It was my absolute pleasure to chat with Dr. Yvonne Chireau, author of the iconic Black Magic and official Hoodoo consultant for Ryan Coogler’s latest smash hit, Sinners.
receipts
If you don’t know her work, please stop reading this and go pick up her book—it fundamentally changed the way I think about American religion/s. For folks unfamiliar with this material, Conjure is African America folk magic, often for security and protection against violence. Chireau defines it as “the African American tradition of healing and harming.” Hoodoo is a synonym for Conjure; the terms are often used interchangeably. Here’s a quick overview of Chireau’s work if you want to learn more.
In this delightful conversation conducted amidst so many real-life horrors, we talked about why Sinners is less a vampire film than a film about the blues, and how popular media can lead audiences back to their ancestors and maybe, just maybe, to the study of religion.
(This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
I was so excited to see this movie, and a big part of that was knowing you’d been a consultant. I figured if they’d gone to the trouble of finding you, they obviously cared about getting the religion parts right. I’m usually so annoyed when movies, especially big blockbuster movies like Sinners, try to say something about religion. But Coogler and his team really nailed it—in large part, I suspect, because they took good notes. What was working on this movie like for you?
I got a chance to work closely with Coogler and [producer] Sev Ohanian. Sev contacted me, and he’s a lovely, wonderful person. But I’ve gotten these calls before, for what turned out to be awful films that distort and misrepresent Hoodoo or Vodou. So I’m often really picky about who I work with. And even then, they screw up.
So Sev called, and I said who are you? Leave me alone. [laughs]
Sev said, I’m with Ryan Coogler.
I was still hesitant. I was resisting getting involved. But Sev said “we really, really want to get this right.”
And boy did they ever.
Well, my thinking was that this kind of work makes an argument for what we do. I’m a religionist; you’re a religionist. When movies and TV take religion seriously, it helps the audience get curious about religion. It helps them see that religion matters, and that they maybe want to learn more about it. So in a way, this movie is making an argument for the study of religion.
But when Sev said, “you’re an expert; we want to learn from your expertise,” I said, “well, I don’t know if I’m an expert.”
[Noises of editorial befuddlement]
No, this matters! Because when it comes to Conjure and Hoodoo—for all Black religion, honestly—the real experts are the practitioners. I know this history; I have connections in these communities. But that’s a different kind of expertise.
I was curious about how you negotiate that tension. Hoodoo and Conjure and other, similar traditions often have components that are not for public knowledge or consumption. They are protected and endangered traditions, and while you’re not a practitioner yourself, I know you must have learned things from these communities that wouldn’t be appropriate to share with, say, Warner Brothers.
Yes, definitely! There’s a huge distrust among Black and Caribbean folks about their religion. They’re often very suspicious of academics. They’ve had anthropologists extracting secrets and publishing them. So doing this work meant I had to be very, very careful. I didn’t, and the film doesn’t, give away protected knowledge. But I also hope that practitioners see themselves represented accurately in the film.
How did you get involved in the making of Sinners?
When I first sat down with them, I said, “what is this movie about, Ryan Coogler?” He said it was kind of a horror film. And I said, “I don’t do horror, Ryan Coogler.”
He said, “oh, professor, you’re going to like this. You’re going like this, professor.” So I said, “alright. Tell me more.”
It’s a wonderful experience to collaborate with creatives who take the stories they tell seriously, who want their work to have a message. When he shared the outline with me, he said he wanted to talk about Vodou. But it wasn’t really Vodou—he was interested in what I call the ancestor moment [the scene in the juke joint where Preacher Boy calls in spirits and ancestors of everyone listening to him play]. The filmmakers were very careful with these stories from folks of different ethnic backgrounds [referring to the Chinese grocery store owners in the film].
I said, “you’re trying to convey Ancestral Time.” And I thought, “never mind the vampires. He’s got something here.”
I’m glad you mentioned the vampires. As you know, I am a horror fan. So I was confused when we were more than halfway through the film with nary a fang in sight. But I think you’ve captured it—this isn’t actually a vampire movie. This is a movie about connecting with the ancestors, some of whom are not resting easy.
And those relationships, both with the living and beyond the living are absolutely the center of this film. If you go in expecting a vampire movie, you might be disappointed. But if you think about Sinners as being about connecting with the beyond-human, no-longer-living human, then it is a phenomenal film.
That’s the realm of religion, absolutely! Gods, demons, spirits, spirits with bodies, monsters. We don’t have to call it horror.
So what was it like to work on this movie?
My job was not only to teach the filmmakers about Hoodoo, but also to work closely with one of the actors, Wunmi Mosaku. I hadn’t heard of her.
You haven’t seen Lovecraft Country???? [Editorial info-dumping and strenuous exhortations to watch the whole freaking thing, as it is a masterclass on mid-century Black American culture]
I haven’t! But I’m a big anime fan, and I found out she voiced the Black woman character on Scavengers Reign. So I was in. I loved working with Wunmi, not only because she’s so talented, but also she’s a big nerd! We spent several weeks working together to create the character of Annie, the Conjure woman. She asked me, “what does a Conjure woman do? How would she pray? How would she think and act in the 1920s?”
By the end, I had learned so much from Annie! To me, this tells us something about how fictional characters can inspire us and teach us in ways we might not expect and can’t anticipate.
She was, unsurprisingly, my absolute favorite part of the movie. I thought her character so beautifully captured the hybridity of Black religious identity—especially the ways that Conjure and Christianity can blend and feed each other.
Yes! There’s a lot of Christianity in Vodou, in Hoodoo. Hollywood really struggles with the complexity of that. And what we’re seeing in Sinners isn’t removed from what the characters’ enslaved ancestors might have done, but it’s also not removed from Christianity. And contemporary Hoodoo practitioners give us a lot of clues about what it might have looked like for Annie to be a Conjure woman in the 1920s Mississippi Delta.
Sinners really captures the complexity of Annie’s religious identity. This isn’t “voodoo ooga booga.” The film shows that Hoodoo is part of the Christian heritage, part of Black religion’s heritage.
It was wild to see a vampire be repulsed by a Hoodoo bag, and to have an Irish vampire acknowledge that Christian imperialism did violence to both their ancestors.
For me, this is a work of fiction, but it’s a historically accurate film. It centers Black religious experience, challenges how we think about what America is and what it does.
I wanted to ask specifically about that ancestral moment in the juke joint, because it’s so powerful. The musicality of this movie is so central to its message, especially in the way it disrupts a sacred/secular music divide in Black spaces.
Yes! That’s the thing: Coogler didn’t lead Sinners with vampires. He led with the blues.
He knew I had written a little bit about the blues being the soundtrack for Hoodoo. He’s obsessed with music, and especially the blues. The blues encapsulates this culture and this history, down to the present. The blues will tell the story.
Sinners shows us the juke as sacred space. That was obviously really important to Coogler. I actually think that was the center around which he wrote the entire story. And the sacred and the secular, at least in Black culture, are imbricated in these spaces of performance, whether it’s the juke joint or the church.
Postscript: if you liked Sinners—and of course you did, YOU’RE not a monster—Mychal the Librarian suggests you check out
- Erin Adams’ Jackal
- Del Sandeen’s This Cursed House
- P. Djèlí Clark’s Ringshout (I also recommend this one!!)
- LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes
- and Tananarive Due’s My Soul to Keep
