Cliff Notes – Sinners’ ‘horniest’ scenes are just as important as the most gory
- Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners blends horror and romance, featuring Michael B. Jordan in dual roles as twins Smoke and Stack, and has garnered a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
- The film’s explicit sexual content has sparked discussions on social media, with viewers praising its positive portrayal of female sexuality and complex adult relationships.
- Sinners challenges traditional horror tropes by showcasing strong, multi-dimensional female characters who play pivotal roles in the narrative, highlighting themes of love, vulnerability, and resistance against societal oppression.
Sinners’ ‘horniest’ scenes are just as important as the most gory
*Warning: Spoilers for Sinners below
Ryan Coogler’s horror debut has proved a smash hit with fans for more reasons than one.
Featuring not just one, but two Michael B Jordans as the Black Panther actor takes on twin roles Smoke and Stack, Sinners has received rave reviews and landed an impressive 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating.
The action-packed, blood-soaked flick follows the duo as they set up their own blues bar in their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, enlisting loved ones far and wide to help get the ‘juke joint’ up and running the very day they arrive back in town.
Offering food, drinks, and live music, the party is well and truly popping just a short while after opening, but the night soon devolves into chaos when a group of strangers turn up and attempt to gain entry.
As the film’s trailers suggest, these seemingly well-meaning travelling musicians are, in fact, vampires, and they begin massacring the patrons of the bar one by one in a bid to build their clan.
It’s a bloody, balls-to-the-wall horror-action hybrid with the best soundtrack of the year so far, but it isn’t the gore and violence that have been shocking audiences.
Sinners has been dubbed the ‘horniest’ film of 2025 with viewers taking to social media to air how shocking the multiple intimate scenes in the film were compared to the scares on offer.
Coogler really has blended several genres and themes into one powerful feature, with Sinners being as much of a love story as it is a spine-chilling genre offering.
Building a relationship
On their return, both Smoke and Stack are reunited with former flames, with whom they both experienced very different relationships.
Smoke visits the home of his former partner Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), with whom we learn he had a child who died in infancy. It doesn’t take long for him to admit he still has feelings for her, and they have sex right there in her apothecary before she fights for her life alongside him just hours later.
Stack, on the other hand, has a fiery showdown with his ex, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who is grieving the loss of her mother. She claims that she waited for Stack and that he never contacted her, with the two exploding at each other various times before falling into each other’s arms.
Elsewhere, Smoke and Stack’s cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) attracts the attention of Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a woman who becomes locked in a tryst with Sammie after he performs at the bar.
While of course, the creatures themselves and the frights they create are what most of us are looking for going into a horror film, the titillating moments of Sinners are, in my opinion, equally as important in building this rich, detailed narrative and confronting some very real fears.
What immediately stands out about Sinners is the fact that it hides its genre roots until well into the second act of the film, beginning very much as a drama film examining the lives and relationships of the ‘Smoke-Stack twins.’
We learn about their criminal past (and present, it seems), their family and relationship to the church, and the loved ones who have shaped who they became.
Coogler’s attention to what makes these men tick builds a relationship with the viewer, which means you care what happens to them, making the bonkers third act hit home harder than you could ever anticipate going in.
Revolutionary representation
Important to these men, and therefore the audience, are the women they love, creating even more tensions when all hell breaks loose, as there’s so much more at stake.
Adult relationships are complex, bringing together the good times and the bad, the laughter and the arguments, the tears, the passion, and sex. While there are some that denounce sex scenes in cinema as ‘unnecessary’, sex is an everyday, healthy part of life for consenting adults.
Sinners’ representation of sex shows it as a normal part of adult relationships (Picture: AP)
Sinners is sexier than Nosferatu. I personally found the sex stuff in Nosferatu repulsive, which i believe was the intent. The context for sex wasn’t for connection but control and pure greed. In Sinners, it’s all about connection. Be it spiritual or physical. https://t.co/ADykJSJwNH
—Breaking taboos
At the same time, Annie, Mary, and Pearline are shown to be strong, sexualised women who do not hide their desire and, in the scenes in question, take charge over what they want their sexual partners to do.
In 2025, women’s sexuality can still be considered taboo on the big screen and outside of it too, so Coogler’s decision to place Black women’s desire front and centre of a mainstream feature film acts to normalise female sexuality and bodily autonomy.
The reaction to the sex scenes has been one of surprise, and yet, should we really be surprised that adult characters have sex? They have opened up a much-needed conversation online about this very topic, and how not all films need to be catered to a family-friendly audience.
In a time where puratism is rising hand in hand with conservatism and there are louder and louder voices condeming not only sex on screen, but sexual education, and gender expression with the recent Supreme Court ruling, showing happy, healthy, and horny scenes in cinema is important to normalise intimate relationships.
Often in horror films with male leads, we struggle to get more than one female character that is memorable, but in Sinners, we receive four, including the addition of a strong-headed business owner and mother, Grace (Li Jun Li).
Not only are they commanding in these sex scenes, but it is Mary who furthers the vampires’ plan and brings the death of many of the bar’s patrons, and it is Annie who deduces what the vampires are and sets in motion a solid plan to combat them.
Along with Pearline and Grace, the women are not just voices agreeing with the men leading the charge, instead, they are intelligent, resourceful characters keeping the group safe, and it all begins with these scenes of desire.
The sex scenes in Sinners help create fully-rounded and realised characters (Picture: Warner Bros)
The vampires, like a parasitic organism, wish to infect everyone and become one faceless, personality-devoid entity with their thoughts, feelings, and opinions linked through a supernatural connection. It works as an allegory for white people’s oppression of Black people’s freedoms and culture, and the characters’ finding against this and not only fighting an undead menace, they’re fighting the looming presence of racism in the Deep South.
But despite this looming threat, we also see a strong Black community, loving households, joy, and sex, highlighting the strength that comes in the face of adversity, offering a glimmer of hope in so much darkness. Horror has often been criticised for solely having Black characters suffer and then die, whereas Sinners turns this trope completely on its head.
The inclusion of its sex scenes helps to tackle the stigma around sexuality and the frightening rise of ignorance around sex on screen, as well as acting as an important part of the characters’ backstory and the creation of multi-dimensional, complex people to make those same horrors feel all the more threatening.
Following in the footsteps of Nosferatu in January, it very much feels like the horny vampire film is back. While we may turn to horror films to be terrified, the genre has always been one to tackle pressing issues in the wider world, and what Sinners has to say about sex and sexuality continues this important tradition.
Sinners is in cinemas now.
