A Most Interesting Monster
Manny and Jez explore monsters and monstrosity and what they represent in pop culture through the ages
A Most Interesting Monster
Sinners (2025): I want your stories; I want your songs
Thank you so much for joining us. Visit AMostInterestingMonster.com and follow us on Instagram and TikTok, and watch us on YouTube at A Most Interesting Monster
Follow Manny at @dialoguesbydesign on Instagram
Follow Jezmina at @jezmina.vonthiele on Instagram
Hosted by Manny and Jezmina Von Thiele
Edited by Manny
Music by Dia Luna
Welcome everyone. Hello, hello, and welcome to a new episode. Well, technically the first episode of A Most Interesting Monster, um, where we delve into the weird and wonderful world of all things terrifying. I, of course, amani, joined by I'm Jasmina.
SPEAKER_03:So happy to be here. So happy to be talking about sinners, even more.
SPEAKER_01:Even more. Um, we have been having a wonderful ongoing conversation about sinners. And, you know, eventually we would like to get to a point where you all, our audience, are also engaging with some of these things, maybe even making recommendations of things you would like us to talk about. You heard our intro episode. If you haven't, please go and check it out uh to learn a little bit more about the two of us and how do we meet and kind of our mythos uh around this work. But I'll just say briefly really the main reason why we are interested in this is that both uh Jez and I acknowledge that uh horror in general is an amazing, amazing genre to talk about uncomfortable truths, to make connections about things we normally wouldn't want to talk about in society. And something about horror allows us to really delve deep into the ways in which monsters are represented in our culture, in our stories, in our folklore, and obviously in our movies and TV shows. Um, and in general, we're just spooky seasoned pros. We we love this. This is year-round for us.
SPEAKER_03:It never stops. Monsters are always in.
SPEAKER_01:There is no reason not to like monsters. Um, and uh we we hope to talk about a lot of very interesting monsters and different kinds of properties and whatnot. Um, and again, we hope to do it in conversation with you all. And so today we are getting into Ryan Kugler's 2025 cultural phenomenon sinners, which we will be bringing in some conversation from a really, really amazing, really, really amazing guest that we had, our very first guest, Brother Yona. And again, welcome to our first uh big episode.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, should we start with a little bit of a synopsis? Because sometimes people might not totally remember what they saw, or maybe maybe you're listening and you didn't watch it and you just want to see what we have to say about it, which I do sometimes with roots fans. I know it's weird, but I really like to do that.
SPEAKER_01:It is not weird at all. Um, my my nephew is a Twitch gamer. I've I mentioned this before. I don't know the games he's playing, but I like to just sit down and watch it. I'm cool with other people playing a game that I know nothing about and will never play, and sometimes that's perfectly fine. Very soothing. Very soothing. So, for those that may not remember, Sinners, uh starring Michael B. Jordan in a dual role as both brothers smoke and stack. Jazz is gonna teach me a lot about the just the interesting symbolism regarding like the two brothers, and the and and we also learn from brother Yonah that even the colors the brothers wear are specific to the the time, the points that are being made, some of the themes, which is fantastic. But it is uh an amazing film, it's a horror film, but with a lot of other interesting elements to it. It's a it music is a large part of it, drama, family drama, etc. Um, but it takes place in Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1946, and is uh focused on these two brothers who are coming back to Mississippi from Chicago, and specifically, they're about to open a juke joint featuring their cousin Sammy on guitar, who is the son of a preacher, hence named Feature Boy, and he is a blues prodigy. Although this is really the first time he's gonna be able to showcase that at his cousin's juke joint. Interesting things happen once the uh once all parties are at said juke joints at the end of the day, involving supernatural forces, vampires most specifically, haints to a certain degree, which we'll we'll talk a little bit about uh later on. And ultimately, what we get is a film that kind of transcends a lot of the genre trappings that they might have been in to create something really new and interesting and beautiful, and a time where sometimes you know Fast and Furious 25 or whatever will come out, and you're like, Where's all the really interesting stories out there? We really felt like Sinners was one of them. So if you've seen it, please be prepared for some wonderful conversation. If you haven't seen it, spoilers. Just to just let you know, there's so many. So many spoilers. Um, but at the end of the day, this is really an opportunity for Jasmina and I to talk about some of the things that resonated with us, why we thought this film was so interesting, the monsters represented, and what they may or may not have represented, and really just anything that we think is interesting because we are very interesting people.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and I just really love how it opens with this intro about how first um music pierces the veil, and this idea that there have been storytellers and musicians, and they have pierced the veil between the living and dead, and that that creates uh energies of healing and also attracts energies that might be preying on the healers or you know, the people bringing this gift to the community. And that's actually a spiritual principle that I grew up with that like the more good you're doing in the world, the more spiritual good you're doing in the world, the brighter you shine to a word energies and they try to attack you. And so you do all these different spiritual things to try to ward them up. So that's I mean, it sort of makes sense if you're dealing with a lot with spirits, then you usually have the best ghost stories because the weirdest shit has come to find you.
SPEAKER_01:Very much can't attest. We're gonna we're gonna have to have an episode where we're not actually talking about any property or anything, we're just talking about monster-ish things in our own lives, just things that we've seen, experienced. Um, because I think there's a lot to that. I'm really curious though to hear, because again, you all our listeners will get to learn more and more about the two of us. Jez and I are culturally as distinct and different as maybe two people can get. Um, but we love each other dearly, and you're gonna only hear me talk about how amazing she is over and over and over again. This is obviously dealing with concepts of magic. This is a this is a film that from first glance looks like a a period film, you know, and uh like a period film or something that maybe Spike Lee would have made back in the 90s, but obviously it's very different. And this idea of a veil uh separating our material world to the spiritual one. And I have no such example to draw on um in my own upbringing. Um, so I'm really interested, just kind of like jumping off the bat, since again you mentioned that like that's really the whole premise, right? Like certain types of art, music, or whatever it might be seems to be able to pierce the veil. And as we talk a little, we'll we'll be talking about a little bit more. It very much seems like the vampires are very much interested in Sammy. I think I think several times is like we came for you, like we're the one that we want. Um, and I find that fascinating. So perhaps just to start things off, where does this film kind of land for you in terms of a narrative talking about, you know, like the separation between this space here and maybe in a a space that we can't see or a spiritual realm? Um, what is the what does that kind of premise touch on for you? I'd be curious.
SPEAKER_03:I really relate it to folktale, I think. It feels very much like folktale to me, and it feels like the kind of cautionary tale that like a grandmother might tell, even though in so many ways this is a very contemporary story, which is w wonderful about it. But it has these great ancient elements where it's basically like, yeah, you might be very gifted, and but that doesn't mean that you can't, you don't have to be aware of what your gift is doing. And um, it feels like a cautionary tale in some ways, but it's also a hero's journey. But we're looking at multiple heroes, and I think that the hero's journey um is something that shows up in a lot of divination tools like tarot and anything that has um a narrative to it and has uses archetypes. And so um folk tales are, you know, created by the cultures that um that tell them, and they often reflect a lot of the spiritual principles that you're you're holding and the values. And so it just it makes a lot of sense that um you might dive into material, like how do you navigate when when the veil is pierced, when you have this like storytelling gift, and what's that hero's journey look like for you, and what kind of archetypes and experiences do you meet along the way? And um, yeah, and of course we have the kind of like devil at the crossroads sort of energy too coming up. It's in the so cool.
SPEAKER_01:Like immortality. We're we're definitely gonna start right in here. An interesting point that our guest brother Yona made about crossroads in particular, and the devil not actually being a devil in the sense of you know, the guy with the pitchfork and the horns and the hoofed feet, which is I suppose the way devils have certainly been portrayed, at least in my Judeo-Christian upbringing. Um, but like this this this idea that like I I I'm so interested in this concept of like using even the term devil is in itself not right, you know, like it's not it's it we could just be talking about an entity in general coming from a different place and and inhabiting a different role in this material world, that because of the whitewashing of sorts of these parts of uh particularly African American lineage and folklore, that that obviously a lot of this film is grounded in African-American folklore. This idea that it's not necessarily the the devil that you need to crossroads, but an entity with which you can form a pact with a deal. Um and I find this a fascinating, fascinating subject.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and I mean let's let's bop back to African folklore too, because even uh the double Jordan is significant because um the sacred twins are such an important part of the Yoruba Yoruba religion. And I was also reading that um in the Yoruba parts of the world where there are most more practicing Yoruba people, there's also a higher concentration of twins, which is just like fascinating to me. So cool.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I have seen that. I have seen that you share, did you share that with me on Instagram?
SPEAKER_03:Maybe I did. I don't know. I got very excited.
SPEAKER_01:That's such a fascinating thing, too, because again, I don't know. I my mother is uh uh was a nurse, she's retired now, she was a nurse for about nearly 50 years, and she began as a midwife in the Caribbean. And there are so many interesting stories that midwives tell about childbirth, and the the the strange kind of this idea that like when there is a new life being birthed for a brief moment, it too is piercing something of a veil. And like so many of our, you know, sometimes religious ceremonies of a christening and whatnot is often kind of touching on these ideas that like a young life is closer to whatever is in the hereafter than we are here right now. And you know, and this idea that you know, like like you gotta be careful, you gotta do certain things if you see the baby has this or the baby has too much of that, or if the baby cries this time, but not at that time, if the baby was born between this time and that time. Um, I've heard all these things can obviously have a factor on um the child and whatnot. So it's so interesting that again we have these twins representing a lot of things from my perspective, and I'd love to that that very much hear yours. Um, off the bat, I see smoke and stack as these really interesting juxtapositions of where black Americans were at this particular time in US history. That Kugler chose this particular place and this particular time to tell this story, because you're talking about a time where post-emancipation, um, the industrialization of the early 1900s basically meant that black men were leaving their families to work in the only jobs that were available for black men at that time, which was mostly labor and the railroads. So as our railroads expanded, areas that were big railroad hubs like Chicago, like uh like Mississippi, like a lot of these other places, became these huge convergences, I guess you could say, of a lot of different black identities at that particular time. And I think one of the cool things about Sinners is that they, without having to put this big sign that says black is not a monolith, they show you that each of the different people in Sinners are living different lives, have had different experiences, perhaps different beliefs, different hopes, and yet they're all kind of under the specter, I guess you can say, of like the the white supremacist policies, views, and everything that was obviously very latent in uh the the America at the time, but most certainly in Mississippi. Um, so for me, those two brothers, especially and if I take them into the context of Sammy and other people as well, but smoke and stack to me kind of represent a urban kind of understanding of the world at that particular time. Um, I saw a guy online likening them to sign it kind of like MLK versus Malcolm X, and that MLK represented more of like a rural southern Baptist black experience, whereas Malcolm X was representing an urban black experience. Both of them obviously are having a negative experience under the spectrum of uh white supremacy, but the way they choose to express it is different. And so I see smoke and stack as representative of that kind of dichotomy at the time of a very urban Chicago-based kind of uh um styling that these these young men have that are in complete conflict, I guess you can say, with the Southern Baptist kind of um upbringing that his cousin and the rest of their cousin Sammy and the rest of their family seem to to kind of illustrate and touch on. So that's kind of how I see it. How do you see those twins?
SPEAKER_03:I mean, I I agree with all of that. And I I got really excited watching um Ryan Kugler talk about um why he decided on twins. And he was, I mean, so thoughtful about all the choices he made in this film. And I was really interested in how he was talking about um ebji, the concept of spiritual balance or divine balance that twins represent in the Yoruba religion, and um how the Ebege is uh an erisha, but also protected by the erisha of Chango, or Chango or Sango, that's different ways to pronounce it, who you know, because I'm curious about how diaspora moves around and how we're influenced by the places we land, I found out that in Brazil, where there's also a big Romani population, Chango is the protector of the enslaved Africans, whereas Oya is the protector of Romani people, who many of whom are also enslaved. And um, right, yeah. And so, like lightning and thunder is a really big important part to both of those arishas. And that happens a lot in the film at important points. There's lightning strikes or thunder, which, you know, of course, is uh a wonderful horror trope that we get excited about when it's a dark and stormy night. But also just with that in mind, with these divine twins showing they're trying to write the balance. I think like they're like true gangsters in that sense, that they're trying to write the balance. They are in in like an unfair system. They are so they and their communities are so heavily oppressed that they're just like, yeah, we gotta fix this. And you see that with um, you know, when uh smoke shoots the guy trying to rob them and then pays for his medical bills.
SPEAKER_01:That is exactly I thought that was the most gangster shit I have like. You're gonna shoot him in the ass and then pay for his medical bills. It's it's such a it's such a fantastic sense of community, but then also kind of like unwritten laws that can exist in a community. You know you shouldn't be stealing from the smokestack twins. Yeah, you know that. Like that is that is that is known, and there are consequences for said actions, and the community will enforce those those consequences and acknowledge them. That you know, like nobody, nobody was angry at him for shooting the guy that you just know not to do that. But like, and I found that fascinating, truly.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and and this whole thing with balance is really played with throughout the film, social balance, like you know, injustice and trying to balance the scales. And then also when Stack ends up um, you know, becoming a vampire, they are in this balance with one on the other side, which is something that's explored not just in these mythologies pertinent to the work that we're looking at right now, but also like Casser and Pollux, one is in the sky and one is on earth, and they swap every, I think it's every six months or something. And so, I mean, this is something that we see a lot with twins and divine balance. One is maybe when, especially when they're separated, the idea is there's some sort of divine reason for that. One is on the other side while the other lives, and it's very beautiful, I think, the way that we navigate balance through both of these twins. I also thought it was very interesting how in order for them to be with the women that they love, they could not be together. There was something around balance there.
SPEAKER_01:Such an interesting I'm I I love that you said that because I am very, very curious about Explore. I actually thought that was a super interesting. The the idea of balance seems very interesting for both smoke and stack, right? And I also am really interested in delving into their relationships because it seems pretty clear that again, these two these two guys, maybe twins, would have had very uh different kinds of experiences, uh, particularly as it relates to things like you know, family or love. Um, they certainly share the same father that has instilled a certain set of examples. We we I you know we've talked about we talked about this with Brother Yonah, but this idea that so much of sinners is possibly talking about generational trauma and the how do we talk, you know, how do we identify generational trauma? How do we liberate ourselves from generation, how do we break the chains? Um, but at the same time, what do we lose when we break the chains is something that I think is also a narrative that I got a lot out of that. And so you you pointed to a line that I thought was particularly interesting, kind of speaking to what we just talked about in terms of these um the the balancing of these individuals and their their love lives. Um so we have we have the comment, I didn't want to be white, I wanted to be with you, which which I I thought was so interesting. So we have this idea that Mary belongs to the community, but is clearly existing in two different spaces. She's able to be uh white passing enough to, from what we understand in the film, is married to a white man. We certainly get the impression that. Um that stack feels like that was for the best. You know, he makes a comment later on in the film that, you know, like I would kill for you. Um, and then I, you know, Mary is kind of like pointing to as like, okay, so you can't love me, but you kill for me, you kill on my behalf. And I personally feel like that is such an interesting thing that you see so often in various kinds of expressions of masculinity, particularly amongst black populations. This idea that I can only express my my interests through someone through violence, and that violence instead of empathy or love is the ways in which we are trained to show affection to somebody else. And I thought that that was something really interesting. But yeah, they couldn't be, you know, like Mary simply couldn't. Stack was like, You couldn't be with me, period. Um, and in Smoke's case, Smoke and Annie had a child um that passed away. And we we don't have to necessarily see how that affected their relationship. We see how, like, in the way they talk to each other and interact with each other, some of the problems that Smoke has even with the Hulu belief system and the feeling like how come your mojo bag couldn't bring back our child? How come your you know your beliefs couldn't? So also there's this idea, obviously, that Smoke and Annie can't seem to be together. Mary and Stack can't seem to be together. What is what is up with that? I wonder.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, it's so it's so interesting because I think the the two of them have such a deep and important connection that immediately creates its own little ecosystem. And it's not like a safe world for for women, for family, for settling down. Like they're operating in very dangerous places, they're literally at war or they're in Chicago, like uh pitting the Irish and the Italian mafia.
SPEAKER_01:Such a cool idea in general, such a cool very piggy blinders.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I love it. Um and so I in some ways it makes sense in that really practical sense where it's like, yeah, this is not where I can settle and have a family, but there also seems to be a cosmic element to it where it's sort of like when they're together, they they have to be apart from them. When they're together, then they're apart from the other. It's it's a lot of this sort of almost like magical balance that's happening. And it's interesting the ways that this shows up. I mean, Mary's character was fascinating to me as someone who's mixed and can is sort of like ethnically ambiguous, like my whiteness is very much in the eye of the beholder. And um uh the way that she was both trying to help and not being aware of how much danger she brought with her um was very felt very cautionary tale for me. It was moving like around like from Romani community to Gage community, like the non-Roma community. Because it is it's very easy to not know that your privilege attracts trouble. Um, that like you might be introducing the wrong people into a community with because they're cool with you, that doesn't mean they're gonna be cool with your people. You know, it's it's very I she may broke my heart a little bit. I'm like, oh baby girl, we gotta be careful.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I I'll be honest with you. I didn't, I honestly didn't take that into account enough because when when Sammy and Smoke were at oh were trying to recruit Delta Slim and Mary is first kind of introduced, Sammy looks visibly terrified that this woman is walking, like there is a white woman talk walking towards us right now. And like he he seemed like he was literally going to freak out. And obviously we recognize that, you know, there's there's now from my point of view, I'm only thinking, well, like, well, like, yeah, bro, like I mean, even right now, if a white lady says that I did a thing, I don't know who's gonna believe me, you know. Yeah, this is just a reality, right? And yet, um, I don't think I really thought about the fact that part of what Mary had to understand was that simply by existing in the same spaces where smoke and where all these other individuals were, there was a certain kind of they were attracting a certain kind of attention. Um, and it didn't uh it didn't really occur to me because now I'm sitting here thinking about obviously later on who is it that event that who is who's the first one who amongst the group who gets turned. It's Mary, and I'm just like Mary, why'd you go out there? We were everything was fine, you didn't have to go out there, but of course, her being able to exist in these two worlds was like, Okay, look, I know you all need money. Yeah, those are some white folks with money. Yeah, I'm gonna try to get those them in here because we I can kind of exist in both worlds, and I know and that's how it always starts.
SPEAKER_03:I I um made a huge faux power like going back into my personal life. Um there was uh a documentary agency that approached me when I was too young and not worldly enough to really understand that most of the time when people approach a Romani person about making a documentary, it's awful, it's gonna be bad. And they spun this whole yarn about like, oh, we're just really interested in understanding more about marriage practices. And I like reached out to a few people that was like, Yeah, what do you think? Do you want to talk to them? And they were like, Are you an idiot? Like, and they kind of pointed out that they had been sniffing around and they wanted to do this super exploitative documentary, and they were just sort of like, Why would you bring these people like to my door, basically, like to my email door, you know? And I was just like, I am a dumbass. I don't know that because I only just started publicly sharing that I was Romani and I don't have any media experience. So I was not savvy enough to know that these people are super exploitative and terrible. I was just thinking, oh, you can get paid for being in this documentary. Because it always starts with like, oh, I can think I can help. Like these people have money, they they want to give us money. And it's like, do they? Do they?
SPEAKER_01:Ooh, yes. I am I'm I'm wondering about some of the some of my own things. You know, now of a sudden I'm sitting here thinking about like, wait a second, there was definitely more than a few spaces where I thought that by courting the dollars of a person or an entity, I would be able to, you know, knowing that it might feel a little whatever to engage with individuals, I figured, well, I can be an intermediary and bring some of those resources to my community. And that didn't happen for me either. So I'm like, wow, what is this?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And so that's I really felt for Mary because she, I mean, she really did want to help, but she just had no idea like the danger that she was bringing in. And it was, it's so interesting because Remick as a vampire is colonization, like he is the force of colonization, and I it absolutely felt purposeful that the the white passing um person is like the first to fall, first one to go, which is of course an interesting flip of the old school horror trauma, horror trope.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah person dies first. Well, at this time it was the whitest lady in the room, is the one who went first, and I found that an interesting way of kind of turning that particular narrative on his head, right? But um, let's talk about Remick because I I think it's important as a podcast platform conversation dynamic duo, um, talking about monsters, that we identify a monster in this film. And for those who have seen the film, you know where we're jumping into. For those that have not, again, sorry, you should you should really you should really check it out. Definitely watch it. Remick is an interesting character in general. Before we even talk about the vampire nature of who remick is, we recognize obviously that whoever the body that we're seeing is coming very specifically from Ireland. And I I really, I really am interested in hearing uh obviously your kind of thoughts about Remick and particularly Remick as this example, I guess you can say, of a type of colonialism that I don't think American audiences think about very often when they think about imperialism. I'll I'll be again the first to admit it probably wasn't until I started watching something like a Peaky Blinders or something like that that I started realizing, man, there's a lot that went down in Ireland that I was never taught in school, uh certainly in the United States. I would love to hear your thoughts on Mr. Remick.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, so first I love that the Choctaw are the vampire hunters. I wish we had more scenes with them. It made me very happy. It felt real. And what really struck me as so poetic and so fascinating about Remick being an Irish vampire is that he drops pretty early on, or well, he doesn't actually drop his Irish accent till later, till he's singing The Rocky Road to Dublin. And which is one of my favorite scenes where I mean the vampires are dancing a jig. I'm losing my mind.
SPEAKER_01:So I I was bl I was like, I was really curious. Uh like I had to go and do research on that song, and because I'm like I knew this was a scene of power, but I knew I didn't have enough uh background or context to know maybe why outside of what I was seeing that this was such an incredible scene.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, because I mean the Rocky Road to Dublin is also all about colonization. It's like first the person leaves their home and um I actually I forget I'll have to look up the lyrics now, but first the person leaves their home and goes to Dublin to find work. And the idea is that um they get robbed right away because they don't like oh, Connect, he's from Connect, um, the the protagonist in the song is from Connect and he has an accent because if anyone's been to Ireland, you'll know that Irish accents vary tremendously just from one side of town to the other. Like it's not even just like by city or by region. It's really, really specific. And so they're like, oh, we don't like the Connect accent here. So he got robbed, and then he ends up um, okay, so he's taking the Rocky Road to Dublin, and he's you know, he's got his blackthorn, he's chasing away the ghosts and goblins. The idea that he's coming, he's a country lad, he's coming from like, you know, the old world, going into the city where he's not accepted. He loses everything, so he stows away to Liverpool, and like it just gets worse. Like he just keeps getting kicked around because no one wants him there. Um, because Ireland had been colonized so much by not just by the British, but also the Vikings before that. And this long, long period, yeah, 1172 first um was the first item was colonized by England, beginning with the Norman invasion in 1172, and also, you know, other groups were showing up there as well. I mean, the potato famine was not a famine, it was uh a genocidal tactic by the English army, and we have people who um have living memory of that. The Irish were so severely colonized and mistreated by the English, and their bloody wars and living memory and battles and skirmishes and all these things to try to regain territory, and it's a really fascinating thing to look into. And so so many Irish immigrants are coming to the US, some of them indentured, um, some of them were able to leave indentured servitudes, some were not. And the thing is that Irish people were also heavily discriminated against here because they had this centuries of stigma coming out of the rhetoric of the colonizers saying that the Irish are backwards and you know, everything that colonizers say, everything that they say about other groups that they've colonized too. But because Irish people are white, within a few generations, people don't need to know you're Irish anymore. You might change your last name or have it changed, or maybe people just don't care because now you own land and you're rich. But the white privilege, yeah, within three generations, it's it's out in the wash. And so many Irish people got here and forgot that and started colonizing other people who they used to be, you know, working on the railroad with like not that long ago. And so it's really scary to be expecting that Remick shows up and wants Sammy's songs because he needs to remember his people. He doesn't see that he is he's become colonization.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I see. Oh my goodness, okay, wow. We've literally had like 14,000 conversations about this, and I think I only just now made that connection. Like, because obviously, from my point of view, I certainly remember, you know, having conversations in in my own personal work. I do a lot of conversations about racial equity and the way that these have kind of tied into various uh uh parts of our you know shared history in the United States, and a lot of people don't remember when Irish were not considered white, like Irish people became white uh when they had to figure out a word that was specifically going to make sure that you weren't black. Um, and you know, they you could easily find newspaper cartoons of Irish people being depicted as like these big-nosed potato-loving gremlins, and like these were these were literally the ways in which uh white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the United States were talking about Irish people. But then, of course, when Irish people in the you know, immigrants in the United States kind of figured out a foothold within the justice system, particularly working in the police departments, um, and the ways in which the the Irish immigrants suddenly found an identity in the United States, specifically as police enforcers, uh, is such an interesting idea that Remick alone, just by uh not only being a vampire, but to your point, is like the reason he wants Sammy Song is to be uh united with his people again. Like it's it's such an amazing analogy for a lot of ways what the West did to uh Irish people, and then the ways in which Irish uh many Irish immigrants uh attempted to be welcomed into a system of whiteness in the United States by themselves becoming part of an oppressive force, uh, which is such an interesting thing. But I don't think I ever actually put that specifically together until you just said that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's it's so fascinating because I I think it's just so masterfully done. Like it's just such good writing. And when Sammy starts reciting the Lord's Prayer, um, I had to look up like how old is the Lord's Prayer in English, because I'm trying to figure out how old Remick is. And also, Remek is not an Irish name, it's an Anglicized version of a Germanic surname, which to me, in my brain, I'm like, that's very like Vikings. Like, whenever there's like a Germanic sounding name, Scandinavian sounding name, it's like that's the Viking influence in in Ireland. And so even his name is sort of like an old type of colonization. And the Lord's Prayer in English is about 500 years old, so it's like dating back to the 1500s.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_03:Possibly could be when Remick was was turned, because Ireland became Catholic like before the fifth century. Like it was that was a long time ago. But if it maybe Remek knew it in another language, maybe he's even older. We don't really know. Um, but he remembers his father's land being taken, and he needs yeah, which is that's old.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you gotta be real old. It's definitely before you know the 1940s when the film is is taking place. Yeah, quite old. That's a good point.
SPEAKER_03:And the gold that he has is very old. It's like that is not even 500 years ago. Well, maybe it is 500 years ago old, but that also brought me to a really interesting post that I saw that I had been wondering about if he's a kind of Faye, which also sort of falls under the category, is he a kind of haint? Um because Faye and Haint are interesting categories. Um, I got this post is from Rose Auroras, uh, who's a really interesting folklore and like spiritual creator. And Fay are just are basically spirits from other places, other times, other other lands. And there are a lot of different kinds, and they kind of they feed on different things. And there are fe who feed on blood, and haints are, you know, they are spirits inhabiting dead, dead bodies. In a way, a vampire is that, but it's also it's like a certain kind of fee, a certain kind of haint. Um, I thought that was really interesting that both of the folklores have something like a category for what Remic is, and both are scary.
SPEAKER_01:Very much so. Very much so. I'm curious too, because you know, while we're talking about Remek and of course attempting to identify our monster, and it should be noted to our listeners there might be multiple monsters in a in a in a single film, and there might be protagonists who are monsters or monsterists, and and we're going to obviously explore more of this in some of our future conversations. Oh, but yeah, you know, it I think what's really interesting too is that I saw vampirism writ large, not even necessarily just remic, but vampirism writ large is such an interestingly specific kind of monster to include in a narrative like that. You really, you could have gone the conjuring route, and it, you know, it's like the ghost of some person who has been hurt in the past, have come to, you know, like there's a lot of ways Ryan could have done this, and I thought vampires in general were were were pretty interesting. So what I did was in my geekery, I decided to do a mini dive into vampire philosophy. Um there there is there is vampire philosophy. Now, for the purposes of of our conversation here, so it's not like 15,000 hours long. I focused my research on two particular areas: vampire philosophy as communicated by Anne Rice, um, specifically through her trilogy, The Interview with the Vampire, the Vampire Listat, and the Queen of the Damned, which was one of my absolute favorites, probably one of my first like adult novels that I remember reading as like a preteen. And here I am many years later talking about horror things. Um, you know, it only makes sense. But Anne Rice had a philosophy about vampires that that she really worked into a lot of her work. The other end that I'm gonna bring into this is totally left field, an animated video game adaptation on Netflix called Castlevania, which is a basically like an anime version of the video game Castlevania, which is Dracula and all those other kinds of stuff. A really interesting thing about that series is they actually take the time to think about vampire philosophy. What does it mean to be a vampire? What do vampires want? What do they actually need? And so, in in the two areas, I'd I'd simply break it down in this way Ann Rice made it very clear that in her work, vampirism is is meant to be about consumption, it's about consuming, and that the the the various vampires in her stories are all attempting could to consume something different. So, for example, when we're talking about interview with the vampire, our two gorgeous leads um played by Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, which is a really interesting pairing, but you know, it was the 90s, whatever. Like, oh yeah, what else are we gonna do? What else? You know, whatever. Funny enough, Anne Rice hated initially Tom Cruise as her Lestat. Then after she watched the movie, she was like, Wow, actually, Tom Cruise is like Lestat. Um questionable gentleman, but you know, he tends to commit with his acting, right? And so Anne Rice basically is saying in Interview the Vampire that the the mystery of where vampirism came from is somewhat irrelevant in the narrative. Instead, it's about what people do with. Their vampirism? What are they attempting to accomplish? And the reality is, every single person who's a vampire in her stories are seeking to consume something. When Lestat turned Louis, he was attempting to consume Louis' attention from anything else in the world and apply it just to him. Lestat saw in Louis, because in the in the in the Anne Rice world, vampires um tend to have a lifespan no more than 400 years because they kill themselves, because they can't stand eternity, you know, just this stretched out, this eternal night stretched out in front of them. So there's like a there's almost like a religious and moral quandary that the vampires in Anne Rice's world are attempting to deal with. Interestingly, in Castlevania, the same hot topic of consumption comes up, but instead the idea that vampires cannot help themselves when it comes to overreaching. They see something and they want it. They see something they don't have, they want to consume it. And obviously, you know, when we talk about the ways in which Nosferatu kind of representing vampires in in very early film, um, it's not at all unusual, obviously, that usually the victims of vampires were women in their night dress. Uh, there's always like there's an open window that the vampire comes, you know, stalking into the moonlight, just happens to drape just on her collarbone and her exposed neck. There's obviously something, and Nosferatu took we that might be one that we want to talk about too, because that's a super cool movie. Um, but Nosferatu, I think, brought it home very specifically. This is meant to be a sexual act, and that the act of consumption is an act of dominance in so much of vampiric lore. That is simply to say the vampires in sinners, I guess the question is, what are they trying to consume? What do the vampires in sinners want to consume and why do they want to consume it? Um, I think that's an interesting area to talk on.
SPEAKER_03:Well, the fellowship and love is a very interesting refrain. And I found that very compelling. Also, I'm I was like half saying this and then I got lost in what I was saying. But basically, the other reason I was interested in um Remek as Faye is that they're dancing in a fairy circle during the Rocky Road to Dublin, the song about colonization, that a lot of the black vampires might be able to relate to on in some way now. And they're all kind of drawn into the fellowship and love of vampirism. And I think the other monster that I've identified, you know, there probably more too in this film would be the KKK. And it's like they they use the phrase the grand dragon a lot, which is a real term, but it's also a monstrous term.
SPEAKER_01:And remick really such a good idea. I am so glad I'm talking to you, just so awesome.
SPEAKER_03:So fun. And Remick is like, yeah, we're gonna go take care of him and teach him some fellowship and love. And the take care of him is like, you know, he's excited to kill some racists, but he wants to convert them. And so, like, the consumption and conversion seem very much the same, and people are not supposed to dance in Faye circles because you will be taken into Fey portals, you will be taken into Faye realms, and so the idea is like like consuming life, but also like taking you from that side to this side, which is something that we see happen with smoke and stack. There's a lot of them traversing sides.
SPEAKER_02:You're quite right.
SPEAKER_03:It's so interesting to me that there is this, like the fellowship in love is also a kind of assimilation. Like the when the people in the juke joint start getting turned, they are part of Remic's culture then. And he has that kind of possession over them and he owns their stories and their memories, and he speaks Chinese.
SPEAKER_01:Like it's really lewd stuff, too. Yes, my goodness, brother. Come on, man.
SPEAKER_03:And I mean, I also just like as a side note, really loved the inclusion of those characters, Grace and Bo. I just thought that was so smart, and like I was geeking out about like the Chinese Exclusion Act and how the restrictions on Chinese businesses were so intense, and there were not any Chinese people or people of Asian origin really allowed in for so long, up until like 1943, and the exclusion act was in 1882. It's truly wild. And like, really, restaurants, groceries, and laundries were the only jobs that Chinese people could have. And and Kugler like really hires a lot of consultants, and he very carefully does like research into what he's trying to depict. And they were Dolly Lee, who's a consultant. I had spoken to everyone, and the actress who plays Grace, who I'm blanking on her name, was saying that it really actually wasn't that common for um the different ethnic groups to be friendly with each other. It would have been normal for the Chinese family to run both the black and white grocery. It would have been strange for them to be close friends with smoke and stack, but she really liked that there was like this crossing of these cultural boundaries, which that's like a positive example of it. Like it's beautiful, their friendship, smoke and stack and bow and grace, they get along really beautifully. The scary part is the fellowship and love. Let me drag you into those.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03:That's the scary kind of cross boundaries.
SPEAKER_01:Agreed. Agreed. And and and I I, you know, now I need to make sure I'm looking into some of my my my research and stuff as well. But wouldn't, you know, at this exact same time while this was happening, were there wouldn't there still have been Japanese internment camps uh on the West Coast? Like, you know, like where smoke and stack fought in World War II. Um I'm trying to remember when World War II ended, but like it's such an interesting thing that this idea of uh of connection almost because of oppression is an is a is an interesting thing because when we see that obviously that that now somewhat infamous scene of Sammy playing his song in the juke joint, and we start seeing like this piercing of the veil of time where we are now seeing hip-hop kind of taking part, and we see jazz happening, but we also see like traditional Chinese dance and and and representations of that also happening. We see indigenous forms of music and we see Choctaw individuals, you know, kind of going through, and this idea that something in Sammy's song is is unifying uh in a lot of ways, uh a piercing time of of all these different groups who can, even if it's a different song, they could all be singing a different song, but to my mind, the authenticity of what they are singing is specific to something that an oppressed culture would understand. And I feel like that's something that Ryan is talking a little bit about because I can't say this is for sure, but uh I watched I watched Sinners with uh I watched Sinners like like 10 times, and I watched one of them with my brother who is a musician. He's a good Ryan is such a good boo. Um, my brother is a musician, he's been playing guitar uh since 1993 and and many, many awards and all sorts of kinds of stuff. And when he watched it, he told me, now I don't know if this is true, he was just like, you know, it's really interesting the songs they chose to play when when Remic was like any s like remick or vampire-based songs versus human songs, and I was like, What do you mean? He was like, Well, it almost sounds like he chose songs that were in a minor chord progression, which in a lot of music tends to have a discordant, or those kinds of chords are meant to evoke sometimes um melancholy or something being slightly off. Whereas he said, All of I I don't I can't confirm this, I gotta go look at this, but he's like, All the songs that was played in the juke joints were major scale songs, they were in either C major, D major. Like these are meant to be more what we would consider traditionally harmonizing sounds. Um, and so he was just like, it's almost as if, just in a slight way, Ryan intentionally chose music that that showed that once it was consumed by Remick, once it was consumed by a vampire, it's almost like it was it was it was taking what was authentic to someone else and perverting it somehow. Um, because that's the first thing that comes to my mind when you're talking about the Rocky Road to Dublin. It's almost perverse for a group of vampires to be saying this song in like there's a perversion of that, like you're taking something that was specific to a group of people, specific to us and an experience, and through you, you've homogenized it into like the pink paste that you can get in in stores that they call ground beef. It's like they've they've turned it into something else, into almost something perverse. And I I've thought about that a lot throughout the film, that there was all that there was often a sense of perversion that was specific to Remick. There is a reason why what whatever what he said to Grace in Chinese was you know sexually perverse. There is there's always like an element of taking something important to a group of people and then perverting it. The way that he sang the Lord's Prayer, the way he kind of mocked the Lord's Prayer with Sammy at the end, it's like taking something, and this was also something really big in um both Aaron Rice's philosophy and Castlevania's philosophy that vampires are creatures of the devil, and as such, they the things they do are actively meant to perverse the holiness of God. In like you know, Ann Rice in particular was very specific about vampirism being a representation of devilry, I guess you can say. And the core struggle that Louis has throughout interview with Impat Vampire is I'm never gonna see heaven. Um, like I'm a vampire now. You did this to me against my will. I'm now a creature of the night, I'm now a thing of of the devil, you know. And and this really seemed to bother him. So I I see a lot of that in Remick in that it feels like Ryan is making like a really interesting point that this particular monster and and in and uh remick even says it, right? I want your story and I want you, I want your song, and I want your story. Um and and again, this question is well, why? Uh what do you what do you get from what what nourishment do you get from taking and stealing something that is authentic to some other person's lived experience? Which it which is just something I thought a lot about, you know, throughout the course of the film.
SPEAKER_03:I have a theory on that.
SPEAKER_01:Give it to us.
SPEAKER_03:I meet uh, I mean, so I I do work in a very specific spiritual cultural tradition. I meet a lot of um, specifically white people who share that they feel like they don't have any culture, and so they feel like which is really interesting because obviously European culture is also rich and storied and old. Y'all do have a culture, but the cultures that stand out the most are the cultures that are not theirs generally, and so they feel in order to partake in anything meaningful spiritually, they need to appropriate or participate in other people's cultures. And some I don't have any problem with cultural appreciation, cultural sharing, cultural exchange, but it gets into weird appropriate territory. And I think, you know, the fellowship and love assimilation of vampirism. I'm I want your stories, I want your songs. Um, that's a really good example of cultural appropriation. He he needs the songs of of all of these black people celebrating and dancing in the juke joint. Yeah. Because he doesn't feel like he has his anymore because he colonized so long ago, assimilated so long ago. And that's very much the case, I think, for not all, but a lot a lot of European descended folks here. If your family came here a long time ago, if they felt the pressure of assimilation, it was so easy for them. Of course, it's gonna all like wash away. You're American. What does that even mean?
SPEAKER_01:What does it mean to what does that mean? Yeah, what does that mean? Also being an immigrant, it's like the my my entire life has been this interesting push and pull of how much has I how much of my Caribbean ancestry have I retained in my life here in the United States? Um, and it how does that kind of play into my own cultural or let's say national identity? Um, and it is interesting. I didn't, you know, like appropriation definitely seems to be at the you know a a uh at a large a large part of the the vampiric motivations, I'd say in this film.
SPEAKER_03:And bopping back to what your brother uh was uh pointing out about the music, I was really intrigued by the song choice and that the first song that Remick sings with his creepy KKK friends is Pick Poor Robin Clean, which that one, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That that just bothered me. I gotta like I got watching it as many times as I did. I was literally listening to the lyrics and I'm like, what the fuck is that about? Like you're eating a dude? Like, like I was very confused. Please tell me more about that because I that confused, that got very confusing.
SPEAKER_03:It's so interesting. I mean, it's a pretty old song. It was first recorded by Luke Jordan in 1927. It's very much like coming out of the African-American like blues tradition. It was recorded and covered by a lot of different, like really talented, really interesting Black performers. And you can look up like the lineage of how many people have covered this song. And it's people are sort of like no one really totally knows what it's about. Like some people think it could be about gambling, some people think it could be about going hungry. But the idea is that it's like it has a cannibalistic theme, but is it it's it's seemingly a metaphor for being picked clean either through gambling or through stealing or through hunger or like something. But it's just so perfect, right? That this like this old song that really speaks to like the legacy of uh oppression and starvation and not having enough and like scavenging for for what you need, um, is then sung by the embodiment of colonization vampire with his KKK buddies, so they can get in and eat everyone at the gym.
SPEAKER_01:You can eat everyone, like that, like I I found that really, really incredible. Really, really incredible. And and you know, I I thought a lot about like a lot of these songs, and again, coming from you know, again, my own background, a lot of these songs have this really interesting um history within minstrel shows, which of course, for for listeners who may not be aware of, these were shows where um white people in blackface were often performing what what could be considered black songs, traditionally black songs, uh, because they weren't about to hire a black person to come and sing said song in these vaudeville joints and and things like that. And so, like, the it's it's so interesting that Ryan um was really specifically taking a lot of music that has not only like you know double meanings like pick poor Robin Clean, but then also kind of immediately tie back to a national memory tied very specifically with this idea of mysterio shows of people donning blackface to sing black songs poorly. Uh I should I should also say uh I forget the the the guy who that owl in Looney Tunes that says I love to sing the I love about the duna you know, like that guy is that's that character of the owl is based on an actual vaudeville blackface singer. Um, and in my music history class, my teacher played the minstrel version of the song and then the it like the black version of the song, and it's incredible how different the two of them sounded. And that's certainly what came to mind for me is that you know, again, in addition to like the the consumption and the assimilation that these vampires are are doing, the thing that can make a song authentic to a group of people is the story that's tied to it, is the experience the experiences that those individuals had. Um, you know, like I I can't sing Beyonce songs, I could do it, like I can sing them, but I've never been a single lady and I don't know. I don't know, but uh you know, like I might I I can sing it, but you're not gonna get the same kind of oomph in it because it's not a story. But it's exactly it's not, it's not it's uh it's not it's not really something that I is I don't have a uh a reference point. I don't I haven't lived some of those experiences, and I really am interested in how it really felt like the vampires were representing the ways in which imperialism, colonialism, what again you pointed out, what does it mean to be American? This idea that you have to assimilate. If you come here from somewhere else and you have different beliefs, different foods, different languages, different whatever you we expect within a generation or so, you're gonna look just like the the family across the street. And I feel a lot of that push and pull in this film. I want to definitely make sure we're being respectful of everybody's time, but I'm really interested in kind of getting to our sort of protagonist in this film, Sammy. Um, because we haven't talked about little Sammy too much, right? And Sammy, I think, is such an interesting character. And so what I would love to hear from you, Jez, is like the character of Sammy to me represents again a push and pull of the changing time that we're having in America, particularly amongst black audiences in America at this time. I made it during the notes that I that I wrote when I was doing this, I was just like, yo, Sinners is a modern version of August Wilson's The Piano Lesson. For our listeners who who may or may or may not be remember, August Wilson, the playwright, decided that he was going to write a a play that took place every decade after emancipation of African Americans. And the really important thing about the piano lesson, essentially the idea of the piano lesson, is that a family is essentially kind of dealing with a number of the changes uh happening with the railroad, with members of their families that have had men in particular who have had to go off and work on railroads and are having these very different kinds of experiences and then coming back and like the way it kind of breaks up the idea of the nuclear family because you know slaves weren't allowed to have a nuclear family, and then post-emancipation, the moment they now had a chance to build a family unit, the men had to now leave to go on months, months-long uh excursions on the railroads. Same with the Chinese folks, same with the Irish folks. All of us were working on those railroads, right? And so what's really interesting is that in the the piano lesson, essentially the main crux of the piano lesson is that they are under attack by supernatural forces that they can't seem to understand. And it's only when they start to embrace elements of more ancestral, indigenous um African worship do they figure out a way to, it's almost like they're melding the modern Black experience, which is steeped in Judeo-Christian, and like this push for more of an interest towards our ancestral beliefs pre-uh colonialism. And essentially that's how they're aid the family is able to, I guess you could say, exorcise the spirit that is dealing with them in the piano lesson. So I say that to say, when I was watching Sammy, Sammy to me feels like a 2025 version of that same issue that August Wilson was pointing out, you know, decades and decades ago. This idea of black identity is so deeply tied to religious beliefs. But which religious beliefs do these black identities wish to hold on to? The one they were given or the one that they are they they attempt to retain, uh, after obviously so many generations of of uh slavery kind of destabilizing that. And obviously, we'll be bringing a lot of our conversation with Brother Yona, who talks very specifically about how Hudu is, in a lot of ways, an African American, a very specifically African American attempt in a lot of ways to center to bring in elements of indigenous belief systems with what. They had available in this new land that they found themselves in. Um, so I say all of that, Suprita said. I I personally felt that SAMI represents in a lot of ways this crossroads, for lack of a better term, that a lot of black people, I think today, very specifically, are feeling. Where, you know, if you are a black person in this country of a certain age, and I think Ryan Googler and I are around the same age in 38, is this idea that you're now starting to think about and embrace elements of your blackness that are not was not part of things that we were taught. We were not because what we were taught was to pray about whatever issue is going on in our life. And um, not that there's anything wrong with that. But again, for me, I've I saw in Sammy a struggle I myself has had because I grew up in a church. I am not a churchgoer today, much I think to the chagrin of literally most of my family, to the point where, like, when my grandmother passed away several years ago, my grandmother wanted me to give her eulogy because my grandma and I had a very close relationship. And my aunts would not allow me to give the eulogy in the church because the tradition was that the eulogy was performed on the pulpit. And she was not about to have the one non-Christian person in our family stand behind a pulpit and deliver a eulogy. But again, this idea that in Sammy, Sammy sees his background in the church and a future that seems to be without the church, and he finds he has to make kind of a decision about that. So I was just curious, certainly in your point of view, like what did you think of Sammy as a character? If it maybe even the something of the journey that he kind of goes on throughout the course of the film, what's what's Sammy mean to you?
SPEAKER_03:I mean, I was so charmed by Sammy. Um he's a great character. My goodness.
SPEAKER_01:Um I ain't so nice either. I'm like, hey, I know, right? Wait, boy, hey, boy.
SPEAKER_03:A little weak in the niece. I really loved how he turned to music, and it felt very much like him turning to some kind of spirituality that felt inherent in him. Also, I mean, I think from my own perspective, just as a Romani person who's uh like mixed and also ri had a kind of ostensible Catholicism, but actually I was raised predominantly with folk practices of Romani people. But my grandmother would have been like shocked if you had said that she wasn't Catholic, even though she literally didn't go to church and thought God was trees.
SPEAKER_01:Well, uh forgive my ignorance on that, but why? Why would would would she have would would she have still identified as Catholic even though she didn't um practice in those ways?
SPEAKER_03:Because it was respectable to be Catholic and it was yeah, it's safe to be Catholic. And and certain Roma are way more religious. Like Paulina talks a lot about the deep Catholicism of her family that coexists with a lot of Romani practice, and it's so it can be really challenging uh to navigate those things for you know for whatever reasons are coming up. But um, I felt like Sammy turning to music and not letting go of the guitar brought us right to the start of the movie, which was very much contextualized by the Choctaw. Like, what does it mean to be America on stolen land? It's like the other aspect of that. The Choctaw, the Irish, and the Aruba. And I think he that was him turning to something older by by following the path of music, even though it was a very contemporary choice, and he became famous and he became so successful and was um, it seems like a kind of cultural icon in a very contemporary way. I felt like his choice to follow music was like him reclaiming his his roots.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Um, that that sense of reclamation, I think, is such a a large part of the narrative that we have here, and what is being reclaimed. I think I made the the comment with our brother Jonah conversation that I truly think one of the antagonists of the film is the church. Um and and that might get me in trouble with some of my people, but like this is this was certainly my my feeling. And it's because Sammy's father, for all from all we understand, seems to be a good, a good guy. We know for sure the uh smoke and snacks dad was not a good dad. You know, uh Sammy's Sammy said that that was their father's older brother, so so their father's older brother was not a very nice man. You think a little bit, obviously, about the context with which Sammy's father would have been raised. We're taking a look at his father and his uncle would have been, God, probably just turn of the century. They would have, they would have, they would have had experiences of post-emancipation and trying to figure out what to do with the, you know, like here you've had several generations of dehumanizing slavery, and now somebody says, Well, you're good now, like go on, like figure it out, make an make a new life uh for yourself. And yeah, I a part of me really does start to feel like the church itself might be something of an antagonist in this film, not just because that seems to be one of the few places Sammy and Remick have a something of an understanding, um, you know, if we even want to call it that, a tiny bit of an understanding. Um, you know, I remember when they came to to my father's home, you know. I remember when they came and brought their Bibles. Like, I I remember this stuff. And throughout the film, there's so many things. Delta Slim in general is such a fair, fascinating character to me. Oh my god, Delta Slim says so many things, but you know, one of the things he tells Sammy is like the blues was ours, it wasn't given to us, it wasn't put pushed on us, it's something it's it's ours. And he said it's magic. I'll never like he said the blues is magic and it's big and it's ours. And I I think about that constantly because I I really do feel like there is the same way that uh the KKK is a constant threat and specter throughout the film, even when there's only a few specific moments when we see a KKK member or things like that. The the threat is constant, constant. Somehow I feel, and again, maybe I'm only speaking from my perspective, the the southern Christian community in a way is another specter that hangs over the film. It hangs over Sammy. I truly think everything Sammy, and you pointed it out in your comment here. Um, that at the very end of the move, the movie, uh Sammy is like, you know, before things got dark and got a little weird, that night was the best night of my life. And and and he's asking Stack, you know, uh, did you feel the same way? And Stag is like, Yeah, for just a few hours, we was free. Free from what though? And that's that's what I constantly come get back to. Their time in the juke joint was a sense of community and camaraderie. But what were they doing in the juke joint? They were sinning, they were sinning. Let's just get to this title of the freaking movie, okay? Like everything that was good in Sammy's life. Pearline, where was he gonna find Pearline on the on the on the plantation? He was not, he was not gonna find a pearline on the plantation, he was not gonna play blues music that was so deep in his soul on the plantation. Uh, I have to truly believe that part of what Sammy felt free from, because then he didn't he even he said that to his dad, he's like, I just want to be you know free from this for one night, yeah. One night, and I get the feeling this that he's talking about encompasses obviously, you know, working, play picking cotton and all this other kinds of stuff, but it's also like the trappings of the church that he is constantly feeling he needs to push push away from, which spoiler alert is basically my my life. Uh is it's just constantly being deep. I mean, I was a youth preacher once, believe it or not. I think we talked about this once when I was when I was younger. I would at 12 years old, I was a youth preacher, bust from church to church, basically saying whatever some people in the bus, the church bus told me to say by the time I got there, I was good at speaking, blah, blah, blah. And my mother would have absolutely wept a Nile River of tears if I if I became a preacher. It was the thing she wanted the most out of her son was to be a preacher. So when I, in my moments of Sammy, turned around, uh, when when my father, and I'm telling you, like, I told you this before, I literally have had an experience just like Sammy, where my father, who is an elder in his church, is appealing to me in the church to put away sin-ish ways. And I was basically like, sorry, I'm sorry. This kind of some of the best parts of my life is the sin stuff, man. Like, I don't want to, I don't want to tell you. So I I always felt like my my I guess hot take is that another monster in this film, or at least an antagonist, is the specter of Christianity, particularly the sub the trappings of the southern Baptist kind of Christianity that Sammy was deeply a part of, that he seemed to he wanted to escape from more than anything else. Uh, and eventually did.
SPEAKER_03:You know, yeah. I mean, in I mean, Christianity did not save them in that juke joint. Like it was Hudu, it was Annie, which is, I mean, I think such a perfect segue into like our next episode is going to be with Brother Yona, and he talks about that so much. But just to end with, I think it's I remember you and I were talking about this not on record, but just you know, chatting about how beautiful and sad it was that you know, first smoke had to kill Annie before she turned into a vampire, so she could go to the ancestors and um with their child.
SPEAKER_01:With their child, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And um the passing of tobacco is a really interesting moment, which is like it's a it's a hoodoo offering, it's a romani offering, it's an indigenous offering, it's a popular offering.
SPEAKER_01:It's an is an industrial one too. Like the tobacco is it's an industrial it's a cash crop. Yeah, you're right, you're right.
SPEAKER_03:And yeah, she tells him she doesn't want that smoke on him, and that can mean so many things. Like you so many things. Um it's that aspect of him, it's it's the actual smoke, it's but I mean, before he crosses over, it's very much by her rules. Like we only really get any kind of safety through hoodoo, which is gorgeous. And I just I can't wait for our listeners to to listen to Yonah just tell us all about it.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, you all are going to just absolutely love the insights that Brother Yona was able to bring to this and bring to this conversation because I think it it just expands on what we already kind of touched on. Like ultimately, there's a lot of interpretations of who the monster might be or what the monster might represent, but it seems very clear who the protagonists are. And in particular, as you pointed out, it wasn't a cross that saved the day in the two joints. Let's be honest. It wasn't it wasn't an offering plate and it wasn't some holy oils. It was hoodoo. Who do saved the day? You'll notice we didn't talk a lot about Annie and Hudu in here because we pretty much specifically talk about Annie and the Hudu kind of practicing with our episode, Brother Yonah. But I really am I can't wait for you all to hear it and to kind of see some of what we're talking about here because it's it just emphasizes why Jez and I are doing this. There's so much to extrapolate from the things that scare us and the people that scare us. And and I find it just a beautiful and amazing time to be a fan of horror or monsters in general. There's so much that we can work with and so much that we can do. And Wit Sinners, I think, is just a perfect kind of jumping off point because there's so many different elements that we can read and read into and talk about and and and whatnot. So I definitely want to encourage you all to check out our next episode, which will be with uh an amazing, amazing voodoo practitioner named Brother Yona. You'll see a lot of the insights that we talked about here today. He expounds on quite a bit and the ways in which Ryan Kugler was very intentional about, to your point, getting actual practitioners to inform the writing and inform the imagery. I guarantee you will blow your mind just as much as it blew ours, like just how much thought and intentionality went into this particular film. So just to kind of close, Jess, I'm curious. Any closing thoughts, uh, just on your your end of kind of sinners and what it kind of meant to you?
SPEAKER_03:I mean, I just loved it so much. I very rarely see uh something just so beautifully crafted and so smart and so deeply moving and fun. And like it was like it was everything. It was so fun. And I um I have some silly thoughts. I really loved that um it was a through line with was how important it was to give head. I appreciate that. And I also I just I loved the the scene um where smoke systematically takes out the KKK. I thought that was so cathartic because it was like he took down one monster by night and another by day and another by day. Yes, it was so good, and um yeah, I just I thought it was just it was a stunning film. I was moved in so many ways. There were elements I could relate to, and then there were elements I was glad I was taught about, and it was I'm just really enjoyed it as just a masterful film. How about you?
SPEAKER_01:Uh yeah, like I said before, there's so many parallels between my own lived experiences and a lot of the things that was going on in that film. It almost felt like Ryan was making a movie for me. And it's rare when I feel like I found a movie that is like talking to me directly, where there's so many things that I'm picking up on from like my own life. We will see this in our in Brother Yonah's episode where he's describing elements of Hudu practitioner, uh Hudu work that I'm recalling is very similar to things my grandmother did in my family and things, things that I never would have associated with any kind of indigenous or ancestral type of worship. So, Sinners to me is just an excellent example of what you can do with the medium in 2025 and still make it fun and like like fun to watch and engaging and edge of your seat and action-y um without being preachy, which is something that I think is very, very difficult to do in 2025. Um, and as I said before, uh the fit the name of the movie itself says it all. Like it, like who are the sinners, really? And is it so bad? Is it so bad? We hope you all enjoyed uh our conversation today. Again, we will you will be hearing a lot more uh from us and our guest, brother Yoda, in a subsequent episode. We are going to then be talking about one of our favorite properties over the garden wall. If that is something that you all are excited about, we would love to hear from you. Please feel free to contact us.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, and feel free to write in with your own spooky stories, encounters with monsters, ghosts, cryptids. I always want to hear. Um, maybe we'll have a little listener's episode every once in a while.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, we should. And I mean, you and I again just have to have an episode on the monsters we've seen in our life and cryptids and all kinds of stuff because we see some weird shit. I know for sure we and I have seen some weird stuff, and it's fantastic. Uh, Jasmina, it is as always a pleasure um being here. Such a pleasure to work with you. Um, thank you again, you all, for taking part, and we hope to hear you on the next one.
SPEAKER_03:Bye, thank you so much for joining us. Visit amost interestingmonster.com and follow us on Instagram and TikTok. You watch us on YouTube at Amost Interesting Monster.
SPEAKER_01:Follow Manny at Dialogues by Design on Instagram.
SPEAKER_03:Follow Jasmina at juzmina.vontila on Instagram.
SPEAKER_01:Hosted by Manny and Jasmina Vontila.
SPEAKER_03:Edited by Manny.
SPEAKER_01:Music by Dia Luna.