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Ryan Coogler & the Cast of Sinners Just Gave Horror Fans Everything They Needed to Hear

Published

2 months ago

February 20, 2026

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Sinners is not just a film anymore. With a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations and sold-out screenings that sparked genuine online history lessons about the Jim Crow South, Ryan Coogler‘s blues-soaked vampire film has become the conversation in cinema right now. And Deadline just sat down with the whole crew — Coogler,Michael B. Jordan, Wunmi Mosaku, and Delroy Lindo — for the kind of in-depth interview that horror fans specifically need to be reading.

Because here’s the thing, a lot of the coverage around Sinners has leaned into the history, the music, the awards sweep. All deserved. But we’re here for the vampires, the hoodoo priestess, the Devil in a stolen body, and what it actually felt like to build that supernatural world from the inside out. So let’s get into it.

The Villain Is the Devil. In an Irishman. And That Was Always the Plan.

For the uninitiated, the big bad of Sinners is the Devil himself, possessing an Irish rogue played by Jack O’Connell, hunting after the gifted young musician Sammie (Miles Caton). It’s a premise that sounds chaotic on paper and lands like a gut punch on screen. The supernatural threat isn’t incidental to the story, it’s woven into the mythology of the blues itself, that old crossroads deal made flesh.

Coogler describes the film’s approach to genre as instinctive rather than calculated. When asked what defines the magic of Sinners, he didn’t talk about category or concept. He pointed straight at the people around him:

“The magic of the film is my incredible cast. Getting all these talented people together, they are very lovely to be around, they’ve got different rhythms and they complement really well.”

That sounds like a deflection until you realize he means it literally. The supernatural elements of Sinners work because the human ones do first. That’s a lesson a lot of horror filmmakers could stand to learn.

Wunmi Mosaku as Annie: The Hoodoo Priestess Who Steals Every Scene She’s In

If you’ve seen Sinners, you know Annie is the one you don’t mess with. She’s a hoodoo priestess with a gun and a complicated history with Smoke (Jordan), and Mosaku plays her with the kind of quiet intensity that makes every scene feel like it could detonate at any moment.

What’s fascinating is how Mosaku and Jordan built that lived-in history from scratch. They did it with music, shared playlists, songs that captured where their characters were emotionally. And with a willingness to get genuinely vulnerable with each other. Jordan described the trust that had to be built before the relationship could breathe on screen:

“It was a lot of vulnerability. I think it was understanding that this movie is Ryan, and it’s coming from him. And knowing him for such a long time and understanding that I am a vessel for a lot of his expression. And I want to always honor that and understand where those things are coming from, so I can bury them into the character as seamless as I can.”

There’s a specific scene Mosaku highlighted that gives you a window into how that supernatural world was built beat by beat. After Stack’s death, Smoke is in shock, and Annie comes to him. Mosaku sat beside Jordan, held his hand, and then they talked afterward about the fact that they’d both been holding back out of mutual over-respect for each other’s process. The conversation unlocked something:

“It was really like, oh, actually me and Michael now know each other well enough and trust each other well enough… to know that there is no wrong answer now. That there’s just a free rein to be creative and express what we are truly feeling.”

For a film where the supernatural is always pressing against the edges of every scene, that kind of actorly freedom isn’t just nice to have, it’s what makes the horror feel real.

The Garlic Scene: Where Comedy and Vampire Lore Collide Beautifully

Here’s the behind-the-scenes story you didn’t know you needed.

There’s a scene in Sinners where the characters eat garlic in a circle. A vampire defense measure, for those keeping track at home. On set, the “garlic” was actually white chocolate carved to look like cloves. Giant white chocolate cloves. That everyone had to convincingly eat.

Jordan, who was wearing gold fronts and could barely chew, described the chaos:

“I got gold fronts in and sh-t, so I can’t really eat with them in, and I’m chilling and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how the fu-k this is going to work out. I can’t even talk at this moment.'”

But it gets better. Lindo, playing Delta Slim, apparently became the unofficial chocolate ration officer:

“He started rationing the chocolate out to everybody. It was a whole exercise.”

And Coogler caught him fake-eating and quietly let it ride. Because as he explained, the ambiguity of whether Delta Slim was actually eating the garlic ended up serving the film’s central question of who among them might actually be a vampire. The chaos became craft. Jordan put it perfectly:

“It played to the whole suspicion of who was a vampire, who wasn’t, and stuff. So yeah, that just worked out a lot better than I thought it was.”

Delroy Lindo, Delta Slim, and the Sacred Horror of the Blues

Lindo’s Delta Slim is one of the most quietly devastating characters in recent horror-adjacent cinema. A veteran blues musician navigating the line between the sacred and the profane in a world where that line has teeth. To prepare, Lindo immersed himself in the actual musicians of that era: Son House, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner.

What he found wasn’t just musical research. It was a spiritual framework that fed directly into the supernatural world of the film:

“With a musician like Son House, really interesting because he was navigating throughout his life the relationship between the sacred and the profane. And that just resonated for me.”

The blues and horror have always been siblings, of course. Both are about confronting what lives in the dark. The crossroads deal, the Devil’s bargain, the thing that follows you home, these aren’t modern horror inventions. They’re baked into the mythology Coogler was working with. Lindo understood that instinctively, and it shows.

He also spoke about his relationship with Coogler as a director in terms that every horror fan should appreciate:

“One of the strengths, one of the things that I most appreciate about Ryan is the generosity of spirit, which gives to each and every one of his colleagues agency, we can talk to him.”

A director who listens. On a horror set. Revolutionary.

The Chain Gang Scene: The Moment the Film Became Something Else

For pure horror fans, the chain gang scene is one of the moments where Sinners becomes something genuinely difficult to categorize. Mosaku described watching it back as a kind of shock. The blues rising out of the scene in a way she couldn’t quite remember being in the script:

“I was like, ‘Wow, was that in the script? I don’t remember that being in the script.’ And just being completely in awe of their openness and their flexibility and their reception to the emotion that was being built up in the scene and Ryan not calling ‘Cut’ at the end of the monologue. It just took me by surprise.”

Ryan not calling cut. That’s the horror filmmaker instinct, right there. Knowing that the most unsettling thing you can do is let a moment breathe past where everyone expects it to stop.

She also pointed to a small change Coogler made in another scene that cracked the film open: switching a line from “Why are you here, Smoke?” to “Elijah, why are you here?” . Using the character’s real name instead of his street name:

“That was like, again, I thought it was a perfect script, a perfect scene, but then just calling him by his name broke the whole scene open to something else.”

In horror, that kind of small detail ,the real name, the true name, carries weight. It’s the difference between a mask and a face.

**What Sinners Actually Is, and Why Horror Fans Need to Claim It**

Coogler describes cinema as a quilt. Every filmmaker adding their square in conversation with those who came before. He name-checks Jordan Peele as an inspiration, alongside Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, and Barry Jenkins. That’s not accidental. Sinners sits in a tradition of Black filmmakers using genre to excavate something true about American history.

When asked what he’d like to make next, Coogler’s answer was simple: all of it. Every genre. He’s not a horror director. He’s not a superhero director. He’s a filmmaker who follows the story wherever it goes, including into the dark.

And right now, the dark is where his best work lives.

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The History of Deals with the Devil: From Faust to The Witch

Published

47 minutes ago

April 29, 2026

Luna Gray

Every culture on earth has invented a version of the same story. Someone makes a deal with darkness, gets exactly what they asked for, and loses everything that made them want it in the first place. This is either the oldest cautionary tale in human history or the universe’s way of saying that wanting things too much is the problem. Possibly both.

The template is so reliable it has survived more reinventions than most genres, showing up in ancient folklore, theater from the sixteenth century, Mississippi Delta blues, and a 1997 Al Pacino film where the devil runs a Manhattan law firm, which is honestly the most plausible setting the story has ever found.

Doctor Faustus and the Original Paperwork

The deal with the devil as Western storytelling knows it starts with the German legend of Johann Georg Faust, a real historical figure from the early 1500s whose reputation for dark arts grew considerably after his death. By the time Christopher Marlowe adapted him into Doctor Faustus around 1592, Faust had already become shorthand for a man who traded his eternal soul for power and forbidden knowledge.

Marlowe’s Faustus gets twenty-four years of demonic assistance, summons Helen of Troy, and spends the entire back half of the play desperately not thinking about what comes next. He traded his immortal soul for the intellectual equivalent of a Wikipedia subscription.

Goethe’s Faust, published in two parts in 1808 and 1832, complicated the template. Goethe’s version ends with Faust being saved, which is either deeply reassuring or a massive loop in the contract depending on how you read it. The devil, Mephistopheles, loses on a technicality. Lawyers have been insufferable about this ever since.

The word “Faustian” entered the language as shorthand for any bargain where you get what you want at a cost that turns out to be everything. It is used now to describe political compromises, corporate mergers, and at least three separate think pieces per year about social media.

The Crossroads

On the other side of the Atlantic, the deal with the devil found a different address. American blues mythology, particularly the tradition of the Mississippi Delta, attached the story to a specific location. The crossroads, where two roads meet at midnight, and where a man could wait for the devil to appear and tune his guitar.

The musician most associated with this mythology is Robert Johnson, who recorded twenty-nine songs in 1936 and 1937, including “Cross Road Blues” and “Me and the Devil Blues,” and died in 1938 at twenty-seven under circumstances that remain unclear. He was a remarkable guitarist who appeared to have improved dramatically in a very short period of time. The crossroads story about him developed and calcified after his death, told and retold until it became inseparable from his music. Robert Johnson himself never claimed any of it.

The person who actually did claim it was a different man entirely. Tommy Johnson, a Delta blues musician with no relation to Robert, reportedly told people on multiple occasions that he had met the devil at a crossroads at midnight, handed over his guitar, and gotten his talent in return. Tommy Johnson is considerably less famous than Robert Johnson, which is maybe the devil’s way of making a point about contract terms.

The crossroads mythology fed directly into O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), where the Coen Brothers dropped it into the middle of a Depression-era Odyssey adaptation because if you are already rewriting Homer you might as well rewrite American folklore while you are in there. It lives in every story about fame that arrives too fast, talent that appears from nowhere, and deaths at twenty-seven. The 27 Club has been run through the Robert Johnson mythology so many times that the connection has become its own piece of pop culture, self-sustaining and impossible to dislodge.

The Devil Grows Up

The devil of medieval Christianity and the devil of the crossroads deal mythology are related but not identical. The biblical Satan is primarily an adversary, an accuser, a figure whose role in early scripture is closer to a prosecuting attorney than a red-skinned tempter in a top hat.

The smooth-talking deal maker who shows up at crossroads and in horror films is a mash up of all of this. The biblical adversary, the folk devil, and a few centuries of storytelling that collectively decided the most interesting version of evil was one that made you an offer. The modern devil does not attack. He negotiates. And he always has better real estate.

Hollywood Signs the Contract

Hollywood has been making devil movies for as long as Hollywood has existed, and the quality varies in ways that suggest not all of those productions made favorable deals.

Angel Heart (1987) is the best film about a deal with the devil that never once uses the phrase. Mickey Rourke plays a private detective hired by a man named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to find a missing person, and the movie spends ninety minutes letting you work out what Louis Cyphre is an anagram of while everything gets worse. De Niro arrives in a cream suit eating hard-boiled eggs and the film is essentially already over.

The Devil’s Advocate (1997) casts Al Pacino as the literal devil running a Manhattan law firm and hiring Keanu Reeves as his star attorney. This works completely. New York in the nineties, of course the devil ran a law firm. The casting of Pacino is either inspired or the only possible answer to the question of which living actor could play Satan and make it seem like he was doing you a favor.

Crossroads (1986) sends Ralph Macchio into the Mississippi Delta to hunt down a lost Robert Johnson song and ends with a guitar duel between Macchio and Steve Vai, who plays the devil’s champion. The film climaxes with a Juilliard-trained classical guitarist defeating a blues devil deal using a Bach-influenced technique, in the Mississippi Delta, in front of a crowd that does not find this strange. Nobody in the film finds this strange.

Drag Me to Hell (2009) is Sam Raimi’s argument that you do not need to want power or knowledge or fame to end up on the wrong side of a supernatural contract. Christine Brown wanted a promotion. She denied a mortgage extension to an elderly woman. The punishment is an eternity of damnation. The moral is that the universe does not proportion its consequences to the scale of the ambition, which is either a theological horror show or a description of most Tuesdays.

And then there is The Witch (2015), where Robert Eggers quietly made the deal the ending rather than the premise. Thomasin does not go looking for the devil. The devil comes to her farm in 1630s New England, destroys her family, and waits. The offer, when it comes, is delivered by a goat named Black Phillip. “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously.” The audience agreed that yes, they probably would.

The Terms

What the deal with the devil has always been about, underneath the sulfur and the crossroads and the cream suits, is the terror of wanting something badly enough to pay any price for it. Faust wanted knowledge. Tommy Johnson wanted to play guitar better than anyone alive. Thomasin wanted to be free. The horror is not the devil. The horror is that the offer sounds reasonable and the terms are always printed small.

Every generation rewrites the story because every generation needs to. The template survives because the wanting does not stop.

News

Shudder’s May Is the Best Month They’ve Had in a While.

Published

2 days ago

April 27, 2026

Luna Gray

Shudder dropped their May 2026 programming slate and it is heavier than most months. The lead is The Terror: Devil in Silver, the long-awaited third installment of AMC’s horror anthology, premiering May 7 with new episodes weekly through June 11. Next up, Tales from the Crypt, all seven seasons, begins streaming May 1 after years off the market. Four new exclusive films fill out the rest of the month.

The Terror: Devil in Silver

The first two seasons of The Terror stand as some of the best horror television of the past decade. Season one sent the crew of HMS Terror on a doomed Arctic voyage in 1845. Season two, Infamy, placed its story inside a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. Neither shared a cast nor a plot with the other. Both were exceptional. Season three takes Victor LaValle’s novel and builds it into a six-episode limited series. Dan Stevens plays Pepper, a working-class moving man who lands in a psychiatric hospital through bad luck and a worse temper. What he finds inside is not treatment.

Karyn Kusama, who directed the Yellowjackets pilot and earned an Emmy nomination for it, directs the opening two episodes and serves as co-executive producer. LaValle and Chris Cantwell co-wrote the scripts. Ridley Scott executive produces. The ensemble behind Stevens includes Judith Light, CCH Pounder, Aasif Mandvi, Stephen Root, and Marin Ireland. This is the kind of combination that earns attention before a single frame has aired.

New episodes premiere weekly after May 7.

Tales from the Crypt

Tales from the Crypt ran on HBO from 1989 to 1996. Seven seasons. Ninety-three episodes. Each one a self-contained story hosted by the Crypt Keeper, a wisecracking animated corpse voiced by John Kassir, who closes every episode with a pun only he finds funny.

The show pulled from EC Comics and assembled talent at a level that looks almost unreasonable in retrospect: Brad Pitt, Demi Moore, Christopher Reeve, Catherine O’Hara, and Steve Buscemi in front of the camera. Robert Zemeckis, Tobe Hooper, and William Friedkin behind it. Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael J. Fox also directed episodes.

The series has been effectively unavailable to stream for years, tied up in rights complications. It is now on Shudder. Season one drops May 1. Subsequent seasons premiere weekly on Fridays, with the final season 7 arriving June 12. Watch parties run every Friday at 9pm ET. There is no good reason to wait on this one.

The Exclusives

Whistle arrives May 8 and is the exclusive to prioritize. Directed by Corin Hardy, who made The Nun, and starring Dafne Keen, Sophie Nélisse, Percy Hynes White, and Nick Frost, it follows high school students who find an ancient Aztec Death Whistle and discover that blowing it summons their future deaths to hunt them down. Totally normal thing to happen.

Heresy lands May 1 and is worth knowing about before it arrives. Director Didier Konings is making his feature debut after years as a concept artist on Stranger Things, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

Smothered arrives May 29 as a Shudder Original. It is Indonesian, and it is produced by Joko Anwar, the director behind Satan’s Slaves and Impetigore. That name means something to anyone who has been paying attention to international horror over the past decade. The film follows a micro-painting artist who loses part of his memory in an accident and returns home to find a woman claiming to be his mother.

This Is Not a Test streams May 22. Directed by Adam MacDonald and adapted from Courtney Summers’ 2012 novel, it stars Olivia Holt as a student sheltering in a high school during a zombie outbreak.

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[Exclusive Clip] ‘From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle’

Published

3 days ago

April 26, 2026

Ryan T. Cusick

Audiences are invited to explore one of Vermont’s most mysterious regions in From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle, arriving later this month on streaming platforms and DVD.

The documentary will debut on April 28, 2026, on platforms including Apple TV, Prime Video, and Google Play. DVD editions will be available exclusively through the Small Town Monsters online shop.

Directed by Seth Breedlove, the film continues the company’s exploration of folklore, cryptids, and unexplained phenomena. Breedlove’s previous work includes The Mothman of Point Pleasant, On the Trail of Bigfoot, American Werewolves, and more than two dozen feature-length productions. In total, Small Town Monsters has released more than thirty films, along with investigative programs, web series, books, podcasts, and exclusive membership content.

From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle was made possible through the support of backers from the company’s 2025 Kickstarter campaign.

Set in rural Vermont, the documentary examines the legend of the Bennington Triangle, an area associated with reports of UFOs, ghosts, phantom lights, mysterious creatures, and a series of unexplained disappearances. At the center of the mystery is Glastenbury Mountain, where decades of unanswered questions continue to inspire speculation.

Going beyond folklore and campfire tales, the film asks a chilling question: Why is Glastenbury Mountain so inexplicable, and what happened to those who went missing?