It’s such a relief to finally be past the era of the backlash to the Twilight phenomenon that lasted throughout the 2010s where everyone was pretending that vampires weren’t interesting and all stories that featured them were juvenile and worthless. I will die on the hill that vampires are the most useful and poignant folklore monster to add to any story, and that their flexibility in telling a metaphor is what makes them so special. No matter the story, no matter the genre, a vampire is never just a vampire. Regardless of whether or not their writer intended them as an allegory they will always represent something just by their nature of being infectious, life-draining undead. Vampires are addiction, alienation, queerness, freedom, chronic illness, aristocracy, poverty, cults, infestations, or a dozen other things depending on the role they are made to play.
The vampires in Sinners represent multiple complex themes layered on top of each other in the form of a monster. They are isolation, loneliness, the loss of culture as well as the forcing of culture onto unwilling marginalized communities. They are presented throughout the majority of the film as irredeemable, if sympathetic, victims of a tragedy they couldn’t hope to escape. This makes the ending scene one of the most powerful in modern cinema, as it shows what happens when a vampire is able to maintain a connection with the living world through music and culture. It shows the person behind the monster that we thought was lost, and implies so much about what had previously been shown as bloodthirsty, if sympathetic, creatures of the night. It adds an extra level of melancholy to what had already been a tragedy, while also reigniting hope for the present and future in a single, short conversation. As writers and artists begin to embrace the vampire more openly now that the embarrassing cringe culture surrounding them has dissipated, I hope that Sinners will be looked back on as having some of the best.