Two brothers return to their hometown and discover that something evil is waiting to welcome them back in Director Ryan Coogler’s vampire thriller, Sinners.

In his fusion of gothic horror and 1930s Mississippi history, Coogler’s film spins the tale of twins Smoke and Stack, who seek to open a new juke joint but find themselves confronted by not only the dangers of Jim Crow-era southern life but also an undead menace.

On May 10, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Coogler discussed the making of Sinners during a Q&A moderated by Director Rachel Morrison (The Fire Inside) who also served as his DP on Black Panther.

During the conversation, Coogler spoke about why he decided to go wide and when to go tall with the aspect ratio.

“The Mississippi Delta has a very defining physical characteristic in that it is very flat. People will argue that it’s the flattest place on earth. And if you go there, you feel like you can see the earth bending, specifically, on some of these plantations. And I realized another thing about the south, specifically Mississippi, was this idea of isolation. You can drive miles and miles and miles and not see another car. You’ll just see fields where there’s cotton or pecans or tobacco. And then you’ll slowly happen upon another house or something like that. That isolation is peaceful but also very frightening because if something was to go wrong... So, I thought that we’d need that width to capture the feeling of the flat landscape and the feeling of supreme isolation that exists down in the south. When we want it to be tall, we just looked at it as where are moments of heightened situations: heightened emotions, heightened musicality, heightened spirituality, or heightened horrific image and when do we want audiences to have that visceral experience?”

Coogler’s other directorial credits include the feature films Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Creed and Fruitvale Station. He also won a DGA Student Film Award for “Best African American Student Filmmaker - West Region” for his 2010 short, Fig.

Coogler has been a DGA member since 2015 and has served on the Western Directors Council.