Horror Cinema and Sinners 2025 Movie Review

Horror has become an integral part of cinema. New horror films are hitting theaters almost every week.

 

Written by: Fatemeh Shahbandeh and Amirreza Fakhri

Amirreza Fakhri

Horror has become an integral part of cinema. New horror films are hitting theaters almost every week. The horror genre is perhaps more established than any other. In fact, it can almost be said to have been the first film genre. Let’s take a look at the history of horror films from the very beginning. In the beginning, film was silent. As we all know, early films were, above all, silent. Putting sound on film wasn’t possible in the early days, and it wasn’t until the 1920s that films learned to talk, sing, play music, and so on.

The first horror films were also silent. Interestingly, the horror genre is one of the oldest representatives of film genres. Initially, films were essentially limited to filmed reality. The first commercial screening of a film showed workers leaving a factory, and it lasted less than 45 seconds. The film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon) wasn’t very impressive in terms of storytelling.

Of course, in 1895 the appeal of the film phenomenon was quite different. It can probably be compared to the current enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, which is still in its infancy. We can’t even imagine what AI will be capable of in 100 years. Likewise, people didn’t know this about the film medium more than 100 years ago.

Historically, a distinction is often made between the “classic” phase (from around 1930) and the “modern” phase of horror films (from around 1960). Horror films emerged as a subgenre in the 1960s, in which the introduction of the uncanny into everyday life provided opportunities to display shocking images, create special effects, and evoke disgust.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners Review

(About Liberation, Borrowed from Domination)

Fatemeh Shahbandeh

Southern Gothic films often depict societies that are outwardly civilized and advanced but, at heart, retain primitive and dark human instincts. Sometimes these films also present civilization and savagery side by side, but in conflict. The past — especially the past of a rigid, bigoted, and controlling patriarch — plays a prominent role in shaping the characters. This legacy is often transmitted through religious, doctrinal, and moral values, or rather immoralities, creating characters whose savage, racist, corrupt, and pathological nature has prevailed over their human and moral dimensions.

In many Southern Gothic works, this dark dimension is symbolically depicted in the form of monsters such as vampires, who embody the same animalistic nature, violence and perversion. 

In the film Interview with the Vampire, which can be considered a modern example, the “vampire” is not only a monster but also a human being trapped in the dark well of his instincts and past, finding no way to escape. It is as if this generation must be destroyed so that human civilization can emerge. Despite their immortality, vampires are tired of the endless repetition of their existence. They have no peace and seem like a flawed and rotten system that healthy people are forced to eliminate with violence and determination — like a long-standing and deep-rooted tradition that requires exhausting effort to break free from.

Today’s audience does not have the same perspective or philosophy as audiences of previous generations when faced with Southern Gothic works. This difference in perception is natural and applies to many other genres and topics as well. However, in the case of Southern Gothic films, the change in perspective can be deeper and more meaningful because these works address topics such as patriarchy, women’s inequality, slavery, land ownership, and racial discrimination in the American South. They also address family issues that are sometimes passed down from generation to generation, sometimes negatively and sometimes positively.

For example, in the 1964 film Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, viewers in the 1960s might not have seen Charlotte’s father as the main culprit for her weaknesses and bitter fate. At that time, fatherly upbringing or family structure might not have been questioned much, but today’s viewers, with different social awareness and sensitivities, might see a more prominent role for the father in the formation of Charlotte’s psychological trauma and offer a different reading of power relations, gender, and family. Elia Kazan’s 1956 film Baby Doll also portrays a sick and dysfunctional life — the story of a teenage girl forced by her father to marry an older man. A crumbling house and abandoned farm serve as symbols of a society in decline and moral decay.

In the heart of this space, the main character is caught in a tense relationship filled with control and repression — a relationship in which the boundaries of power, gender, and desire are extremely distorted and unequal. When the film was first released in 1956, audiences and critics focused mainly on the film’s sexual elements, the triangular relationships between the characters, and the way it portrayed desire and seduction. These were elements considered highly controversial at the time, but from today’s perspective, the role and structure of patriarchy (memory and the past) in perpetuating the cycle of violence — namely, the father’s role in destroying the girl’s future — is a more visible issue. In fact, instead of focusing solely on the erotic dimension and the boundaries of censorship, today’s audience pays attention to aspects such as the violation of the right to choose and oppression within the framework of family and society. What once seemed like a controversial melodrama is now reinterpreted as a terrifying study of the dynamics of power, gender, and human destiny in traditional societies.

A characteristic of some Southern Gothic works is the conscious use of optical illusions, or rather errors in perception — a type of representation in which the boundary between consciousness and illusion remains blurred until the final moments of the work, and only when the perspective changes do the hidden aspects of the truth suddenly become apparent. In fact, directors play with the deceptive and distorted face of reality. For example, in the film Frailty directed by Bill Paxton, the story is told of a father who believes he has a divine mission to kill demons who have appeared in human form, and he involves his sons in this mission. Until the last minutes of the film, the audience thinks that the father is suffering from some kind of mental disorder, but suddenly we realize that he is telling the truth and actually has access to some kind of divine power to destroy evil people. This shift in perspective transfers corruption from one character to another. In 1971’s The Beguiled, a wounded army man accidentally finds refuge at an all-girls school in Mississippi.

Coogler’s film can be seen as a modern continuation of the Black horror film movement that culminated in Blaxploitation in the 1970s — a movement that transformed the role of Black people in genre cinema. For the first time, the main heroes of films were Black, and white actors were usually limited to playing negative or supporting roles. However, it is worth noting that Blaxploitation, which means “the reclaiming of the stolen image of Black people,” did not necessarily represent equality among people, but rather reversed the roles. This shift came about in response to years of neglect and racist portrayals in mainstream cinema. It was not limited to a specific genre, nor even to Hollywood heroism.

Overall, Sinners is a work worth watching and reflecting on in the context of Southern Gothic films, due to its unique atmosphere, intelligent use of references and satire, and its use of contrasts such as sin and faith, as well as the depiction of violence in the heart of a peaceful place.