Sinners, Silk, and the Sacred: Afrocentrics in Horror Media (Pt. 2)

From the archives of Verse and Vantage.

Let’s talk about gothic desire and the politics of eternal bondage.

There is a difference between Gothic horror and ordinary horror. Ordinary horror scares you, but Gothic horror seduces you, then reveals that the thing you love is the thing that will destroy you.

Which is exactly why Interview with the Vampire (2022) doesn’t just work as a reboot. It works as a cultural reckoning with whiteness, with queerness, with American empire, and most of all, with what it means to be Black and bound by love in a world that was never made for you to survive in, let alone live forever. The AMC series does something the original 1994 film refused to do. It casts Louis de Pointe du Lac as a Black Creole man in 1910s New Orleans, rather than leaving his Blackness to historical speculation. This changes everything: the metaphor, the meaning, and the horror, because when Louis is Black, his relationship with Lestat isn’t just about passion. It becomes a violent metaphor for the racialised dynamics of power, property, survival, and inherited trauma.

Gothic indeed.

Louis is introduced not as a man of great privilege, but as one of constrained dignity. He is a business owner in a segregated world, he works in the vice economy of Storyville, where Black men can only rise if they sell parts of themselves: liquor, sex, respectability, all to a white population that still sees them as disposable. He plays the game, he wears the suit, he holds the line.

Beneath it, we see a man already deeply haunted because his internal struggle is not just moral. His city, New Orleans, is soaked in the ghosts of auctions and blood. His every gesture, every calculated silence, every compromise with whiteness is a symptom of trying to survive in a system built to erase him. He is, in many ways, the ideal Gothic protagonist — a man caught between worlds, haunted by the past, and unable to fully claim his present. Still, he is also more than that: he is the reanimation of every Black ancestor who tried to preserve their dignity in the empire’s shadow.

Lestat enters Louis’s world with all the seduction of empire: fluent, refined, unapologetic in his violence, and romantic in a way that seems charming until you realise you’re not being loved, you’re being possessed. He offers Louis companionship, love, and escape. Still, the offer is deeply conditional: to be loved by Lestat, Louis must give up his community, his family, his values, and — eventually — his humanity.

Lestat is not a villain in the comic book sense; he is a portrait of white supremacy in its most intimate form — not just invading, but rewriting the subject it desires. Louis doesn’t just become a vampire; he becomes a version of himself that can only survive within the terms Lestat sets: eternal youth, yes — but also eternal dependency, eternal gaslighting, eternal displacement from his people. He is taken, remade, adored, and broken. This is the definition of a master/slave relationship rewritten as romance. Not fiction — metaphor.

The uncomfortable brilliance of Interview with the Vampire (2022) is that it never asks us to pretend the relationship is healthy. It doesn’t sugarcoat, it doesn’t excuse, it places the abuse at the centre of the narrative and says: Watch it. Feel it. Understand where this pain comes from.

What Lestat does to Louis goes beyond emotional and physical abuse, executed in a brutal and unforgiving manner. He isolates Louis from his family, insisting he knows what’s best. He humiliates him publicly and privately, he offers glimpses of affection only to withdraw them, and then he turns Louis into something inhuman and then shames him for not behaving “properly.”

Sound familiar?

That is the historical trauma of Blackness in the grip of white obsession. Where love becomes survival, and survival becomes submission. Lestat loves Louis only in the way an empire loves its crown jewel: as something beautiful to own.

What does it mean that Louis must become a vampire to be “equal” to Lestat, finally? It means that to be accepted, he must abandon his body, his blood, his world, his values — and become undead. The dark and beautiful metaphorical nature of Black assimilation in white institutions — in art, in academia, in politics. To be allowed in, we must become ghosts of ourselves.

Enter Claudia, the child vampire, turned far too young, left to fend for herself in a twisted family dynamic she never consented to (seriously, this diva would have taken death over having to deal with the emotional turmoil these two put her through). She is the child of two traumatised lovers — a master and a broken man — and she is handed their chaos like an inheritance: The embodiment of intergenerational trauma.

She was made this way and then blamed for it. She is infantilised, sexualized, denied autonomy, and then punished for asserting it. She exists as both witness and consequence of a system too broken to admit its guilt. She is the part of us that remembers everything our families buried. This is what makes Interview with the Vampire (2022) not just a good show but a necessary one, especially for Black audiences.

It is a Gothic media about the horror of being loved by your oppressor. That is the deepest Gothic terror of all: A curse that kisses you then puts you in a cage that sings to you.

Let’s talk about how a Black priestess broke the covenant, made a monster, and paid the price in blood.

Drolta Tzuentes? She was never just a villain (she wasn’t just there to). She wasn’t some pale vampire queen with a god complex and a corset — she was a Black woman, an Egyptian high priestess, a vessel of Sekhmet, and at one time, a healer, guardian, and mother to the suffering. She chose vengeance over divinity, she drank blood instead of weeping, she became the very monster she had once healed others from.

That is Gothic.

The year is 1199 CE. The temple of Sekhmet — lion-headed goddess of war, plague, healing, balance, and rage — stands in Southern Egypt, a haven for the broken. Drolta is its high priestess, not just a ceremonial figure. She’s the living bridge between gods and people, she heals children, she guides the dying, she protects the divine body of Sekhmet itself, preserved in sacred mummification (she is boss in its final form, during her time of being mortal, she was fine too!). This is the type of role that only someone chosen by the goddess herself could bear. Drolta isn’t feared, she’s loved.

Until raiders come, whether mercenaries, invaders, or early whispers of imperial greed, it doesn’t matter. They storm the temple, they kill indiscriminately, they steal not just valuables, but the body of the goddess herself. And Drolta? She wakes to the corpse of a child she couldn’t save. Her sisters — massacred. Her goddess — gone. In that moment, she does not pray. She drinks the blood of the vampire who desecrated her sanctuary. To become powerful enough to never be helpless again.

She believes the only way to preserve her goddess is to pave the way for her to walk the earth once again (and took BOLD steps to do so). So she stops serving and starts the process to bring the divine to the earth. Not by aligning with Sekhmet’s true balance of war and healing, but by feeding only the rage. This is the tragedy of her arc: she’s not a white villain playing at godhood — she’s a Black woman whose trauma curdled into fanaticism. She had every right to rage, but she chose domination instead of restoration. She took Sekhmet’s name and twisted it into a cult; she took divine power and fed it to the unworthy. And for centuries, she tried to remake the goddess in her broken image.

Erzsébet Báthory is not an avatar of Sekhmet; she’s a vampire aristocrat with a taste for young girls’ blood. She’s historical Gothic evil, she’s the coloniser’s nightmare dream, she’s a white woman who thinks pain is power, and Drolta looks at her and says: Finally, a goddess (the betrayal went hard in this one on so many levels). Drolta decides that a sadistic white noblewoman — a foreigner, a butcher of girls — is the one worthy to hold the power of a goddess forged by the African sun. Why? Because by then, Drolta is too far gone. She’s no longer trying to restore Sekhmet. She’s trying to conquer the world in her name, and that’s not faith. That’s heresy.

Drolta’s arc is not just about being victimised by the empire. It’s about what happens when the oppressed internalise the logic of the oppressor. She was once a servant of balance, now she is the bringer of blood. She became the very evil she swore to fight — and did it using the name of her goddess. She isn’t white, she’s something worse. In Black Gothic literature, we often talk about ancestral grief, about stolen gods, about surviving empire. Drolta is what happens when the line between survival and corruption disappears.

This is why Annette matters because when Annette — revolutionary, daughter of Haiti, conjurer of spirits and seeker of justice — becomes possessed by Sekhmet’s true Ahk, she doesn’t just fight Erzsébet. She also calls Drolta out because Drolta isn’t just a vampire now. She’s a false prophet. When Sekhmet (through Annette, and homestly she should have let her keep the long dreads ‘cause that fit was fire!) reclaims her magic, it is a reckoning. Annette isn’t stronger than Drolta; she’s purer. Not in blood, but in purpose. Sekhmet doesn’t want tyrants; she wants balance.

Drolta’s final betrayal is the most poetic: After helping Erzsébet rise, she decides she no longer needs her. She turns on the monster she made, bites her, consumes her power, only to fall just minutes later, outmatched by the very balance she abandoned. When Richter and Alucard, with Annette’s aid, strike her down, it’s not just victory. Drolta falls — screaming, broken, alone — not tragedy, but it becomes a Gothic catharsis.

She’s every Black revolutionary who traded purpose for ego, every sacred leader who forgot the point of the power, every ancestor who bent the knee to wrath and called it faith. She’s not scary because she’s strong. She’s scary because she could’ve been a savior, and chose to be a monster.

And that’s why her story is Gothic: It reminds us that horror is not always imposed. Sometimes, it’s inherited. It’s chosen.

How the blues became a vampire gospel, colonised love was never enough.

Let’s be clear about something right off the bat (pun intended, dry I know): If you still think Sinners (2022) was “just another artsy vampire flick with Southern aesthetics,” I need you to do two things: Log off that dry review site, sit down and let me explain why this movie is peak Black Gothic storytelling.

Enter the Moore twins — Smoke and Stack. Black WWI vets and bootlegging badasses who roll back into Clarksdale, Mississippi, fresh from the hellfire of the Chicago Outfit. They show up with gangster cash and generational trauma and say, “Let’s make a juke joint.”

Not a bar, not a church, but a space built from sawmill bones and stomped red dirt. They built it even though the land is owned by a racist, Klan-connected white man. Even though their cousin’s (Sammie) daddy is yelling about demons in the music, even though everyone knows freedom in the South is a lie dressed up in Sunday suits. They built it anyway because music and a good night were the only kind of salvation they could feel in their chest.

Now let’s talk about Sammie himself: the haunted heart of this whole damn story. Sammie doesn’t just sing and play on his guitar; he summons ghosts, ancestors, spectres of memory. When Sammie plays, the past leaks out and the future leans in. The music becomes a literal portal — a bridge of the dead, stitched together with six strings and pain. This was blues music as a séance and not metaphorically. Literally.

Sammie’s daddy — a pastor, of course — calls the music “supernatural” and for once, the preacher isn’t wrong. Because this isn’t just music, it’s the sound of Black memory, dragged up from the river, wrung out over cotton fields, and pressed into vinyl with blood on it. (Honestly, if your guitar doesn’t open a portal to the afterlife, what are you even doing?)

Now. Remmick. Let’s talk about the Irish vampire in the room. If Sammie is haunted by his ancestors, Remmick is trying to resurrect his. He’s an Irish immigrant, an outsider still. A man whose homeland was colonised, starved, brutalised, and who still ended up in the American South with fangs and a hunger he can't outrun. And here’s where Sinners gets dangerous. Remmick is the vampire, yes, but he’s also the colonised becoming the coloniser. He was hunted, so now he hunts “to save these folks“.

When he hears Sammie play, he recognises something, and it isn’t just talent. Kinship. Simply, because they’re both products of empire, they are both trying to connect to a culture that was stolen from them. The difference lies in the fact that while Sammie tries to honour the dead, Remmick wants to possess them.

Remmick doesn’t love Sammie’s music: He needs it because Sammie’s songs can call the ghosts, and Remmick wants to build an undead community of “the lost” with that power, like blues-fueled necromancy. (Colonised trauma remix, featuring bloodsuckers and vibes.)

So what’s the theme of horror in this film? The fact that in black media or black supernatural media (in this case, in Sinners), it’s not just the vampires. It’s the way Black people are always expected to give away their power — their music, their magic, their souls — to people who think admiration entitles them to ownership. Remmick listens to Sammie like the world owes him that sound, like he’s entitled to Sammie’s gift, like he gets to take part in the ritual just because he’s been hurt before, too.

Sound familiar? (White tears at the altar of Black genius, still not new.)

Sammie doesn’t fall for it. Not even when his people start dying, not even when his love interest gets turned, not even when the church burns and the vampires dance and the sun is still too far away. Sammie knows what every Black person in a horror story should know by now: You don’t barter with a monster just because he knows the lyrics.

There are no side characters in my opinion, they are different interpretations of the same myth. The twins are doppelgängers — mirrors of each other, trapped in history’s loop. Annie is the hoodoo heart — the conjurer whose garlic juice saves lives and whose grief is deeper than the grave. Grace and Bo Chow, the Chinese shopkeepers, are the immigrant thread — another colonised people, caught in the mess of American horror. Even Pearline — turned too young, too fast- becomes a symbol of what happens when Black joy is devoured before it gets a chance to grow.

The final act? Fire, death, and freedom by sunrise. When the vampires finally get in, it’s not a war. It’s a ritual and a test of resilience and the ability to save all before the Klan comes for them in the morning. People die, Smoke is shot, and Sammie watches his family bleed. Still, he plays later down the line. He sings for the ghosts, he sings for the ones who can’t, he sings for Stack, and Annie, and the daughter lost in infancy, and the gods that never got temples, and the songs that weren’t allowed to be sung in chains.

Remmick burns, his thralls turn to ash, and the juke joint — that sacred space built with stolen money and intention is baptised in light. Sammie lives but not in peace. Sammie doesn’t find salvation in the church; he finds it in the city — Chicago. He becomes a blues legend, and 60 years later, when Stack and Mary — still ageless, still vampires — come to see him, Sammie doesn’t run.

He plays.

The music is bigger than the pain, because Black Gothic doesn’t end in terror; it ends in testimony. (“That night ruined my life,” Sammie says. “But until the violence, it was the greatest day of my life.”) That’s the horror, that’s the beauty, that’s Sinners.

More than anything, this movie and its dynamic characters and beautifully written plot are proof that Black Gothic isn’t an aesthetic. It’s a memory. It’s the juke joint that became a church, it’s the guitar that became a graveyard, it’s the blues that became a resurrection. We’ve always known that horror lives here, but Sinners reminds us: so does survival.