Sinners director Ryan Coogler on how Metallica inspired his horror movie about blues music

The Black Panther director talks about how Metallica’s song One inspired the structure of his new vampire movie starring Michael B. Jordan

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Ryan Coogler at the European premiere of Sinners in London. The American director talks about his influences, from blues and metal music to Stephen King. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:15pm, 20 Apr 2025

Growing up in the 1990s in Oakland, in the US state of California, director Ryan Coogler was fuelled by his city’s magnetic hip-hop scene and artists such as Digital Underground, 2Pac and E-40.

But it was Bay Area heavy metal legends Metallica who helped provide a structure for his new movie Sinners, the director says over a Zoom call from Chicago.

Starring Michael B. Jordan in a dual role as Smoke and Stack, twin brothers in Mississippi in the early 1930s, the movie takes on the history of blues music and mixes it with a supernatural story about a pack of bloodthirsty vampires.

Coogler says he had Metallica on his mind when he was laying out the story’s rhythms and beats.

“I wanted the movie to have the simplicity – and simultaneously, the profound nature – of a Delta blues song. But I wanted it to have the contrast, variation and the inevitability of a great Metallica song, like ‘One’,” he says.

“One” is the signature song from the band’s 1988 album, …And Justice For All. “It starts off with almost like an easy-listening solo, you know what I’m saying? And then it just goes bats*** insane, in a way you could have never seen coming – and at the same time, it felt like it was going there all along,” Coogler says. “The movie’s basically that.”