Sinners

Smoke and Stack Moore — twin WWI veterans turned Chicago bootleggers — come home to Clarksdale with enough stolen money to buy an abandoned sawmill. They assemble a community: their younger cousin Sammie, a sharecropper with a blues gift nobody can quite explain; musician Delta Slim; Chinese-American shopkeepers Grace and Bo; bouncer Cornbread; Smoke's estranged wife Annie, who practices Hoodoo; and Stack's former girlfriend Mary. The juke joint opens. It is the best night this stretch of Mississippi has seen in a long time.

An Irish vampire named Remmick arrives at the door. He is old and patient and has been tracked by Choctaw vampire hunters into the Delta. Smoke turns him away. Remmick targets the community instead. Mary is turned. She bites Stack. Stack turns. The patrons start going one by one.

The survivors — anchored by Annie's Hoodoo knowledge — hold the line inside the sawmill as the night turns into a siege. Grace invites the vampires in to protect others, and the confrontation goes violent and total. Grace, Bo, Annie, and Delta Slim are killed. Mary, grief-stricken by Annie's death, flees into the dark. Smoke and Sammie get Remmick into the sunrise. He burns. The horde burns with him.

Smoke kills the Klan members who come with the dawn, but takes a fatal shot doing it. He dies and finds Annie and the daughter they lost waiting for him on the other side.

1992. Sammie is a celebrated blues musician. Stack and Mary — ageless, unchanged — come to his club. Stack tells him that Smoke spared his life on one condition: never go near Sammie again. He kept it for sixty years. Stack offers Sammie the turn. Sammie declines. He has had a full life, he says. He is satisfied. For Stack, the day the juke joint burned is the last time he stood in sunlight, the last time he was free, the last time he was with his brother.