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Remmick & his lame choice of audition music.

STACK: "Well, y'know, it's kinda catchy."

SMOKE: "You outta you fuckin' mind?"

SAMMIE: "Keep these crackers away from me."

Bert looking like he's a member of the Addams Family.

Remmick trying to contain his frustration.

Looking like every performer who thinks he's nailed it but is told, "Thank you. NEXT" and argues with the director.

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Let’s Talk About the Irish Music in Sinners.

It's a rocky road to Clarksdale, Mississippi.

By Leah Schnelbach

Sinners opens with a monologue that’s as ominous as it is stirring. A voice, which we later learn belongs to Annie, a root worker and Smoke Moore’s partner, tells us that in some cultures “[t]here are legends of people, with the gift of making music so true it can conjure spirits from the past and the future. This gift can bring fame and fortune, but it also can pierce the veil between life and death.” The three groups of such people she mentions are the ones she’s familiar with: ancient Irish filídh, Indigenous American Fire Keepers, and West African griots.

Now, Sinners is primarily love song to the blues, the resilience of Black culture, and the Black South. While I love and admire all of those things, and have been fortunate enough to be a guest of Black Southern culture occasionally, that is not my dusty sun-baked red dirt lane. For more on the blues in the film, here are three excellent interviews with Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Göransson, and here’s an interview with a musician who makes a special appearance in the film—but the interview is full of spoilers, so don’t read that one if you haven’t seen the movie yet!

Which is why I’m going to talk to you about Irish vampires and the songs they sing. Ryan Coogler spoke with the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast about the importance of Irish music in Sinners, and I wanted to look at the way he uses the Irish vampire Remmick and his three songs (two of which are Irish standards, and one of which very much is not) to shape the film’s plot.

Be warned: This is a full-spoiler post! Flee if you must! Flee to a theater to see Sinners, in fact!

The opening of the film is set to a song called “Filídh, Fire Keepers and Griots”. The “filídh” are represented by musician and sean-nós singer named Iarla Ó Lionáird, whose work we’ll talk about in a moment, but first I need to take us back about 2,000 years to explain what “filídh” means.

In ancient Ireland, filídh were among the most important members of society. A combination of poet, singer, and seer, they divined the future, advised the kings, told the stories that were also histories, and, if they were mistreated, satirized the shit out of the offending party with a poem called an áer, or lampoon, to ruin that person’s reputation. (Supposedly it was believed that a really good áer could kill a man.) Since ancient Ireland maintained an oral tradition rather than a written one, filídh who could hold story cycles in their heads were extremely important, and it took years of study to work your way up the ranks and be considered a master poet. The role of filídh changed as Ireland became increasingly Christian, and while they still had high status, they became more like what we’d think of as bards. A related term you may have heard is seanchaí—the seanchaithe were, or I suppose are, keepers of legend, who pass stories down in a particular way so each new generation will be be able to remember them and retell them. They’re why the early monks were able to transcribe stories like The Ulster Cycle, which tell us most of what we know about the values of pre-Catholic Irish society. And to the monks credit, they seem to have written the stories down fairly accurately, without tacking Christian morals on. (And even more to the monks credit, sometimes you get an absolute banger like “Pangur Bán,” a poem about a monk’s faithful cat.)

Now you might be asking: What is a “sean-nós singer” and why is it important? Sean-nós (pronounced shann-nos, like Thanos) means “old style.” It’s usually a cappella, usually sung in Irish, and it’s the root of the music that the vampires attempt to weaponize in Sinners. Sean-nós was a way for poor people to create art, even when the system they lived under wouldn’t allow them to buy what they needed to make it—which is also how you end up with “lilting,” a thing that maybe sounds odd to modern ears, but is essentially using the human voice to mimic the sounds of different instruments.

The idea with sean-nós is that when you sing the song, or “say the song”, you get the story right—the emotion of it, the cadence, the tone—rather than worrying about having perfect pitch. A famous song from the genre is “Roisin Dubh” (“Black Rose”), initially written in the early 17th Century about a high-born woman who was divorced (and thus terribly shamed) by her husband, but actually, in the rewrites, kind of became about how the English are bastards and Ireland shall endure. (Popular subgenre, that one.) The love song became a way for people to sing about political grievances without getting caught by their oppressors.

With this song you can see a pure version of a sean-nós—this version by Joe Heaney, regarded as one of the great modern musicians in the tradition, is a man quietly singing a mournful song with no accompaniment, and here’s Sinead O’Connor’s take, if you want to need to lie down for a while. (Neither of these is my favorite version, we’ll come to that one in a second.)

It’s important to remember that the songs can be about anything. Plenty of people know rebel songs, murder ballads, slow mournful dirges about the land being taken away or women being exploited or children dying. (And, given the country’s history, fair!) But there are also songs like “Eileanóir a Rún”, a sweet love song with a lot of mythology woven into it, “Neili an fuacht” (more or less “Nelly, it’s freezing out here”) in which an intoxicated man begs his wife to let him come in out of the cold, and promises to do all sorts of fun stuff with her if she does. Here’s a polka-fied version of that one. Or “Dá bhFaighfinn Mo Rogha de Thriúr Acu,” a song about a young woman weighing the merits of the three different men who are wooing her. Here’s a version sung by Julie Fowlis and Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh.

If you want to hear some really old versions of sean-nós, we have recordings that were made on wax cylinders in 1905, and because sometimes humans are good, actually, you can listen to them here. A couple decades later, Alan Lomax recorded Elizabeth Cronin singing “Siúil a Rúin” (“Go, My Love”), a macaronic song with English verses interspersed with an Irish chorus. And here’s a current take on the song from Irish language group Seo Linn. Sean-nós traditions were adapted for the “serious” realm of classical composition by the Irish composer Seán Ó Riada, who did for Irish folk music what Béla Bartók did for Hungarian and Antonín Dvořák did for Czech. Ó Riada also co-founded a men’s choral group that allowed people to sing in their own language, Cór Chúil Aodha, and composed the first Mass in Irish, Ceol an Aifrinn. I mention all of this because Iarla Ó Lionáird, who as I mentioned acts as the voice of the filí in Ludwig Göransson’s opening track, is the great-grand-nephew of Elizabeth Cronin, and sang in Ó Riada’s Cór Chúil Aodhaas a young man. (Like, it’s almost like the past isn’t past?)

I think this is important to talk about all of this because here we have a grand folk tradition, one that Remmick, the film’s vampiric antagonist, should have firsthand knowledge of, yet the first time the vampire uses music to try to charm with his prey, he appropriates a song from the Black tradition.

When we meet Remmick (Jack O’Connell) he’s fleeing two lethal enemies—the sun, which is singeing him as he runs, and a truck full of Choctaw vampire hunters. (Whom I, and I think everyone else on the internet, want a spin-off about RIGHT NOW.) The Choctaw are presumably chasing him because he came to them hunting a Fire Keeper and they recognized him for what he was, but we never learn that for sure. He entreats the white couple (Joan, played by Lola Kirke, and Bert, played by July Talk’s Peter Dreimanis) he meets for shelter, telling them that Choctaw are chasing him. Only after he notices the Klan hood sitting in full view of the front door does he offer them money and refer to those Choctaw by saying “dirty Injuns,” exaggerating the words to appeal to their racism, which of course works when an appeal to their empathy does not.

At this point in the film, he has a Southern accent. But over the second half of the film, as he leads his two new vampire followers to Smoke and Stack’s juke, that Southern accent is dotted with an ever-stronger Irish one.

Remmick has been drawn to the juke by Sammie’s singing. He wants the young man’s gift, he wants to join the party, he wants everyone to join together in “fellowship”—and, as becomes clear, he doesn’t align himself with the sheet-loving whites he’s turned into vampires. It’s strongly implied that he’s ancient. (I’m not sure how ancient, given that he references people bringing Christianity to Ireland almost as though he remembers the time before—but that happened around 400 C.E., and that seems extremely ancient.) Nevertheless, in his mind, after watching centuries of exploitation, he’s offering the folks inside the juke a chance to step outside the bounds of Jim Crow and capitalism in exchange for some blood. But… as I mentioned in my initial review, what he sees as an offer looks a hell of a lot more like an imposition. While vampirism seems to cure the white folks in the film of their racism, it is also just another colonization that’s being forced on people who don’t want it.

And he has an ulterior motive—but that motive is to reconnect with his own ancient heritage that he lost to oppressive invaders.

But he still isn’t asking politely.

Theoretically, if he simply asked Sammie to play as a gift, and Sammie was willing to give that gift, he could have that connection with his past just the same. There could have been a version of this story that ended with Remmick lurking in the juke, out of the sun’s reach, to help Smoke, Stack, and their still-alive, non-vampire friends and family stomp the shit out of the KKK at the end. Instead he turns out to be just as rapacious as the whites he sees as beneath him.

Don’t come to the man who turned Erik Kilmonger into an icon for a cardboard cutout villain.

(But also, I’m pretty stoked to add “I’d rather be a vampire than a racist” to “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist” in my personal pop cultural lexicon.)

The way he tries to get the folks in the juke to trust him is through music.

Throughout Sinners, there are a few great examples of the way Remnick tries to get the folks in the juke to trust him through music. The first one of these is “Pick Poor Robin Clean.” The song has which has a few potential interpretations: Is it a gambling song? A song about being poor? A song about taking another person’s clothes off for them? What it definitely isn’t is the corny reel Remmick, Joan, and Bert turn it into:

The way Remmick uses the song, he’s not inviting the people inside the juke to join him in a sean-nós session, and he’s not adapting the song to personalize it. (He’s also not lilting—these white people can afford musical instruments.) He Pat Boones the shit out of the song, until it can only sound like mockery… until it starts to sound like a threat.

Compare with the version a lot of people think is the oldest recording of the song, by Luke Jordan in 1927, or with Geeshie Wiley and L.V. Thomas’ version that was recorded right around the time Sinners takes place. Daphne A. Brooks picks Wiley & Thomas’ “Pick Poor Robin Clean” clean in an excellent 2016 essay, and finds the two women using the song as a subversive dig at the system that jailed both of them at different points in their lives.

[…] the lyrics suggest instead that the heroines of this tale have slyly turned the tables on an obtuse and unsuspecting dupe, one who is robbed “clean” while the “jaybird” laughs. She is the witness who bridges the song to the carceral world lurking at the edges of their respective lives. Freighted with symbolism, “jaybird” or “j-bird” in 1920s and ’30s slang also stands for “jailbird.” Thus, she who laughs does so while looking out from behind bars at the ones who got away with mischief.

Later in the essay, Brooks pushes back on the idea that the song was a minstrel circuit staple, suggesting:

By calling Geeshie and [L.V.]’s “Pick Poor Robin Clean” a blackface tune, we risk missing, among other things, an important legacy of black women’s vernacular exchange, improvisation, and internal critique in their performance, an internal dialogue between two genius artists playing out the “folk knowledge” that Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man protagonist slowly, painfully recollects in a moment of danger […]

Remmick may have done jailtime under the British before he was turned, but given who Joan and Bert are in their white supremacist society, and who they’re related to, they’ve only been in positions of relative power—especially when compared with anyone in that juke. I also love the detail that they claim to be traveling musicians down from North Carolina, when Luke Jordan’s recording of the song was made in North Carolina, and I LOVE that Smoke cuts them off right before they would have hit some language that a trio of white musicians should under no circumstances use in a cover, and that Remmick protests that they were getting to the best part.

Especially when compared with Geeshie Wiley and L.V. Thomas, who spent years on the road together only to be forgotten by history for decades. On top of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” they recorded the all-time classics “Last Kind Word Blues” and “Motherless Child Blues”, respectively, and if you’d like an in-depth longread/excavation of history, I’ll direct you to John Jeremiah Sullivan’s profile of the two women’s work together. I find it telling that Coogler and Ludwig Göransson give the last word back to those two trailblazing women, as it’s their version of “Pick Poor Robin Clean” that closes the Sinners soundtrack album:

The vampires second musical overture is much more successful, possibly because it’s more authentic. After the Twins reject Remmick and his two followers, Mary goes after them in the hopes of sussing them out and seeing if it’s at least safe enough to let them spend their money at the juke, if nothing else. (She volunteers because she figures they’ll be more honest about their intentions to someone they think is white.) The trio lure Mary closer with a really nice version of “Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?”, also sometimes titled “Wild Mountain Thyme”—a song with Scottish roots that was adapted by a family of Belfast musicians, and has since become a standard of Irish traditional music.

It’s a sweet, innocuous song about gathering flowers and making a bed out of them by a spring to spend some quality time with one’s true love… unless she turns him down, in which case he’ll find someone else.

Ouch.

But, just as with “Pick Poor Robin Clean”, they stop the song before they get to that lyrical turn. They use this song to seduce Mary, drawing her in with their harmonies until she sits with them, to lull her into imagining a world where she gathers heather with an interracial vampire polycule. It almost works—but again, even after she explicitly says no and walks away, Remmick chases her, feeds on her, and turns her. Much like the man in the song, he isn’t as trustworthy as the sweet song initially implies.

If you want a more modern take, here’s Bob Dylan with The Band at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival.

And remember when I said my favorite version of “Roisin Dubh” was still to come? Well, here it is, in the Thin Lizzy version that weaves it into “Wild Mountain Thyme” and becomes “Roisin Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend”—objectively the greatest rock song ever recorded.

The final song the vampires sing is, finally, totally, fully IRISH. Like OIRISH Irish. It’s “The Rocky Road From Dublin,” which they sing as a round with all the vampirized people from the juke, with Remmick even breaking into a jig (or, excuse me, a whimsical skedaddle) in the center of the circle.

“The Rocky Road From Dublin” is a newer song, adapted from a poem written by D. K. Gavan in the 19th Century and popularized on the English music hall circuit by Londoner Harry Clifton. It’s a song about a person from Connacht who leaves home and travels across Ireland to Dublin to look for work, only to get rolled by ruffians once he gets there, and mocked for his rural accent when he asks the cops for help. He boards a ship to England, only to get thrown in with the pigs because he’s Irish, gets super sea sick but tries to sing and jig his way through it, and finally reaches Liverpool, only to get rolled by ruffians AGAIN—when a band of people from Galway come and assist him and his trusty shillelagh in battle.

Here’s a traditional sing of the song from Peter Lennon and Raoul Coutard’s documentary Rocky Road to Dublin, an exploration of life in the Republic after the Rising and Revolution which was actually not-quite-banned in Ireland for a while for being critical of the Catholic Church. Here’s a version by modern folk gymnasts Lankum, a version from The Dubliners, because, come on, I have to, and finally the Pogues’, cause, come on, it’s the fucking Pogues—but also because Shane MacGowan was the visual basis for that OTHER famous Irish vampire, Preacher’s Proinsias Cassidy.

This is where Remmick really tries to capture the spirit of a session, and gets the closest to the sean-nós he’s chasing. Remmick the wannabe filí stands in the center of a circle, leading everyone in a song that they can all share, now that they’re part of a collective vampiric consciousness. It’s a song about being the mistreated other, about trying to create a party against impossible odds, working for people who hate you, and finding people who will have your back. It’s about immigration and poverty. It’s about using a big blackthorn stick to fend off supernatural threats. And it’s great. It’s raucous and fun and all the voices come together to make the song more than it would be with just Remmick singing it.

Imagine how much better this circle will be once Remmick gets his teeth into Sammie?

But of course it’s a lie. This song can be a lament for leaving home, it can be a rousing battle song, it can be a fuck you to the British. The vampire wants to use it as a foundation for a new family—but what kind of a family is this, where he controls what’s supposed to be a collective? You can feel how much Remmick wants the musical power in this scene. He wants to feel like he’s created a new family. It’s such a clear dark mirror to Sammie’s absolute barnburner of an original blues song, “I Lied To You”. But this isn’t allyship, and it isn’t solidarity, and it sure as shit isn’t “equality” or “freedom.” It’s another form of coercion. The people in that circle probably would have loved seeing him perform, and maybe they would have even joined in, on another night, on neutral ground, by choice. Instead, Remmick has made himself the invader and the colonizer just as much as the men who stole his homeland from him. Remmick can’t reach the real magic; whether it’s because he lost his soul to vampirism, or whether he never had that gift to begin with, the movie never tells us.

When Remmick finally catches Sammie, the young man tries to fend him off with the Lord’s Prayer, and the vampire responds by saying that those words were brought to his people by the men who took his father’s land, but that they still bring him comfort—and then he and his whole vampire crew recite the words together because I guess Ryan Coogler loves me, personally? But my point is, Remmick’s either being extremely poetic, or he’s saying that he’s many centuries old. I love the idea of a truly ancient Irish vampire, with first-hand knowledge of The-Great-Hunger-that-was-actually-a-genocide, a strong connection to the Choctaw who hunt him, and even a real memory of the time when filídh were among the most respected people in his society.

But if he is that ancient, he’s had centuries to observe exploitation, and to decide how to wield his supernatural power.

Finally Sammie turns to his guitar to fend the vampire off—the power of music works better than prayer—and buys just enough time for Smoke to reach them with a stake. When Remmick finally goes up in flames, it’s not because of music. It’s because he’s burning in the light of the sun.

An Irishman to the end.

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Come Halloween if I don't see lilttle kids dressed like this . . .

. . . I am going to be greatly disappointed in parents these days.

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Christ, they're like 3 earnest summer camp counselors.

"Sing along, everybody! Picked poor robin clean --"

"Man, this some hokey-ass shit."

"Elijah, we know you an' yer brother are new t' Camp Choctaw, but y'all missing out on th fun if'n y'all keep questionin' our camp songs."

This is exactly how I imagined Remmick having them practice went before they came out to try and show off for everybody

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It's the Caribbean accent that makes this gold.

That boy has a torso 3 miles long.

Sinners (2025)

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If I could do PhotoShop I'd do Remmick with an accordion so damn fast.

Remmick in Hamtramck, MI, in 1932, when it had a huge Polish population: "Hey, I'm here tah drink sum beer, eat sum mustard on pretzels, and oompa wit y'all." Whips out giant-ass accordion.

remmick headcanons :)

hes actually a fucking bum and sleeps in dirt pits on the side of the road/abandoned barns/a random ass forest (frugal king!!! so ethel cain coded!!)

for the first century or so he was a vampire he would not stop trying to drink alcohol. like he'd probably projectile vomit it back up immediately because vampire stomachs reject human food, but bro is Irish. getting wasted is in his DNA (i can say this im irish too)

he actually has no concept of social anxiety. "right on!" SHUT UP.

least self-aware person ever, craziest hypocrite. like bro really thought he was in the right for the whole entire movie

doesn't use deodorant (and you can fucking smell it)

potatoes give him ptsd

chronic scarcity mindset

in a modern setting would literally just act exactly like the white parents in Get Out (them in the first 1/3 of the movie that is) "erm i would've voted for obama for a third term if i could" SHUT UP.

hates the british (rightfully so)

at one point owned an accordion (but it probably got smashed or smthg)

thinks he's unspoken rizz, in reality he's sexual harassment

thinks he's good with kids, but really he just comes off like a child molester to everyone else (he's not actually one obviously he just has a rancid aura)

has gotten booed off more than one stage

to combat his inability to drink alcohol he likes to kill/eat people who are drunk, because they have a high concentration of alcohol in their bloodstream, so their blood is spiked, and he can get a buzz that way (creative king! way to think outside the box!)

i have more of these lmk if you want a pt. 2

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"Yall Klan?" I just KNOW Remmick had this tight of a mental hold over Joan and Bert in that moment

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Neither Hot Topic or Box Lunch has Sinners merch.

Talk about being WAY behind the curve.

Guess Tilly's got the contract. They've got some cool shirts.

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I've never been interested in vampires. I've always found them boring.

They're either plain old ugly ass monsters with barely any personality . . .

Or Landed Gentry . . .

"I once had an orange this big. THIS. BIG."

Or a literal Prince . . .

Or a weird ass Upper Class vamp who can easily change his appearance, but for some reason chooses this freaky shit . . .

Or annoying teenagers . . .

Or teenagers with Klingon foreheads . . .

Or sulky sparkly teenagers . . .

Or flooffy pretty boys . . .

Or satire.

But now there's this dork.

I fucking love him.

He has a damn interesting backstory. He's a trickster and deal maker; he doesn't resort to hypnotism or staring into people's eyes to control their will. He's an itinerant poor boy, searching for his next meal and to find the power to break through the veil and return his beloveds. Rather than supernatural charm he has lots of charisma, but he also sometimes can't read the room and is awkward as shit. Plus he obviously gets too cocky and almost is taken out by Choctaw folks he clearly underestimated. (if Joan and Bert's house hadn't been there Remmick would've been done for, trying to hide in the cotton field until the hunters did him in before sunset).

God bless Ryan Coogler for creating him and adding him to the vampire pantheon.

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"Sinners" DVD release is July 8!

Can't wait to watch it with Closed Captioning so I can get all the parts I couldn't hear before!

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My response to seeing the #youth liberation posts like y'all the first to ever think of it.

unmute & crank it up

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"You ever going to write fanfic again?"

Writing is my profession.

No more giving it away.

Now it's strictly

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Sinners & Free by Florence and the Machine

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OK, I get that a lot of Sinners fans don't know shit about 1932 America. I do because my Mom was born that year and when I was growing up schools had decent History classes, unlike the shit they teach now.

Go read a book about the 30s. The Klan was beginning to decline after 300,000 marched in Washington D.C. in 1925, but they were still huge. Lynching was common. There was the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. And Prohibition, which is what lead to Al Capone and all the other gangsters in Chicago that Smoke and Stack dealt with.

Immerse yourself in some fucking history, folks. It'll make you appreciate the depth of Sinners all the more.

Here's one:

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel

Oh, and go listen to Robert Johnson and Buddy Guy.

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I adore this so much I almost want to write a fanfic about it.

"Yes ma'am, I'm a certified Child Care Specialist. I'll sure give your precious young'uns tons ah laughs."

"OW. Shit. Timmy, you throw ah ball at mah head one more time you gonna have a Time Out for Eternity."

"Yessir, there certainly is Snack Time. Oh. Y'all mean for th' kids."

Hey, remember when this happened?

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Remmick getting his ass repeatedly trashed.