Why it Matters that the Vampire in Sinners is Irish
Part of investigating my own Irish identity inevitably forces me to reckon with Ireland's colonized soul. When I attempted to find literature about pre-catholic Irish folklore for a comic I'm working on, the best resources were decades out of print books and texts in dead languages.
Meanwhile, head into any Barnes and Noble and you'll find a plethora of Irish myth representing the revised Catholic interpretation of those myths. With few exceptions, the cultural identity of pre-colonial Ireland has long been erased.
When people say Irish people were, at one point, not considered white, the takeaway shouldn't be "well of course they're white, look at their skin" it should be that whiteness is the social construct supremacists use to "other" those they don't consider themselves. Ireland had to be violently colonized with war, famine, and christianity for them to eventually be considered white.
What this means in the present is that I, half-Irish living in North America, am disconnected from my ancestry in a way that I may never be able to reconnect to, because the Ireland that I miss in my soul has been replaced with a colonized history, a colonized culture, and a colonized soul.
Sinners (2025) is probably gonna be the movie of the year for several reasons, and one of them is how Remmick, the irish vampire, acts as the perfect antagonist to the film's themes.
In what is perhaps the film moment of 2025, Sammy plays I Lied To You with such passion and spirit that the past and future are connected. The threads of blues, of identity, of culture travel back to ancient ritual ceremonies and forward to rock and roll, EDM, and rap. It's not just black american culture represented either, we see peoples representing east asians and west africans alike. In one beauitiful moment, everything is connected.
It's this connection that Remmick wants desperately for himself.
In a later scene, Remmick does his own version of this moment using the song Rocky Road to Dublin, but it's... not the same. Despite his multicultural attendance, the song is entirely a celebration of Irish culture and ONLY Irish culture (and post-colonial at that!) He has no ability to reach into the past or future because he himself has been so violently disconnected from his own heritage. Remmick is no longer irish, he is now white.
The vampirism in the movie is whiteness. It's the loss of cultural identity in favour of the mass. It's the appropriation of others to replace what is missing. It's to collect but not connect.
That's why he want's Sammy's ability: he's trying to fill the void caused by his assimilation into whiteness, but he can only think to do it by enacting the same violence enacted on his people. By taking.
In other words, Ireland is what's going to happen to Black America if Remmick wins.
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