Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners’ Is Inspired By Iconic Heavy Metal Band

Ryan Coogler, the same movie director behind the popular Black Panther franchise, has another film in the works.

The film Sinners is Coogler’s first original feature film project, and is a movie about vampires set in the Jim Crow South.

Behind Coogler’s mind and craft, the Oakland native mainly took inspiration from Metallica.

“I wanted the movie to feel like a song,” Coolger said to the San Francisco Chronicle. “So I used Metallica’s One.”

One song in particular was the 1998 anti-war song from The Bay Area heavy metal band’s album, “And Justice for All.” the lyrics go as follows, “Darkness imprisoning me / All that I see / Absolute Horror /I cannot live / I cannot die / Trapped in my self / Body my holding cell.”

“It starts off intense, then gets melodic,” Coolger said of both Sinners and Metallica, “and going somewhere just f—king crazy. But by the time you’re finished, it was clear you were always going to get there.”

While still living in the East Bay, Coogler came onto the scene around 2013 with the movie Fruitvale Station, which was based on the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant by a police officer at the Fruitvale BART station.

Then, he made moves by taking over the Rocky franchise with Creed in 2015 before ultimately entering the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Black Panther and the sequel, Black Panther Wakanda Forever.

What’s significant about the movie Sinners is that it will be his very first feature that’s not based on another source. The actor who plays Killmonger in the first Black Panther movie, Michael B. Jordan, will play twins Smoke and Stack in the film. The twins are two Chicago veterans who come back home to a small town in Mississippi to start a jazz club. They begin to receive hate from white people. The opening night of the Jazz Club is where the vampires appear.

The film also stars Hallie Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Wunni Mosakh, and many more.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Coogler answered a few questions about the movie.

When asked if he was nervous about writing his first movie, not based on the source material, he stated, “I’m always nervous. But I was excited to put myself out there after having worked so much and engaged so much with the film-going audience.”

Coogler then continued, “I was actually kind of ashamed that I hasn’t done anything that was more personal in terms of story. I wanted to build a framing that was unique to me, the framing of the horrific tragedy, the injustice I was going to convey in this film.”

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