Sinners star Wunmi Mosaku has explained why she keeps returning to horror, despite not actually liking scary movies or TV shows herself.
Having appeared in refugee chiller His House and phantasmagorical drama Lovecraft Country, the Loki star’s latest sees her play Annie, a healer whose otherworldly knowledge proves crucial in Ryan Coogler’s new blood-soaked vampire flick. Set in ’30s Mississippi, it follows Michael B. Jordan’s twin brothers Smoke and Stack, whose bootlegging juke joint becomes an all-you-can-eat buffet for a trio of banjo-playing bloodsuckers one fateful evening. It leans hard into the silly supernatural, with Delroy Lindo’s drunken musician offering up a lot of laughs across its 137-minute runtime, but it also unpacks the harsh realities of the Jim Crow South and the joys of Black community.
“I think [it’s] just such a great genre for exploring the horrors of humanity,” Mosaku tells GamesRadar+ of the genre. “I’m not into horror when it’s just, like, scary, gory, and all darkness. It’s not something I choose to spend my time, you know, immersed in. But when I saw Get Out for the first time, it was a real turning point for me, because I realized that horror can be such a powerful tool for social commentary. Then I got Lovecraft Country and His House, and those felt like similar sorts of things.
“I remember my adrenaline pumping and sweat forming on my skin as I was reading the horrors that these people were experiencing. In fact, I felt closer to them in a way. I felt an understanding, because your body is physically doing those things, going through that, like, those fearful reactions,” the British-Nigerian actor recalls. “With Sinners, it’s a horror in one respect. But it brought up so many personal questions, development, artistically; you’ve got the blues music, you’ve got these complicated characters and complicated relationships. There’s this depth of love and grief and joy and all of it. It’s a horror that isn’t just a horror, it’s a horror that makes you think, a horror that makes you feel something, change your thought pattern. That, to me, is powerful.”
In Sinners, Mosaku’s Annie shares a complicated history with former soldier Elijah, who goes by Smoke. The pair drifted apart following a family tragedy and have grown more distant, still, thanks to Smoke’s time up in Chicago working with notorious mobster Al Capone. For Smoke, money equals power, but Annie gets her strength from a less tangible thing: hoodoo.
“I didn’t know anything about hoodoo before, I didn’t know anything about voodoo. I knew nothing about Ifa, and I realized in my research that hoodoo is a direct descendant of Ifa, which is the Yoruba traditional religion,” explains Mosaku. “I’m a Yoruba woman and knew nothing about it, and so for me, in looking into all this, I found a little part of myself that I didn’t know was missing.
“It felt like I gained a deeper understanding of who I’m from, where I’m from, the wisdom of the people who got me to this point, my ancestry, the healing powers of nature. It was quite amazing, because I’ve been doing Yoruba lessons since 2020 and it was just not sticking, and in the last six months it’s really stuck. I wonder if Annie has anything to do with that – feeling like things are slowly starting to click into place in regards to my ancestry and how that ancestry now informs and shapes my purpose. A message in this movie about your purpose reverberating through the generations. So I don’t know, I kind of credit… obviously, my teacher… my own teacher…” she laughs. “But I also credit Annie and that connection through hoodoo and the mysticism and that spiritual, earthly wisdom that she has.”
Sinners releases on April 18. For more, check out our guide to the most exciting upcoming horror movies heading our way.
