Vampires have always had bite, but in the hands of creators like Stephen Graham Jones and Ryan Coogler, the fangs sink deeper. More than just bloodsuckers lurking in shadows, these monsters become metaphors—tools for interrogating identity, trauma, and resistance. In Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Jones channels Indigenous horror through a uniquely personal lens, while Coogler’s Sinners bleeds emotional authenticity into a narrative about music, trauma, and the roots of belonging. Together, these two creator,both men of color, reimagine the vampire and its adjacent myths not just as threats, but as apocalyptic destroyers of culture.
What emerges is more than horror—it’s horror that reflects, redeems, and ultimately endures.
The Plot of Sinners and Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Set in 1932 Mississippi, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both portrayed by Michael B. Jordan) return home to open a juke joint using stolen mob money. Their cousin Sammie, an aspiring guitarist, joins them despite his father’s disapproval of blues music. The club’s opening night attracts a vampire named Remmick, who, along with his followers, begins turning club goers into vampires. As the brothers and their allies confront the growing threat, they face betrayals, supernatural battles, and a violent clash with the very ordinary and killable Ku Klux Klan.
In Buffalo Hunter Hunter, a Native American man forever cursed to live and drink the blood of living animals tracks and tries to kill a similar but more malevolent supernatural creature. As he delves deeper into the hunt, he uncovers the creature’s ties to colonial violence and cultural erasure. The protagonist must confront both the external threat of the Buffalo Hunter and the internal struggles related to his heritage and identity.
The Vampire as Cultural Mirror
Before we dig too deep, let’s be clear: Jones and Coogler aren’t remixing horror for the sake of aesthetics. They’re not here to add flavor to folklore or toss in a token monster. Their work is about using genre—specifically the vampire and its adjacent mythos—to hold up a mirror to historical and cultural trauma. While Jones has a history of reimagining older genre tropes into something new and special (i.e. The Indian Lake Trilogy) Coogler a newcomer to traditional horror proves he is master of all genres.
Stephen Graham Jones, an Indigenous horror powerhouse whose Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a fever-dream of loss, vengeance, and survival, uses monsters as metaphors for colonial violence. In his world, the vampire doesn’t just drain blood—it drains stories, language, culture. It is
Ryan Coogler, on the other hand, brings his signature emotional weight to Sinners, a filmic exploration of of the blues and music generally as a means of cultural survival. While Sinners doesn’t include traditional vampire stories with castles and counts, the themes, predation, guilt, transformation, echo vampire mythology. The system itself becomes vampiric, feeding on those it claims to protect. The siren song of the vampire is not eternal life but rather a seat at a table that has tradtionally been closed to the folks at the Juke Joint.
Both artists use horror to articulate pain without exploiting it, to explore cultural heritage without essentializing it. They are stories that manage to discuss pain without being only about that pain.
Identity Is a Battlefield
In both Buffalo Hunter Hunter and Sinners, identity isn’t static. It’s under siege. It’s something you survive, not just something you inherit.
Jones’s work consistently questions the idea of “authenticity”—what it means to be Native, who gets to claim cultural identity, and how trauma lives in the bloodline. His protagonist in Buffalo Hunter Hunter isn’t just fighting monsters; he’s fighting (quite literally in some aspects) to stay human and relevant to both his people but also the world at large.
Coogler’s Sinners takes a different angle but lands in the same emotional territory. His characters often wrestle with who they are versus who they’re allowed to become. They are boxed in by expectations—of masculinity, morality, family, and justice. Like vampires, they are neither fully living nor fully dead, caught in liminal spaces where every choice feels like a compromise. They are of Mississippi but somehow transcend their birthplace (or maybe reclaim it).They leave their small town to fight a world war. Finding indepedence at the risk of their lives. That risk finds the brothers in Chicago where they must learn to live in a different liminal space created by organized crime. Only to return to the small town where it all started.
Whether it’s bloodline or background, both artists show that survival means reclaiming who you are, not just staying alive.
Myth Meets Reality: Genre in Sinners and Buffalo Hunter Hunter
What makes both of these creators so potent is how they bend genre to their will. Jones, for example, doesn’t just write Indigenous horror. He writes horror that could only come from his lived experience, laced with folklore, history, and narrative experimentation. In Buffalo Hunter Hunter, he plays with time, memory, and tradition—giving us a monster that is as much psychological as supernatural. The worst scenes in terms of horror come when our hero experiences how the evil he hunts has worked its way into a place of leadership with his own people. It is approrpriation and assimilation but in a way that is consensual and as a result far more insideous. That is not to say that indigenious horror is a specific thing. Rather he redefines the concept into something larger. Something deeply personal but relevant for this moment.
Coogler brings that same energy. Even outside of Sinners, in films like Fruitvale Station and Black Panther, he leans heavily into spiritual realism. His characters are haunted—by legacy, by ancestors, by history. In Sinners, the lines blur between guilt and curse, sin and survival. The result? A moral landscape that feels mythic but grounded. They don’t use history they ARE the history.
Both artists understand that myths are not escapism—they’re realism turned up to eleven. More important, these myths are all
Survival as Resistance
Here’s where it gets even more real: survival isn’t just the endpoint in these stories. Surviving becomes an act of rebellion.
Jones’s characters survive because they have to. Because their survival spits in the face of systems built to silence them. Whether it’s surviving colonization, intergenerational trauma, or a literal creature hunting them down, their endurance becomes often the only way to stick it to the oppressor. If genocide is the end goal, survival is enough.
Coogler’s characters survive on different terms, but with no less fire. In Sinners, they’re navigating moral grey zones, wrestling with decisions that don’t have easy answers. Survival here is emotional, ethical. It’s about not becoming the monster while surrounded by monstrous systems. Or at least learning to become human again after accepting monstrous choices as a means of survival.
In both, survival becomes resistance—and with this type of resistance. it is always political.
When Monsters Reflect the Makers
Perhaps the most important connection between these two visionary artists is who they are. Stephen Graham Jones and Ryan Coogler are men of color creating horror that reclaims the genre from its traditionally white, often colonial lens.
The horror genre has a history—one filled with coded racism, cultural appropriation, and a lack of diverse voices. But these two don’t just insert people of color into old frameworks. They burn the frameworks down (quite literally in Sinners) and rebuild them with cultural specificity, authenticity, and emotional truth.
Vampires work especially well here. They’re inherently about power and exploitation—themes that resonate deeply with historically marginalized communities. In the hands of Jones and Coogler, the vampire becomes a metaphor for colonizers, cops, systems, and even internalized guilt. It’s a monster that takes and takes—and that’s exactly why it needs to be fought.
When Jones or Coogler gives us a vampire (literal or not), they’re asking us: Who benefits from your pain? Who’s feeding on you? Perhaps most important they are asking How do we resist?
Signal Boost
Want more Indigenous horror? Check out our breakdown of The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones—equal parts brutal and beautiful.
Curious how other creators of color are transforming the horror genre? Dive into our piece on Jordan Peele’s Us and the Horrors of Identity.
Need more vampire content? Or want to dive deeper into horror that punches back? Stick around—we’re just getting started (like 5 years ago but whose counting).
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Tyler has been the editor in chief of Signal Horizon since its conception. He is also the Director of Monsters 101 at Truman State University a class that pairs horror movie criticism with survival skills to help middle and high school students learn critical thinking. When he is not watching, teaching or thinking about horror he is the Director of Debate and Forensics at a high school in Kansas City, Missouri.
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