Directed by Ryan Coogler, Sinners marks the filmmaker’s fifth feature and a vampire thriller that has quickly captured audiences’ attention. Since its April 18 release, the film has surpassed $250 million at the global box office, far exceeding early projections and igniting widespread pop-culture buzz. Its star, Michael B. Jordan, recently won the Best Actor Oscar for his dual performance as twins Smoke and Stack at the 98th Academy Awards this year, a role that has become central to the film’s success. Set in the Jim Crow–era Mississippi Delta, the story blends period drama with supernatural horror, delivering a world that is eerie, violent and seductive in equal measure.
The film follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who return to their hometown after years away. Armed with a truckload of Irish beer and whiskey stolen from an Illinois mafia outfit, the brothers recruit family and friends to help open a new juke joint on the outskirts of town. But their plans for a fresh start quickly unravel as sinister supernatural forces begin to reshape the fate of everyone involved.
Anchoring the magic and gore of Coogler’s horror epic is its evocative 1930s Southern setting. Oscar-winning production designer Hannah Beachler is the brain behind the film’s Clarksdale, Mississippi, which she crafted through arduous research into the period’s real-life architectural details. “The initial inspiration came from Ryan [Coogler] telling me about the people in the story—who they are, what they want, what they wish for, their struggles and joy, pain and loss,” Beachler tells AD via email. “It was then up to me to put myself in the characters’ shoes and design from [their perspectives].”
Clarksdale, Mississippi, is the centre of the Sinners universe—but production was one state over
Though Sinners takes place in the tiny Mississippi town of Clarksdale, the production was shot in neighbouring Louisiana. The crew, Beachler, and veteran locations manager Elston Howard scouted in and around New Orleans to find the right spots for their Mississippi Delta, citing The Big Easy’s superb film infrastructure as the reason behind the decision. Beachler, who has been based in New Orleans for over 20 years, felt comfortable making a Mississippi Delta atmosphere out of what the city had to offer. “Louisiana is Mississippi’s neighbour,” she says. “We have several things in common, from the big fields (in southern Louisiana, the crops are sugar cane, so we had to plant a lot of cotton for many of the scenes), small rural towns, the train stations, and the weather.”
Striking the right tone for the town of Clarksdale was the heart of Beachler’s research. She chatted with Clarksdale locals to get an understanding of the culture and tasked herself with visiting key landmarks—including Dockery Farms, an 1895 plantation recognized as the official birthplace of the Delta blues. “One of the elements that stood out to me at Dockery Farms was the beam work of the cotton gins,” she explains. This informed shots of the juke joint and the church in Sinners. “It was our mission to capture the essence of Clarksdale as much as possible and to bring the spirit of the Delta into the film.”
With the help of set decorator Monique Champagne, the historic elements of 1932 Clarksdale were brought to life. “The craftsmanship of the buildings stood out to me, and I began to recognise that language in so many buildings—board and batten-style sidings were everywhere,” Beachler says, adding that the vibrant colours and the patina of the wood she came across in her research inspired Sinners’ sets. “With the architecture and the set decoration, there is so much texture and detail that is part of the Southern tradition.”
She also made a point of highlighting the economic hardships Black residents faced in the Jim Crow era. Starkly contrasted scenes of the “Black and white” sides of town offer glimpses into the station of Black Americans of that era in the Delta.
Crafting a perfectly distressed juke joint
Beachler reveals that the team built two juke joints: One in Braithwaite, Louisiana, at the Plaquemine Parish, used for the exterior and interior shots showcasing the overgrown foliage and nearby water (“Which was filled with alligators, so there was already the feeling of something old and prehistoric in the environment,” she says); and another—once a sawmill, located on a former golf course at St. Bernard Parish—built onstage for other shots.
Beachler and construction coordinator Erik Van Haaren envisioned a gutted, abandoned feel for the juke joint, so its exterior was purposefully dilapidated, with carpenters and scenic artists on set transforming surrounding trees to look weathered and worn by torching, sanding, staining, painting, and even chemically distressing the wood.
A struggle with faith illustrated through subtle design details
“You keep dancing with the devil, [and] one day, he’s gonna follow you home,” says Jedidiah (Saul Williams), preacher and father of protagonist Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) in the opening scene. Sammie, a young blues musician, is set to play at the grand opening of the juke joint hosted by Smoke and Stack, his cousins. But in doing so, he abandons his duties at his father’s church, signaling an act of defiance—at first glance, anyway. Beachler sought to convey Sammie’s complexities of faith through the church’s architecture. The design brief for the church all came from “putting myself in Jedidiah’s head as he, in my mind, was the architect of the Church,” Beachler says. “I imagined that it was built by Jedidiah, the Pastor, and the men of the congregation.”
The church is based on Clarksdale’s Sunflower Plantation. The set itself was built at the Laurel Valley Plantation in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Beachler’s team drew inspiration from vernacular clapboard praise houses established by African Americans throughout the Delta. The main factors she weighed for the church were its size and material, all to tell a story of the character’s access—or lack thereof—to certain resources. Its exteriors (double wood entry doors and a small louvered window at the peak, shaped into an exaggerated triangular silhouette) were made out of rough cuts of sawn wood, also used in the juke joint and Sammie and Annie’s (Wunmi Mosaku) homes. “As the wood dried, it naturally added age to the paint and shrank a bit to leave small gaps in the walls and floors,” she says. Beams that supported the roof were shaped like “the Wakanda crossed arm gesture,” Beachler adds, a nod to Black Panther, another blockbuster on which Coogler, Jordan, and Beachler collaborated. The set designer paid specific attention to “the smallest of details” in the church, including “the distance of the studs being 33 inches apart—the age Jesus died, a signifier of the end,” she notes.
Each location in the film, church included, “became very specific in colour and architecture” to the respective characters inhabiting them. In the beginning of Sinners, the exteriors of the church glistened in white paint, paired with the parishioners wearing all white as they sang “This Little Light of Mine” to depict the feeling of safety and acceptance Sammie felt in the context of the church. By the end, the house of worship became an ominous space, its interior rendered in darker shadows to portray the heaviness Sammie feels as he rejects the wills of his father.
