The Vampire Remmick from Sinners (2025) dir. Ryan Coogler
I really love how multilayered Remmick is as an antagonist. There’s a haunting tragedy to his vampirism; it’s not just a curse, it’s a wound, a stench that follows him around, a sore that never heals. In the movie, it's established that vampires are cut off from their ancestors, from the spiritual lineage that gives people a sense of self and belonging. That’s why Remmick is drawn so powerfully to Sammie’s music: he believes it can bridge the chasm between him and the past. Through the sound, the soul, and the ancestral memory woven into Sammie’s voice, Remmick sees a chance to reconnect with the generations he’s lost, to reclaim a heritage that immortality has denied him.
He’s not just turning people into vampires out of malice. He’s desperate for connection, for kin. He’s been walking the earth for so long that time itself has become a prison. His loneliness is unfathomable. In his mind, creating more vampires is an act of love, a gift, a way to build a new kind of family bound not by blood, but by shared experience and eternal understanding. The shared consciousness among vampires gives him a feeling of closeness and empathy that he no longer finds among humans. He can feel their joys, their fears, their memories and through that, he feels alive again. But ironically, while he can touch their emotions, he’s lost touch with his own humanity. He doesn’t recognize the cost of what he’s doing.
What makes him especially compelling is that he genuinely believes he’s saving people. To him, mortality is suffering. A life of labor, injustice, and quiet despair especially for marginalized groups, seems like a cruel fate. He offers what he sees as liberation: power, eternity, and freedom from the human condition. But what he offers comes at a terrible price; the loss of agency, individuality, and the natural rhythm of life and death. In binding everyone to himself, he becomes a tyrant cloaked in the language of salvation.
The fact that Remmick is Irish adds another layer of complexity. Historically, the Irish were also colonized, displaced, and treated as second-class citizens, especially during the famine and the waves of migration to America. That background gives him a tragic justification: he knows what it means to be othered, to be seen as lesser. His empathy with other oppressed groups is sincere, but it’s twisted by the trauma he carries. In trying to overcome his own powerlessness, he becomes the thing he once despised; a colonizer of the spirit, assimilating others into his vision of safety through submission.
Choosing the Choctaw people as the vampire hunters is a brilliant symbolic reversal. It frames Native Americans not as victims, but as protectors, guardians of spiritual balance and cultural autonomy. The fact that they are resisting vampirism; a metaphor for forced assimilation and cultural erasure ,mirrors the very real historical struggle of Indigenous peoples to preserve their ways of life in the face of settler colonialism and domination. Remmick, though well-intentioned in his mind, represents yet another invader trying to overwrite identity in the name of unity.
What’s even more poignant is how Remmick uses his own pain; the pain of exile, of losing homeland and kin to rationalize his actions. He seeks solidarity among the oppressed, but his version of unity demands surrender. For the patrons of the juke joint, a sacred space of Black joy, resistance, and cultural memory, what he’s offering is a violation. To become a vampire in his world means giving up one’s privacy, one’s inner life, one’s ability to dream alone. It means becoming part of a collective that speaks with one voice, his.
Ryan Coogler writes relatable villains... It's like, you understand why this person is the way they are and you can almost excuse it but you don't, because evil is still evil, even if it's coming from a good place.
In the end, Remmick isn’t just a monster. He’s a cautionary tale. He shows how the desire for belonging, when corrupted by trauma and unchecked power, can turn even the most sympathetic soul into a threat. He wanted a family but what he created was a hive. And in trying to save others from suffering, he ended up robbing them of the very things that make life worth living. He’s a talented and charming villain who believes he has more in common with the people he's trying to “save" than with their collective oppressors.