth while, by way of his profession, the preacher is the only one donned in black. Alongside his uniform the preacher’s position above all others informs us of the imposed hierarchy. A hierarchy immediately confirmed when he commands care to be delayed and all begrudgingly abide.

“My son has felt the call of sin.”

Sammy, the preacher’s son, limps down the aisle towards his father, tattered and bloody. The declaration of his assumed sin enough to trigger a flashback: a bloodied monster illuminated by the night behind him, there and gone in a blink of an eye. His father’s accusatory tone and evangelizing posture enough to mentally place Sammy right back into the trauma he experienced the night prior. These flashbacks warn us of the horror to come while also explicitly linking the violence and domination both the monster and the church-father perpetuate in the lives their actions have demonized.

—“The good lord calls upon us to be vicious of men who sin and show them the way!”

Confirmed through the words of the doctrine’s own representative, within this house of worship salvation is spoken through the language of violence and domination. A language enshrined so thoroughly within the words of foundational fore-fathers it will come to reverberate from the mouth of our monster more than a millennium later.

The Monstrous Other

This fabliau of Eurocentric patriarchy—that is, the construction of the monstrous other by way of demonizing natural human traits—demands communion under terms of domination while prohibiting access to the proffered privileges of the community. All by way of the very assumptions that ‘necessitated’ such actions in the first place. A hierarchical ouroboros where those whose immorality is assumed become victims of an imposed oppression that insists itself divinely driven.

This constant othering; this constant refusal of humanity allows this doctrine double-speak to persist: “In this aisle are stationed men with whips and goads to enforce order and silence, and keep them [the Native people] in a kneeling posture. By this arrangement, the untamed and vicious [resistant ones] are generally made willing to comply with the forms of the service.”⁸ Those forced to kneel in subservience to another’s god under threat of violence are described in animalistic terms—untamed and vicious—while those willing to whip another human into submission perceive themselves as moralistic ministers-mine. The Doctrine of Discovery, which absolved such behavior, made clear exactly which humans are stripped of their humanity much in the same way the crusader papal bulls did before them: “O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent god and is made glorious with the name of christ!”⁹

Still from Sinners (2025) via Warner Bros.

Long before night falls in Sinners it is clear just who the monster of the movie is as our main characters navigate the obstacles white supremacist patriarchy places in their way throughout the day, but as the safety of the day dims into dusk we are presented our topos once again—this time with a twist. Remmick, the embodied evil, is seemingly under pursuit and forced to seek shelter, the viewer alerted something is amiss by his smoky, blistering skin as the diminishing sun slowly settles to night in the background. With guns drawn, the white homeowner’s xenophobia is on alert and they are wary of the man on their doorstep. The camera pans as Remmick becomes aware of the KKK robes propped in the corner illuminated by the roaring fireplace and he offers a story which plays on the presuppositions of the homeowners; on the assumptions drawn from a medieval topos. He frames his Choctaw pursuers as uncivilized and vicious, a ploy that works over his previous attempt to illicit empathy.

With vultures circling and settling upon the house, the imagery alerts the viewer that death is already present as the Choctaw arrive. This time the woman is alone to answer the door, gun once again drawn. This man at her doorstep also offers words of another’s danger, delivered in a calm, peaceful manner, but the woman’s subtle step into a more defensive position—opposed to her wavering quickly in the face of Remmick—confirms her willingness to perceive the man afore her as an inherent threat. With help offered and denied, the Choctaw communicate a wish to depart into the dusk to avoid the night and hastily retreat from our story. It is as the woman steps further into her dark house the monster becomes realized within the white man. The ‘folly of racism’ prompted her to invite the devil over her doorstep and bring about her own doom.¹⁰

Bound by patriarchy

Still from Sinners (2025) via Warner Bros.

The evil that thrives in the shadows takes pause when Sammy begins to recite the lord’s prayer at the climax of our story. “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…”—it is these words that bind the monster with his intended victim. Both forced into submission by way of salvation, the origin of both domination and dominating. Overlaid with the only battle song of the soundtrack, Thy Kingdom Come, and the imagery of baptism, it is clear the monster is more than just the white man in front of Sammy and is confirmed when the threat continues after his demise.

This is the fabliau of Sinners, it isn’t just that the monster is white supremacist patriarchy, but the recognition of the perpetual trauma brought about by the very existence of patriarchy in the first place. Patriarchal violence begets patriarchal violence and the evolution of assumptions into presuppositions is the folly of us all. In this story, we are all capable of becoming the monster.

If you need more Sinners commentary in your life, I highly recommend the following three pieces and the phenomenal writers behind them:

Smoke, Stack, and Black dandyism

Everything You Missed in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners—COMPLETE Historical Reference Guide

Acts of Intention

1. As made explicit within the introduction of The Creation within Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.458516/page/n25/mode/2up

2. The Towneley Plays. https://metseditions.org/read/zKaRzGLgc6ya3f5yKhvZ6Zt0MW9A962Y

3. Hornback, Robert “The Folly of Racism: Enslaving Blackface and the ‘Natural’ Fool Tradition.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, vol. 20, 2007, pp. 46–84.

4. Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard. Black Face, Maligned Race: The representation of blacks in English drama from Shakespeare to Southerne, 1987

5. The Towneley Plays, “Both women’s sexual capacity and her breadth of imagination made her the perfect partner for the demon incubus—a figure that had been a part of orthodox tradition from the patristic period.” Elliot, Dyan. Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, & Demonology ibn the Middle Ages, 1988, and Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard. Black Face, Maligned Race: The representation of blacks in English drama from Shakespeare to Southerne, 1987, respectively.

6. The Creation within Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.458516/page/n25/mode/2up

7. Ibid.

8. https://originalfreenations.com/an-original-nations-examination-of-freedom-human-and-human-rights/#_ftnref39

9. Urban II: Speech at Council of Clermont (1095)

10. Language taken from Robert Hornback’s “The Folly of Racism: Enslaving Blackface and the ‘Natural’ Fool Tradition.”