A dialética do medo: representação cinematográfica, blues e contestação histórica no filme Pecadores (Sinners)

Abstract

This study analyzes how the film Sinners (2025), directed by Ryan Coogler, mobilizes codes of Afro-diasporic culture to tension the historical structures of racism and segregation in the Southern United States. To this end, the research adopts a qualitative and descriptive approach, grounded in Dialectical Method, examining the narrative through three axes of tension: Written Law versus Sung Word, Sacred versus Profane, and Memory versus Forgetting. The analysis demonstrates that the work subverts Black Horror tropes, utilizing blues, the figure of the griot, and orality not as folkloric elements, but as technologies of survival and archives of memory. The results indicate that the space of the juke joint and musical performance operate as territories of resistance against the violence of Jim Crow laws, while the protagonists' refusal of vampiric immortality symbolizes the affirmation of humanity and the rejection of co-optation by the colonial system. It is concluded that cinema, by articulating ancestral memory and orality, transcends the function of entertainment to consolidate itself as a living archive and a tool for political emancipation, allowing for the narrative elaboration of trauma and the continuity of Black identity beyond physical death.