Ryan Coogler's Sinners Was Heavily Inspired By An Underrated Twilight Zone Episode

It's been 12 years since Ryan Coogler made his startlingly assured feature filmmaking debut with "Fruitvale Station," but he still feels like an unknown quantity as an artist. We know from "Creed" and "Black Panther" that he's got a knack for imbuing franchise movies with uncommon heart, and no shortage of swagger when it comes to staging dynamite action set pieces. But due to circumstances beyond his control (the death of Chadwick Boseman and the COVID-19 pandemic), he's only made one movie over the last seven years. That's a lot of time for a still-young filmmaker (he's 38) to sit on the sidelines, especially one whose oeuvre is curiously light on original movies.

That's not a knock on Coogler at all. Christopher Nolan directed a remake ("Insomnia") and three Batman movies en route to becoming the most prominent and praised studio filmmaker on the planet, so Coogler is in excellent company. But Nolan still found time to scratch personal itches with "The Prestige" and "Inception." Coogler, for whatever reason, couldn't carve out that space for himself.

This makes "Sinners" one of the most anticipated films of 2025, and the trailer makes us even more excited. Armed with a substantial budget, and limited only by his imagination, Coogler appears to have crafted a Deep South-period vampire flick dripping with sex, blues, and blood. It's his idea and his screenplay brought to life by a banger cast that includes frequent collaborator Michael B. Jordan (in dual roles), Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, Jack O'Connell, and Delroy Lindo. But while "Sinners" qualifies as an original, Coogler freely admits it's packed with influences, one of which happens to be a less heralded episode of "The Twilight Zone."

Syndication trends come and go, but the five-season run of Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" between 1959 and 1964 has never faded from view. When I was a kid in the 1980s, it typically aired in the late afternoon or early evening on weekdays; nowadays, you're most likely to run across it on a national holiday via a 24-hour marathon. So I'm not surprised a pop culture seeker like Coogler is a fan.

While speaking to the press yesterday ahead of the trailer release, Coogler rattled off a list of influences on "Sinners." He cited "The Faculty" and "Inside Llewyn Davis," but also targeted Stephen King's vampire novel "Salem's Lot" and a "Twilight Zone" episode titled "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" as the primary inspirations for his new movie.

If you've never seen it, "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" centers on a country bumpkin who throws his hayseed community into a panic by rising from a coffin at his own funeral. Initially, they accept that he once again walks amongst the living, but they become alarmed when he does very un-Jeff-like things like eating two eggs at breakfast and whupping the town bully who's licked him every day of his unremarkable life. Jeff's girlfriend has reasonable cause for alarm when he shows up with a bouquet of dead flowers he picked for her that very morning, but, really, there's nothing wrong with him other than he's a better version of himself.

The twist arrives at the end, when, having threatened a mob of townspeople with the possibility that he is an evil spirit who could lay waste to their crops with a plague of locusts, he ignites a match without striking it against anything. His girlfriend sees this, remarks on it, but lets it go when he says she's seeing things. The devil has convinced her that he doesn't exist. It's an understated "Twilight Zone" episode all told, but if you mix up its DNA with "Salem's Lot," you might have something special. I wouldn't bet against Coogler.

"Sinners" opens in theaters on April 18, 2025.