“Indigenous artists have no problem portraying possible undesirable futures […] because these narratives are evocative to our known realities…we are living in a dystopian, settler-occupied oligarchy fueled by resource extraction and environmental contamination, completely alternative to our traditional ways of being and knowing.” (Frike, 2019, p. 110).
In many ways, Sinners (2025) and Blood Quantum (2019) are cinematic inverses of each other. Both feature racialized bodies, cultural assimilation, ‘othering’, and the ongoing effects of colonial violence. Yet, one of them is defined by taking, and the other by giving, each articulating a different facet of narrative sovereignty and postcolonial perspectives. This is done by two contrasting metaphors: the insatiable hunger for colonial extraction in Sinners, and Blood Quantum’s burden of giving, even if that giving results in pain.
At every level of its narrative, Sinners is a movie about taking—land, labour, pleasure, culture, life. The twins steal from Italian and Irish mobs, redistributing their spoils in their home of Clarksdale as a gesture of temporary, precarious joy. Bodies are taken too, first for pleasure and power, then for life and sustenance as the characters turn into vampires. The vampiric metaphor underscores how colonial systems have always demanded the extraction from bodies: as labour, as spectacle, as disposable in the path of conquest.
Sinners understands that the colonizer’s hunger is never simply for land or resources. It is also for aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural ownership, stripped clean of the people who created it. As Delta Slim shares as they drive down roads surrounded by endless cotton plantations, “See, white folks they like the blues just fine. They just don’t like the people who make it.” (Coogler, 2025, 00:30:36). Remmick embodies the most violent form of extraction and taking: he hungers not only for blood but for stories, memories, and the cultural lineage of the Black community he preys upon. He represents the colonizer who, denied a culture of his own, feeds off and extracts the identity of others.
If Sinners is a story of extraction, then Blood Quantum is its counterpart as a story of giving. In this film, giving is not framed as generosity, but rather as a burden upon the racialized, the weight thrust upon Indigenous bodies to offer sanctuary and protection against the apocalypse. Red Crow reservation becomes a haven not just for its infection-immune Indigenous residents, but also for the settlers that once benefited from their dispossession. The community of Red Crow is forced into a moral standoff: how much can be given, and at what cost?
In an exchange between Sheriff Traylor, and his son’s optimistic settler-girlfriend, this dilemma shows itself again: “We’re supposed to be helping people!” she argues, only for Traylor to retort back, “We aren’t supposed to be doing anything! We’re supposed to be surviving.” (Barnaby, 2019. 00:36:40). The apocalypse also offers a darker side of giving: the transmission of infection and pestilence, a mirror and a metaphor for how settler diseases once decimated Indigenous communities. How Lysol, the scorned son of our protagonist, delivers infection to the doorstep of their sanctuary. His act is a gift given not from compassion but from anger, pain, and inherited resentment.
Despite their contrasting metaphors and cultural contexts, Sinners and Blood Quantum both reject the idea that horror is apolitical, or that monstrosity exists only in the supernatural. Their conflicts are rooted in settler hunger, in the colonizer’s demand for something that doesn’t belong to them, whether that be the culture, stories, and music of Sinners, or the entitlement of settlers seeking safety, protection, and even infection-immunity in Blood Quantum. They both use the language of horror to expose systems of colonial violence and survival in the face of oppression and assimilation. Through narrative cultural sovereignty, both films testify that some things—identity, resistance, the right to tell one’s own story—cannot be consumed.
Barnaby, J. (2019). Blood Quantum [Film]. Elevation Pictures.
Coogler, R. (2025). Sinners [Film]. Warner Bros. Entertainment.
Fricke, S. (2019). Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms in the hyperpresent now. World Art, 9:2, pp. 107-121.
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