Ryan Coogler’s Sinners keeps getting called a horror film, but that label doesn’t stick. Horror is supposed to work by breeding dread, keeping people on edge, making you wonder who’s going to survive. Sinners? It’s more like a brisk period drama with vampire gloss and a weird amount of sex talk.
The climax illustrates this mismatch. Remmick, the head vampire, threatens to go to Grace Chow’s home and turn her daughter Lisa into a vampire. That threat — not a monster breaking in, not a slow build — is what presses Grace to act. She calls them out, invites them into the barn, and suddenly you’re in the finale. Within minutes, half the cast is killed off, Preacher Boy and Smoke kill Remmick, and then the KKK show up for a final Tarantino-style shootout. And here’s the kicker: the movie honestly would have been better if the KKK had been the sole villains all along. At least that kind of historical horror has weight, resonance, and real terror. Instead, we got vampires who act like they’re waiting for an engraved invitation, followed by a grindhouse shootout that feels tacked on for style points.
But what the film dwells on is even stranger. There are repeated discussions about cunnilingus — Stack and Preacher Boy banter about “finding the button,” Hailee Steinfeld drops a line about someone shoving “his tongue in her coochie.” These aren’t rare jokes; they’re recurring motifs. By the end, you realize there are more moments devoted to sex humor than actual terror. If you walked in expecting vampires to petrify, you instead got more oral-sex chatter than bite-marks.
Part of why it feels undercooked is how fast it got made. Coogler and Warner Bros. pushed this into production in about four months, with a budget around $90–100 million. The first two acts are strong — atmosphere, cast, setting all firing — but the rushed timeline weakens the horror elements and the payoff.
Now, on box office: Sinners did huge domestically. As of late summer 2025, it’s grossed about $278.6 million in the U.S. and Canada. Internationally, it’s made about $86–88 million, for a worldwide total around $365–370 million. Its opening weekend domestically was about $48 million; internationally in that same weekend it pulled in around $15.4 million, giving a global opening in the vicinity of $61 million. The U.S. embraced it, but overseas the film landed soft — not because of quality, but because it was packaged as horror and delivered as something else entirely.
So let’s call it what it is. Sinners isn’t horror. It borrows the look — barns, shadows, vampires — but it doesn’t live in the genre. What it delivers is a drama with a Tarantino-style finale, a fairy tale gloss, and a running joke that makes it feel less like a horror film and more like a promotional tour for cunnilingus. And in the end, the scariest thing about it is how close it came to being great — if it had skipped the toothless vampires and just let the real monsters, the KKK, run the show. At least then the horror would’ve actually felt like horror, instead of a polite knock at the barn door.
Hollywood After Dark 