Curriculum Overview & Teacher Rationale

By Cara Campbell & Fairuze Ahmed Ramirez

This three-week unit invites students into a critical and creative exploration of Sinners, a film by Ryan Coogler that centers music, movement, horror, and visual storytelling as forms of resistance, remembrance, and liberation. Designed for a first-year writing course, the unit draws from cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and multimodal composition to honor expressive forms of communication, which have often been marginalized in academic spaces.

We approach Sinners through the frameworks of bell hooks (1995) and Robin D.G. Kelley (2002). hooks positions art as a radical act of care, self-definition, and spiritual resistance—values reflected in Coogler’s choreography of sound and silence, his centering of the Blues, and his reverence for embodied knowledge. Kelley’s call to “imagine otherwise”—to treat dreaming as a method of political struggle—resonates in the film’s layered soundscapes and speculative imagery, where grief and joy coexist as portals to freedom.

Students also analyze Sinners through the lens of Black horror, drawing on thinkers like Tananarive Due (2019), to explore how horror functions as both genre and metaphor for naming and surviving racial terror. Ultimately, students consider how sound, silence, and movement in Sinners embody protest, healing, and collective memory.