Remmick and the Evolution of Irish Gothic Through Colonial Trauma, Catholicism, and Cultural Hybridity from Le Fanu to Stoker
Bonus Issue of the Week: my thesis paper on Sinners and the Irish Gothic.
The devil went down to Georgia with a fiddle looking for a soul to steal, and then pivoted to Mississippi to find his ancestors.
Before I jump in, I want to note I pivoted my IRISH GOTHIC MFA Thesis to write about the evolution of Irish Gothic Vampirism in Remmick. It doesn’t cover absolutely everything about Sinners. I could have written a fifty page paper on that character, and because I was losing my mind (and time), I chose to write thirty. (The assignment was for twenty pages… I could not stop writing about this.)
Ryan Coogler, you are a genius.
a note from the author:
The screenplay for Sinners by Ryan Coogler was not available for public access at the time that this paper was written. I searched diligently for it, and could not obtain any versions as it exists of Sinners to refer back to. Thus, the following quotes and recollections of Sinners are based off of five consecutive viewings of the film in theaters, including 2 screenings in 70MM IMAX, 1 screening in 270 degree ScreenX, and 2 standard edition screenings. During 2 screening, I took transcript notes of lines and moments of the film. This paper attempts to represent Ryan Coogler’s writing as it appeared on screen to the best of my ability at the time that this paper was written. I apologize for any potential inconsistencies that may emerge.
Introduction
“There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future. In ancient Ireland, they were called Filí. In Choctaw land they called them Firekeepers. And in West Africa they’re called Griots. This gift can bring healing to their communities, but it also attracts evil.”
— Sinners (2025), Ryan Coogler
Irish Gothic literature offers a uniquely haunting lens through which to view Ireland’s turbulent history and cultural psyche. From the Victorian-era vampire tales of Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker to contemporary reimaginings, Irish Gothic texts consistently fuse supernatural horror with themes of colonial trauma, religious repression, hybridity, and national identity. This paper traces the evolution of Irish Gothic conventions from Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1872) through Stoker’s Dracula (1897), culminating in the character of Remmick — the Irish vampire antagonist of Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners (2025). By examining these works in sequence, we see how the genre’s defining anxieties and tropes are expressed and transformed across time.
Le Fanu and Stoker, both Anglo-Irish writers, encoded the unresolved tensions of Ireland’s colonial status and the Anglo-Irish Protestant psyche into their vampire stories [17][20]. Today, Sinners revives the Irish Gothic vampire in a new context: Remmick explicitly carries the baggage of Irish history into 1930s Mississippi, using his “whiteness as a weapon” against an oppressed Black community, despite his self-aware and self-perceived ally-ship from the trauma of colonization of his people [3]. Through close literary analysis with substantial textual evidence, this study will highlight the connections between Carmilla, Dracula, and Remmick. Each embodies Ireland’s Gothic nightmares in different guises—from Carmilla’s intimate menace in a “lonely and primitive” corner of Styria [10], to Dracula’s invasion of modern London as a “doppelgänger” of British imperial anxieties [20], to Remmick’s perversion of the Irish vampiric legacy in service of new oppressions. In doing so, we uncover how Irish Gothic conventions of haunted history, religious anxiety, cultural hybridity, and identity conflict persist and mutate, reflecting changing historical moments while retaining a gothic “specter” of Ireland’s past.
I. The Irish Gothic Tradition: Trauma, Religion, and Hybridity
Gothic literature in Ireland has long been a vehicle for confronting the nation’s “silenced past” and cultural conflicts [15]. The Irish Gothic emerged from the peculiar position of the Anglo-Irish Protestant minority in a colonized Catholic country. Critics note that Irish Gothic fiction often voices Anglo-Irish fears and guilt regarding the “subaltern Catholic Other” in Ireland [15]. Jarlath Killeen observes that “the demonisation of both Catholics in general, and Catholicism as a theological and social system, is…central to the Irish Gothic,” with monsters frequently figured as Catholic or “crypto-Catholic” threats [8].
Gothic tales by writers like Le Fanu and Stoker — both members of the Protestant Ascendancy — encapsulated the anxieties of a ruling class in decline, “caught between fading power and a rising Catholic majority” [15]. In these stories, Catholicism functions as a menacing external force (the “Not-I” in Todorov’s terms), yet it simultaneously fascinates the Protestant imagination [8]. This Catholophobia mixed with Catholophilia meant that Anglo-Irish authors were at once terrified of and attracted to the religious and folkloric “other” of Irish Catholic culture [8].
Equally important is the colonial trauma underlying Irish Gothic. Ireland’s history of conquest, rebellion, and dispossession permeates the genre as an unquiet spirit. As scholar W.J. McCormack argues, Le Fanu and his contemporaries were deeply influenced by “Victorian Ireland,” exposing in their work “the anxieties of the Protestant middle classes at a time of deepening political tensions” [20]. The 19th century saw fierce debates over land ownership and Irish nationhood, especially around the Great Famine (1845–49) and campaigns for independence. These sociopolitical pressures creep into the subtext of vampire tales. Indeed, both Carmilla and Dracula are preoccupied with landed estates, ancestral ruins, and questions of inheritance, reflecting the unstable land tenure and colonial land-grabs in Ireland [7]. One critic notes that Stoker and Le Fanu’s shared Irish heritage came at a time when “questions of Irish nationhood were fiercely contested,” and thus “metaphors of predation and domestic invasion” in their novels resonated with the English occupation of Ireland [7].
Another hallmark of Irish Gothic is its hybridity — cultural, political, and metaphysical. The Anglo-Irish have been called a “hyphenated culture,” poised uneasily between English and Irish identities [21]. This hybrid identity bred a “sense of cultural ambiguity” so deep that it naturally lent itself to Gothic literature’s penchant for “hesitancy over certainty” and blurring of binaries [21]. Killeen notes that as “hybrid figures the Anglo-Irish were in a perfect position to develop” a literary tradition defined by ambivalence, one that refuses to fully separate “living/dead, inside/outside, friend/enemy, desire/disgust” [21].
Gothic tropes of undead beings, doppelgängers, and uncanny doubles mirror the Anglo-Irish community’s own in-between status — colonizer or colonized? British or Irish? This ambiguity plays out in the vampires of Le Fanu and Stoker, who are often liminal figures themselves. The Anglo-Irish Gothic also often ends with incomplete resolution: evil is vanquished, yet some “primitive” residue remains. Terry Eagleton famously argued that the realist novel failed to flourish in Ireland because Irish society, riven by colonial divisions, could not be neatly assimilated into the tidy progress narrative of realism [21]. Instead, Gothic “flourish[ed] in disrupted, oppressed, or underdeveloped societies, to give a voice to the powerless” [21] — a description that certainly fits colonial Ireland.
In Dracula, for example, the ending features the birth of a baby named after all the story’s heroes, symbolizing a hopeful future, yet Dracula’s contaminated bloodline lingers in Mina after she was forced to drink from him [21]. Such ambiguities suggest that the “atavistic” past is never fully exorcised. As we turn to Carmilla and Dracula, we will see these themes — colonial hauntings, religious anxieties, and hybrid identities — woven into the fabric of the narratives.
II. Carmilla: The Vampire as Colonial Ghost and Repressed Desire
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is a foundational text of Irish Gothic, even though its surface setting and characters seem far removed from Ireland. Published in 1872 as part of In a Glass Darkly, Carmilla is set in a remote corner of Styria (in Austrian territory) and centers on a lonely young woman, Laura, who falls prey to a female vampire guest in her father’s schloss. Le Fanu — a Dublin-born Protestant — displaces the action to Central Europe, yet critics have long argued that Carmilla encodes the political angst of Anglo-Irish society in disguise [20]. At the time Le Fanu wrote Carmilla, Ireland was reeling from the recent Famine and the rise of the Home Rule movement (the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1869, and land-rights agitation was ongoing) [20]. The Protestant Ascendancy’s “Big House” was beginning to crumble, metaphorically speaking [20]. In Carmilla, we find an aristocratic vampire of the past threatening the modern household—a potent metaphor for the “unresolved…Anglo-Irish occupation of Gaelic land” [17].
From the opening pages, Carmilla emphasizes the isolation and outsider status of its protagonists, subtly mirroring the Anglo-Irish situation. Laura tells us: “In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way… My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England” [46]. This passage immediately marks Laura and her father as transplants —English people living abroad, much like Anglo-Irish landlords lived in an Irish land that was not truly “home.” The father, a retired English officer, has purchased a feudal estate “a bargain,” enjoying comforts that his money “would have answered [for] scantily” in England [46]. The setting—forested, ruined, steeped in Catholic history — evokes a fallen aristocracy and depopulated land. The extinct Karnsteins, whose château stands desolate in the forest, symbolize a vanished old order. We later learn Carmilla is the last scion of that Karnstein line—undead and vengeful. This scenario can be read as a coded reference to Ireland: an ancient Catholic aristocracy dispossessed and left in ruins, with a Protestant landowner now inhabiting the castle. The stage is set for the return of the repressed: Carmilla, the vampire Countess Karnstein, literally returns from the grave to “reclaim” life from the intruders on her ancestral land.
Critic Jamieson Ridenour argues that Carmilla, beneath its surface, is “reflective of the political angst then plaguing the Anglo-Irish institution,” and that the eponymous vampire can be viewed as a form of aisling figure — the spirit of Ireland seeking to have her story told [20]. In Irish poetic tradition, an aisling is a vision of a woman symbolizing Ireland, often lamenting her oppression. Carmilla might be seen as a dark subversion of this trope: she is a mysterious, suffering noblewoman who haunts an English family, her very presence a lament for a lost lineage and a symbolic vengeance. If Carmilla represents Mother Ireland or the spéirbhean (spirit-woman), she is the return of the repressed — she “returns to drive the English (read: Anglo-Irish) Other from her rightful place” [20]. By preying on Laura, Carmilla effectively corrupts the blood of the English family, threatening their line — a reversal of the colonial power dynamic.
It is significant that Laura’s father and the General (an Austrian nobleman whose ward was also killed by Carmilla) must join forces with a Berkeleyan occult doctor, Baron Vordenburg, to hunt down and destroy Carmilla in her tomb. This coalition of patriarchal authority reflects the forces of empire and reason uniting to stamp out the lingering “native” threat. They locate Carmilla’s grave in the Karnstein chapel (a space of Catholic decay and restless spirits) and enact a ritualized execution: the stake, the decapitation, the burning of remains, and the scattering of ashes. The systematic violence of this purge, though framed as a triumph of good over evil, resonates with the historical violence of colonial repression. The spectral echo of history is unmistakable: Le Fanu’s fiction suggests that “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”
Religious themes in Carmilla are understated but significant. Le Fanu, a Protestant with Huguenot ancestry, was personally fascinated by Catholic ritual and folklore [20]. In the novella, the setting is steeped in Catholic imagery — the Gothic chapel, spiritual legends, and the “rites” to dispose of the vampire — even though the heroes themselves are not explicitly devout. The Catholic Church is implicit as the source of the rituals that ultimately destroy Carmilla. This reflects what Killeen identifies as the Protestant Gothic’s habit of both demonizing and “obsessively borrowing” from Catholicism [30]. The Protestant characters must tap into Catholic folk knowledge—the old superstitions and ancestral legends—to combat the evil, a pattern that recurs in Dracula as well. Thus Carmilla encodes a subtle tension: Protestant rationalists must acknowledge the power of the “superstition” they otherwise dismiss. The story’s Gothic horror springs from hiding a past which remains unresolved — in this case, the violent history embodied by Carmilla [17].
In addition to political and religious themes, Carmilla is famed for its exploration of transgressive sexuality, viewed as another form of “otherness” repressed in Victorian society. Carmilla’s erotic fixation on Laura — depicted through dreamy, sensual encounters — was groundbreaking in 19th-century literature for its lesbian overtones. Most Victorian readers would have read Carmilla’s desire as monstrous not only because she’s a vampire, but because it is same-sex desire. Le Fanu’s handling is oblique but daring: Laura is both entranced and repulsed by Carmilla, describing feelings of “a love growing into adoration” mixed with “horror” in her presence. This mirrors the Catholophilia–Catholophobia described earlier, suggesting that sexual and religious deviance were parallel anxieties for the Anglo-Irish. Elizabeth Signorotti emphasizes that Carmilla “clearly presents an unusual and provocative engagement with Victorian domestic and gendered roles,” with Carmilla’s lesbian predation subverting traditional family and friend dynamics [18].
Race and racialization play subtle but critical roles in both Carmilla and Dracula, often encoded through the language of foreignness, darkness, and bodily difference. In Carmilla, Le Fanu repeatedly emphasizes the vampire’s exoticism and inscrutability—her “strange accent,” “foreign” features, and dark, flowing hair, which sets her apart from the pale, blonde heroine Laura. Carmilla’s queerness and monstrosity are intertwined with her racialized otherness, suggesting a fear of contamination that is both sexual and ethnic. Similarly, Stoker’s Dracula constructs its villain as a racialized threat to English whiteness. Count Dracula is described as having “aquiline” features, “peculiarly sharp white teeth,” and a “heavy moustache” that marks him as Eastern European—coded through the lens of racial science and xenophobic paranoia. Jonathan Harker notes that the Count’s “skin was as white as a corpse,” yet his hair and nails grow quickly, his body exudes odor, and his speech is filled with Slavic inflections—all elements that reinforce his status as an invasive, racialized “other.” While Dracula ostensibly pits British modernity against Eastern savagery, it also reveals the porousness of those boundaries. Mina, the novel’s Victorian ideal, is tainted by Dracula’s blood, and her physical and psychic changes mirror the racial anxieties of miscegenation and cultural hybridity.
Remmick, in Sinners, emerges as a contemporary evolution of this racialized vampire figure—one that explicitly confronts America’s own troubled racial history and the complex position of Irish immigrants within it. Unlike Dracula, whose racial otherness is foreign to the British Empire, Remmick represents an Irishman navigating the racial caste of America in the 1930s—a time when the Irish were still in the process of becoming white. He is depicted as dark-haired, pale, and strange—a figure often called “Black Irish,” a term historically used to describe Irish people with darker features, and in American context, one entangled with both pride and prejudice. As Noel Ignatiev argues in How the Irish Became White, the Irish in America gained access to whiteness not by resisting racism, but by aligning themselves with systems of racial oppression [7]. Remmick embodies this transformation grotesquely. He clings to his Irishness in language and ritual, yet uses his appearance and status to integrate into white supremacist structures like the Klan. His whiteness is not innate—it is claimed, mimicked, and enforced. He is a liminal figure, shaped by colonial trauma but willing to inflict it on others. By presenting Remmick as both victim and enforcer, Sinners acknowledges the painful truth: Irishness in America has been racialized, deracialized, and weaponized. Remmick’s vampirism becomes a metaphor for assimilation—the draining of culture, the adoption of whiteness, and the moral death that follows.
Le Fanu’s Carmilla thus inaugurates the Irish Gothic vampire as a multi-layered symbol: a horrific female predator that violates domestic sanctity, a cipher for repressed Ireland unsettling the colonizer, and a figure of transgressive hybrid identity—aristocrat/monster, woman/fiend, friend/lover/enemy. This rich ambiguity would feed directly into Bram Stoker’s more famous vampire, one that expands the scope from the intimate and provincial to the global and imperial.
III. Dracula: Imperial Anxiety, Blood, and Belief in the Anglo-Irish Imagination
When Bram Stoker, a Dublin-born Anglo-Irishman, published Dracula in 1897, he built upon the vampire archetype established by Le Fanu but expanded it dramatically. Dracula is a sprawling novel that moves from the wilds of Transylvania to the heart of London, depicting Count Dracula’s attempt to transplant himself—and his undead curse—into the center of the British Empire. In doing so, Stoker tapped into a vein of late-Victorian anxieties about race, invasion, sexuality, and imperial decline — many of which, recent critics argue, reflect his Irish perspective on British power and colonialism [25].
Although Dracula never once mentions Ireland, numerous scholars have interpreted the novel through an Irish lens. Joseph Valente asserts that Stoker’s novel is “an exegesis of colonialism itself and the blood racism at its heart,” and that Stoker — as an Irishman in London — crafted Dracula as a subtle critique of English imperial ideology [57]. At the novel’s core is the fear of the racial/cultural “Other” contaminating the purity of the English body politic. Stephen D. Arata famously characterized Dracula as expressing a “nightmare of reverse colonization,” where the colonial periphery (embodied by the Count from the Eastern fringes of Europe) strikes back at the metropole [39].
Valente agrees that Dracula engages this fear but goes further: rather than simply validating British racial anxiety, Stoker inverts the perspective. Dracula becomes a mirror held up to British imperial hubris. Dracula’s obsession with blood purity and conquest, his aristocratic pride and violence, reflect the very “racialist blood-obsessed English” whom the novel’s vampire hunters represent [57]. The group of heroes — Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and Van Helsing — initially embody Victorian Protestant values. But to defeat Dracula, they must embrace what they fear: hybridity and foreign knowledge. They rely on Catholic iconography (crucifixes, communion wafers), multilingual knowledge, and transnational cooperation. In essence, they must become more like the “Other” to overcome the Other [57].
Dracula’s lineage is also steeped in hybrid identity. He claims descent from the Szekelys, a warrior people from Transylvania with a complex ethnic heritage. He boasts, “We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races… the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame… What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” [18]. This lineage positions Dracula as a palimpsest of conquerors and invaders — Roman, Magyar, Hun — and implicitly situates him both inside and outside European civilization. His threat lies in precisely this hybridity: he is both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, aristocratic and monstrous.
This ambivalence mirrors the Anglo-Irish identity crisis of the 19th century: the hybrid status of being colonizer and colonized, English by culture but Irish by geography. Stoker, like Le Fanu, was part of this Anglo-Irish Protestant minority. Valente calls Stoker a “metro-colonial,” a subject of empire who lived in its capital, internalizing both the guilt and grandeur of British dominion [57]. His Count Dracula, accordingly, operates as a double agent: he is both the threat from without and the repressed guilt from within. When Dracula arrives in London, his goal is not merely to feed but to reproduce: to spread his blood, his race, his ideology. The idea of racial contamination through blood (via vampiric infection or transfusion) is central to the novel’s fear of miscegenation and imperial decline.
Religious conflict also plays a crucial role. Though Stoker was a member of the Church of Ireland, Dracula portrays Catholic symbols and rituals with reverence. Van Helsing, a Catholic-leaning Dutchman, arms the vampire hunters with consecrated Hosts, crucifixes, and holy water — sacraments viewed with suspicion by many Anglicans of the period. As Christopher Herbert notes, Dracula is remarkable among Victorian novels for its sincere depiction of Catholic faith as spiritually efficacious [56]. The novel suggests that science and Protestant reason alone are insufficient; victory over the monstrous requires embracing mysticism, tradition, and ritual. This reflects an Irish Gothic tendency: the Protestant protagonists must turn to the very folklore and faith they distrust in order to survive.
Moreover, the novel elevates hybridity as salvation. Mina Harker becomes a pivotal character not only because she is the one most intimately threatened by Dracula, but because she embodies a fusion of masculine intellect and feminine intuition, modern technology and deep emotional empathy. Her psychic connection to Dracula (a result of being forced to drink his blood) allows her to help the men locate him. She is both victim and agent, reinforcing the novel’s ambivalence about purity and contamination. In the climactic confrontation, Mina’s compassion extends even to Dracula himself. Upon his death, she perceives “a look of peace” on his face, implying a redemptive potential that even the monster is not beyond [18].
The trope of the “innocent white beauty” appears in both Carmilla and Dracula through Laura and Mina, whose youth, purity, and delicate femininity initially mark them as passive figures within their respective narratives. Both are aligned with record-keeping and letter-writing—Laura narrates her experience retrospectively through memoir, while Mina is lauded for her meticulous transcription of documents, diaries, and telegrams, which ultimately enable Dracula’s defeat. Yet this clerical role does not insulate them from becoming eroticized sites of vampiric violation. Their coming-of-age is catalyzed through encounters with the vampire: Laura experiences an erotic awakening under Carmilla’s gaze, while Mina becomes psychically linked to Dracula after being forced to drink his blood. Each woman suffers a period of mutism or passivity under the vampire’s spell, her agency suspended. Sinners builds upon and subverts this Gothic pattern through the character of Mary, a biracial (“mulatto”) woman whose light skin leads Stack to send her outside the juke joint to “deal with the white folks.” In a chilling turn, her whiteness grants Remmick access to the Black space within — Mary becomes the first to be turned in the juke joint. Like Mina and Laura, her beauty is used to broker trust, and like them, she enters a sexually coded transformation upon being bitten. But Sinners exposes the violence of that transformation in racial terms: Mary’s “whiteness” does not protect her—it is the means by which her community is infiltrated. Her body, like Mina’s and Laura’s, becomes a contested site between autonomy and control, and her ensuing mutism under vampirism recalls the same silencing that haunts her Gothic predecessors.
This evolution of the vampire myth across time is made especially vivid in Sinners, where Remmick’s arrival in America mirrors Count Dracula’s own infamous voyage to England. In Stoker’s novel, Dracula crosses the sea aboard the Demeter, a ship found run aground with no surviving crew—a haunting image of supernatural migration and death. Remmick’s transatlantic journey echoes this precisely: he arrives in America in 1911 aboard the Celtic Hare, an Irish immigrant vessel whose entire passenger list perished en route — except for him. This allusion firmly links Remmick to Dracula’s lore, but re-centers the myth in Irish experience. Unlike Dracula, a foreign aristocrat intruding upon Britain, Remmick is a product of Irish colonial trauma who carries his monstrous legacy to a different frontier. The literary parallel continues in Remmick’s relationship history: Dracula’s three “brides” symbolize sexual excess and patriarchal possession, but Remmick’s wife is singular. She is killed by a Choctaw hunter while they are en route to flee and find refuge among the Klan, a moment that sets Remmick fully on his path of assimilation and vengeance. This fusion of grief and rage parallels Dracula’s own violent motivations, but in Sinners, it becomes wholly inflected by settler logic and Irish complicity in whiteness. Remmick thus emerges as a uniquely Irish recasting of Stoker’s vampire—a creature forged in diaspora, defined by historical trauma, and corrupted by the systems he once fled.
This final grace note aligns with Valente’s reading that Dracula ultimately argues against racial purity and for ethical hybridity. The vampire hunters—Protestant, Catholic, English, American, and Dutch—must form an interfaith and intercultural alliance. Dracula’s destruction is not achieved through isolationism or racial superiority, but through collaboration across boundaries. For Valente, this marks Dracula as a subversively Irish Gothic text: it critiques rather than celebrates empire, and it gestures toward reconciliation rather than conquest [57].
In sum, Dracula expands the Irish Gothic vampire from Carmilla’s personal, repressed desire into a global figure of geopolitical anxiety. Stoker’s Count embodies the ambivalence of imperial guilt, religious hybridity, and cultural assimilation. He is not merely a foreign invader—he is a reflection of what the British, and the Anglo-Irish, feared becoming. And in that reflection, the vampire exposes the wounds of a colonial consciousness that, much like Dracula himself, refuses to stay buried.
IV. Sinners’ Remmick: The Irish Gothic Vampire in a New World
In Ryan Coogler’s 2025 film Sinners, the Irish Gothic vampire is resurrected in the form of Remmick, an Irish immigrant who now haunts 1932 Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. At first glance, this context — rural America during the Great Depression — seems far removed from the foggy castles of Le Fanu and Stoker. However, Coogler uses this historical shift to emphasize a core truth about the Gothic: the monster adapts. Remmick becomes a distinctly modern Irish Gothic figure, not just because he is a vampire, but because he embodies all the cultural anxieties that defined Carmilla and Dracula — colonial trauma, religious repression, hybridity, and national identity — while also addressing a contemporary audience’s need to reckon with race, power, and historical complicity.
Remmick is not simply an Irishman; he is a survivor of Irish colonial trauma. The film introduces him as having fled Ireland shortly after the country’s partial liberation from British rule. He references the famine, the English occupation, and even sings “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” a 19th-century Irish folk song about hardship and migration. The film anchors his identity in the Irish diasporic experience. But unlike the sympathetic vampires of Le Fanu or the tragic ambiguity of Stoker’s Count, Remmick is a cynical, opportunistic predator. His Irishness does not lead him to solidarity with other oppressed people; it becomes a mask he wears to blend into whiteness and gain power. This marks a radical shift: whereas Carmilla and Dracula reflect the trauma of colonialism from within, Remmick reflects how colonial trauma can be repurposed to justify domination of others.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Remmick’s relationship to race. Set in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow, Sinners portrays Black communities struggling under the boot of white supremacy. Remmick enters this world not as a savior or ally, but as a manipulator. He presents himself as a kind of liberator, offering Black people “freedom” through vampirism — immortality, power, and escape from racial oppression. But as the film makes clear, this promise is hollow. He is not empowering them; he is enslaving them. The new vampires he creates serve him and carry out his will. The power dynamic remains intact — Remmick simply substitutes himself for the plantation master.
In one pivotal scene, Remmick addresses a Black congregation, promising them eternal life and protection. He invokes a twisted version of Irish solidarity, saying, “They said we were less than white once, too. They said we were barely human. And look how far I’ve come.” On the surface, this echoes real historical narratives about the Irish being racialized in 19th-century America. But Remmick weaponizes that history to justify his own authority. He implies that assimilation into whiteness is a path to power, and that those he “saves” can follow in his footsteps. What he leaves unsaid is that his assimilation came at a cost: the betrayal of his identity and the exploitation of others.
This betrayal is emphasized through Remmick’s relationship to whiteness. In a deeply ironic scene, he is shown hiding among members of the Ku Klux Klan — who initially accept him as one of their own. The audience is forced to confront a disturbing inversion: an Irish vampire, historically a marginalized figure, now aligned with the most virulent symbol of American racism. But Remmick is no longer an outsider. He uses his whiteness as camouflage, even turning the Klan couple into vampires who serve him. This moment encapsulates a key theme in Sinners: the horror of assimilation. Unlike Carmilla or Dracula, who resist dominant power structures (even if destructively), Remmick embraces them. He is not a subversive Gothic figure but an opportunistic one, and that makes him more monstrous.
The film contrasts Remmick’s corruption with the resistance of the Choctaw and Black communities. In a powerful narrative thread, Choctaw vampire hunters pursue Remmick, recognizing him as a colonial threat who has crossed the ocean. This is a deliberate nod to historical solidarity: the Choctaw Nation famously sent famine aid to Ireland in 1847 and has a longstanding historical partnership with the community of Ireland. By casting them as moral antagonists to Remmick, Sinners reverses the vampire mythos. They are the protectors of cultural memory, invoking indigenous knowledge and spirituality to counter Remmick’s European infection. One of the Choctaw elders insists he is “not all what he seems”, directly tying Remmick to settler colonialism.
This link between Irish colonialism and American settler history is one of the film’s most sophisticated elements. Remmick, as a vampire, is both colonial remnant and settler enabler. He fled a colonized land only to replicate its horrors elsewhere. His actions expose the dangers of unresolved trauma: when unexamined, it metastasizes. This reflects a broader critique of diaspora politics: identity alone is not redemptive. It is what one does with that history that matters.
Religion also plays a subtle role in Remmick’s characterization. Though he does not speak much of God, the film frames him as a once-assimilated, now-fallen Catholic, someone who fled a country where religion was weaponized and now seeks transcendence through domination. In contrast, the Black characters invoke both Christian and Hoodoo traditions to resist him. Annie, the wife of Juke Joint owner Smoke, wields an old crucifix and salt circle passed down from enslaved ancestors; Sammie, the preacher’s son, prays as he faces the vampire — a move that is met with a surprising conflict of emotional depth from Remmick, who acknowledges this religion too was forced on his people, but after centuries of learning the prayers, somehow it still brings him comfort. One of the greatest horrors of the film arises from the entire converted juke joint joining Sammie and Remmick in prayer. Religion is no longer a place of healing when the devil has arrived and turns the mirror to reveal we are all sinners. The religious resistance in Sinners blends African diaspora spirituality and Christian ritual, echoing how Dracula’s hunters turned to Catholic sacramentals for power. In Sinners, the marginalized faith traditions of Black and indigenous people become the true weapons against Remmick’s corruption.
Ultimately, Remmick’s defeat is not simply physical — it is symbolic. He is killed not by one lone hero, but through collective action. Smoke, Annie, Sammie, and the Choctaw hunters all play a part. His death at dawn, body consumed by sunlight, is staged as a cleansing, not just of evil, but of complicity. His ashes are scattered not into a river like Carmilla, but into a fire fueled by Choctaw cedar and Black church pews — symbols of resistance, community, and faith. As Annie, a folk healer who dies resisting Remmick, says earlier in the film: “We’ve buried too many devils pretending to be saints.”
A central theme in Sinners is the devastating cycle of violence—how systems of oppression replicate themselves not only between colonizer and colonized, but among the oppressed themselves. The film draws clear historical lines: from the West African slave trade, to the Trail of Tears inflicted upon the Choctaw, to the British occupation of Ireland. These legacies of displacement and brutality form a haunted backdrop to every interaction in the story. One of the most poignant examples comes when Smoke, the juke joint’s protector, reveals to Annie at the site of their estranged marital home that the money used to purchase the club was “blood money.” He recounts his years working as a hitman for Al Capone, describing how he killed both Irish mobsters and Italian gangsters alike—men who were themselves descendants of immigrant communities—and robbed them of their Irish beer and Italian wine to traffic across the South. The safe haven they built was funded through stolen goods and the bodies of other marginalized people. The revelation reframes the juke joint not only as a sanctuary, but as a monument to survival born from violence. When Remmick arrives and turns this space into a feeding ground, he doesn’t initiate the violence—he continues it. His intrusion becomes part of a long cycle of occupation, resistance, and assimilation. Sinners ultimately argues that the vampire is not only a metaphor for whiteness or colonial power—it is a metaphor for history itself, which feeds on blood, erases boundaries, and returns in new forms to haunt the living.
Music serves as a deeply symbolic thread in Sinners, drawing a powerful line between Irish folk traditions and African American blues. Both are genres born of sorrow, resistance, and diaspora—oral legacies that preserve the memory of what has been taken. Remmick, despite his monstrous nature, is portrayed as aching for a connection to the past he can no longer access. Early in the film, he listens outside the juke joint as Sammie plays a bottleneck blues lament on guitar, visibly moved. Later, Remmick confesses to Sammie that Irish laments once served the same purpose: “I want to see my people again.” His fascination with Sammie’s music is not merely a cover or manipulation—it’s a genuine attempt to commune with something lost. The film suggests that Remmick’s vampirism has severed him from his own ancestral memory, and he sees in the blues a mirror of Irish sean-nós—a plaintive, unaccompanied style of singing often used to mourn exile and death. Both traditions reach for the dead, for the enslaved, for the starved, for those made to vanish. Yet where Sammie’s music heals and preserves, Remmick seeks only to possess it. In trying to claim the blues, he hopes to fill the void where his own culture once was—but in doing so, he enacts the very pattern of appropriation and dominance that has marked his transformation from victim to predator.
This conflict is crystallized through two pivotal musical moments. When Remmick first lures Mary outside the juke joint, he, Joan and Bert play “Wild Mountain Thyme”, a gentle Irish ballad often associated with romantic longing and generational devotion. The song functions as a siren call, appealing to Mary’s mixed-race identity and longing for belonging—it evokes a solidarity that seems shared, but is ultimately predatory. Later, within the vampire cult Remmick assembles, The Rocky Road to Dublin becomes something darker: a ritualistic chant, a war-song of exile reimagined as a vampiric anthem. Once a rowdy folk tune about Irish migration and survival, it is now weaponized, used to initiate new converts and justify their violence. The lyrics—“one, two, three, four, five / hunt the hare and turn her down the rocky road”—take on eerie resonance when applied to Remmick’s pursuit of victims and his own mythologized trauma. Music, in Sinners, becomes both a language of resistance and a tool of possession, illustrating how even cultural memory can be corrupted when wielded in service of power rather than healing.
These musical invocations resonate with earlier Irish Gothic works. In Dracula, music is not as central, but sound is—in particular, the sound of howling wolves, the eerily described “Székely songs,” and the phonographic recordings Mina transcribes, which take on spiritual weight. Music in Dracula is often a mark of otherness and seduction; it is tied to the disorientation of Jonathan Harker, the sensual spell of the Brides, and the haunting atmosphere of the Count’s castle. In Carmilla, music is a more subtle but equally telling motif. Carmilla herself is associated with softness, lullabies, and murmured voices—her vampirism wrapped in gentleness. Le Fanu uses the musicality of her speech and presence to lull Laura into trust, recalling the lull of folk ballads and oral traditions. What links these works across time is the way music—and by extension, sound—becomes a medium through which power is transferred, identities are shaped, and trauma is recorded or rewritten.
In Sinners, music becomes the final battleground for memory. Where Dracula and Carmilla use music and sound to signal supernatural seduction and confusion, Sinners renders music as contested cultural ground. Remmick’s hunger for song is not just nostalgic—it’s imperial. He wants to possess the blues as Dracula possessed Mina’s blood and Carmilla claimed Laura’s heart. But unlike his predecessors, Remmick fails to absorb the spirit of the music he covets. It resists him. Sammie’s blues remain intact, Grace’s hymns continue, and the Choctaw drumbeats that accompany Remmick’s destruction reclaim the story from his control. Music, in the Irish Gothic, is no longer just background—it becomes the archive of history, the spell that binds, and, finally, the exorcism.
In Remmick, Sinners presents a uniquely 21st-century Irish Gothic villain. He carries all the motifs of the tradition — trauma, dislocation, hybridity — but weaponizes them for dominance. He is the nightmare not of being colonized, but of becoming the colonizer. By casting an Irish vampire as a white supremacist predator, Coogler reconfigures the Gothic template, asking what happens when the ghosts of one history invade the living wounds of another. In doing so, Sinners keeps the Irish Gothic alive — not as a relic of Victorian repression, but as a vital language for confronting modern injustice.Conclusion
From the remote castles of Carmilla to the imperial heart of Dracula, and finally to the racially charged Mississippi of Sinners, the Irish Gothic vampire has undergone a dramatic evolution — but its thematic roots remain deeply entangled with history, identity, and trauma. These texts show us that the vampire is never just a monster. In Irish Gothic, the vampire is a ghost of the past — a spectral embodiment of repression, displacement, and cultural ambiguity.
Le Fanu’s Carmilla introduces this figure as a haunting specter of lost aristocracy and dangerous femininity. Beneath her elegance and allure lies a warning about the return of the repressed: the Catholic, the colonized, the sexual “other.” Carmilla feeds on isolation and nostalgia, seducing the Anglo-Irish gentry with the very past they have sought to bury. Her destruction is both physical and symbolic, a desperate act to reassert Protestant control over a history that refuses to die.
Stoker’s Dracula amplifies these anxieties to an imperial scale. The Count is a foreign invader, yes — but also a product of imperial violence, a doppelgänger of the British ruling class. He is what they fear they have become: bloodthirsty, corrupt, decaying. The vampire hunters do not simply slay a monster; they must unlearn their chauvinism, embrace hybridity, and wield the “superstitions” of their colonial subjects to survive. In the end, the true enemy is not difference, but the fear of difference. Dracula warns against the perils of insularity and calls for reconciliation—not through dominance, but through coalition.
Remmick, in Sinners, is the most radical departure — and perhaps the most necessary. He is not a relic of aristocracy or a metaphor for empire’s fear. He is empire, wearing the mask of the oppressed. As an Irish vampire in Jim Crow America, Remmick personifies what happens when colonial trauma is unexamined: it becomes a tool of domination rather than resistance. By aligning himself with white supremacy, Remmick betrays the history of Irish struggle and reveals the dangers of assimilating into systems built on the suffering of others. His destruction is not just justice — it is a cleansing of historical betrayal, made possible by those who remember their ancestors, their rituals, and their strength.
Across all three works, the same questions echo: What is inherited? What is repressed? Who gets to survive, and at what cost? The Irish Gothic vampire forces us to confront the answers, not in the safety of myth, but in the messy, painful terrain of lived history. In this genre, monstrosity is never simple. It is hybrid. It is haunted. And most importantly, it demands to be reckoned with.
As new works like Sinners demonstrate, the Irish Gothic continues to evolve, speaking across oceans and centuries. In a world still grappling with the legacies of colonialism, systemic injustice, and cultural erasure, the vampire remains an enduring symbol—not just of fear, but of memory. And in remembering, perhaps, we find the only path forward.
Works Cited
Primary Sources:
Le Fanu, Sheridan. Carmilla. 1872. In In a Glass Darkly.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Archibald Constable and Co., 1897.
Sinners. Directed by Ryan Coogler, performances by Jack O’Connell et al., Warner Bros., 2025.
Secondary Sources:
Killeen, Jarlath. “Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction.” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, vol. 1, 2006, pp. 5–30.
Fernández, Richard Jorge. “Changing Aesthetics: From J. S. Le Fanu’s Anglo-Irish Aesthetics and Bram Stoker’s Emerging Irish Identity to Claire Keegan’s Rural Imaginings.” Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 75, 2020, pp. 45–61.
Valente, Joseph. Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. University of Illinois Press, 2002.
McCormack, W. J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland. Oxford University Press, 1980.
Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, 1990, pp. 621–645.
Ridenour, Jamieson. “Carmilla and the Anglo-Irish Aisling Tradition.” Cleave: Journal of Separation and Return, vol. 1, 2002, pp. 55–62.
Stuart, Rachel. “Sinners: how real stories of Irish and Choctaw oppression inform the film.” The Conversation, 30 Apr. 2025.
Killeen, Jarlath. “The Irish Gothic: An Anglican Nosferatu?” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, vol. 1, 2006, pp. 1–4.
Brown, Terence. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–1985. Fontana, 1985.
Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. Routledge, 1995.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2, Routledge, 1996.
Riquelme, John Paul. “Introduction: Stoker’s Dracula and its Cultural Afterlife.” Dracula (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism), edited by John Paul Riquelme, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002, pp. 3–16.
Herbert, Christopher. “Vampire Religion.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 4, 2009, pp. 411–450. [56]
Signorotti, Elizabeth. “Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in ‘Carmilla’ and Dracula.” Criticism, vol. 38, no. 4, 1996, pp. 607–632
W.J. McCormack. “Le Fanu’s House by the Churchyard: an Irish reassessment of the eighteenth century.” The University Magazine (Dublin), vol. 9, 1991, pp. 879–884.
Schultz, Matthew. “Gothic Inheritance and the Troubles in Contemporary Irish Fiction.” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, vol. 10, 2011, pp. 28– fifty.
Moynahan, Julian. Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton University Press, 1995.
Arata, Stephen. “Dracula and Reverse Colonization.” Dracula, edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, Norton Critical Edition, 1997, pp. 462–470.
Backus, Margot Gayle. The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. Duke University Press, 1999.
Costello-Sullivan, Kathleen. Introduction to Carmilla, by J.S. Le Fanu, Syracuse University Press, 2013, pp. xiii–xxx.
Eagleton, Terry. “Heirs to the Gothic.” The English Novel: An Introduction, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 84–101.
A few things I would love to expand upon in another paper:
The deliberate choice to cast British-born Irish actor Jack O'Connell as the colonized-turn-colonizer vampire Remmick, his past in Hollywood influencing his casting, choices he made onscreen that invoke Carmilla and Dracula
Sexuality across all three texts and I wanted to go so much deeper into how sex is portrayed across the three and only touched on it lightly -- the Irish love sexuality in their vampire stories
The site of ruins evolved into the Southern Juke Joint. (I spoke with a horror film critic friend of mine in Edinburgh while writing this who told me that Sinners actually invokes a bit of British Isles Gothic tradition of the "besieged pub" as a setting for supernatural happening? Wondering about that British-Irish relationship in this film)
Really wanted to go deeper into the West African Slave Trade/Irish American history/Choctaw Relationships further, and then the colorization and racialization of characters in Dracula and Carmilla. -- and the relationships between Irish folk songs and African American blues music!