A few years after he became The Karate Kid, and before he showed up in My Cousin Vinny, Ralph Macchio starred in a spectacular relic of a movie called Crossroads, where he played as aspiring Blues guitarist working his way through the Deep South to try and reach a mystical intersection where he can play guitar against the Devil. It’s better in execution than it sounds on paper, probably because Crossroads was directed by the legendary Walter Hill (48 hrs, Last Man Standing), and had a blistering cast surrounding Macchio. I thought a lot about Macchio’s movie while watching this magnificent trailer for Ryan Coogler’s hotly anticipated vampire movie Sinners, and when speaking with the director, the rest of his influences basically melted my face.
Here’s the Sinners trailer, which you need to watch, immediately:
Without question, the marriage of music and sin is conjured in Ryan Coogler’s new movie, his latest collaboration with Creed and Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan. And of course, audiences will be thinking about their previous films as they come to Sinners – which opens in theaters on April 18. But during a conversation with Coogler, during which he frequently called Sinners “genre fluid,” the director opened up about the movies that were on his mind while making this, and they are going to make every horror lover – and film history fanatic – go insane.
Talking about his influences on this film, Coogler told us:
A lot of Coen Brothers influence in this, starting with, I would say, Inside Llewyn Davis, some O’ Brother there, (and) definitely some Fargo there. But definitely some No Country. Robert Rodriguez is a big one. I think on the nose, it would be very easy to make the From Dusk ‘til Dawn comparison, right? But it's actually quite close to The Faculty quite a bit, which is a remake of The Thing, which is one of my favorite movies. Definitely my favorite horror movie. So there’s a lot of Carpenter in the film, as well.
Stop right there, Ryan Coogler. You already had me at Prohibition Michael B. Jordan with massive muscles and Tommy guns. You don’t have to keep adding this much cool shit into your upcoming horror movie.
But then Ryan Coogler had to kick things up a notch by name dropping one of my all-time favorite Stephen King books as an influence. He told us:
But the biggest influences, truthfully, the biggest influences are not in cinema. You know, the novel Salem's Lot? That's a massive influence on the film.
Not only am I holding tickets, sir, I’m currently seated in the auditorium and ready to roll! Sinners opens on April 18, and if you were looking for more reasons to attend, I give to you a vampire Hailee Steinfeld, an original score by Ludwig Goransson, and Ryan Coogler shooting with the same IMAX cameras used by Christopher Nolan. Yeah, this one’s fixing to be special.
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