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WARNING: This article contains MASSIVE SPOILERS for Sinners.Ryan Coogler’s hit vampire movie, Sinners, marked a new chapter for horror movie history as it paid tribute to previous classics in the genre. One can easily spot Sinners‘s similarities to iconic scary stories like Salem’s Lot and From Dusk Till Dawn. However, 2025’s Sinners seems to pay homage to another horror movie released in 1968 that doesn’t even feature vampires: director George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
Both films feature the basic story of a group of ordinary people fighting off a horde of undead monsters. However, the most notable similarity between the two films is how their respective protagonists die in the end at the hands of a human mob. Given Night of the Living Dead‘s history of highlighting racism towards Black people, it wouldn’t be a surprise if it had inspired Coogler and his tale of vampires in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. However, director Ryan Coogler seems to have reimagined the ending to Romero’s film by putting Smoke in a triumphant showdown at the end of Sinners.
Sinner’s Final Shootout Parallels 1968’s Night Of The Living Dead
Smoke Has A Similar Fate To Ben From Night Of The Living Dead
Sinners and Night of the Living Dead end with their Black protagonists getting shot down by a mob of white men after a long night of fighting off bloodthirsty ghouls. Ben’s murder at the end of Night of the Living Dead has gone down as one of the most shocking and pivotal moments in cinema history, due to how it reflected real-life racial violence toward Black people in America, particularly the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which occurred just after the film was completed.
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Given Ryan Coogler’s passion for telling stories centered around Black culture and history, it wouldn’t be a surprise if he deliberately had the ending of Sinners parallel that of The Night of the Living Dead. However, Sinners seems to have paid homage to the ending to Romero’s movie with more explicit commentary about racism by having Smoke face a white mob that was part of the Ku Klux Klan. While Ben was killed because he was mistaken for a zombie, Smoke was targeted because he was Black.
How Sinners Subverts The Ending To Night Of The Living Dead
Smoke Went Out In A Blaze Of Glory Fighting The White Mob In Sinners
While Smoke dies during his encounter with the white mob in Sinners, the way he went out was far different from how Ben died in Night of the Living Dead. Before the villainous Remmick died in Sinners, the vampire told Smoke that he and Stack bought the mill from a leader of the KKK, who was planning to murder them the next morning. Having been warned about the KKK’s attack, Smoke set up a trap for them that allowed him to fight back.
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Using his supply of weapons and his military training, Smoke battles the KKK in an explosive final shootout. Smoke may have died in the end, but he managed to take the entire mob down with him. This made Sinners‘s ending a much more pleasing and cathartic experience than the finale to Night of the Living Dead, as it shows a Black man ridding the world of a gang of white supremacists.
Why Smoke’s Death Is Less Shocking Than Ben’s In The Night Of The Living Dead
Unlike Ben, Smoke Expected And Embraced His Death In Sinners
Ben’s death at the end of Night of the Living Dead came completely out of nowhere. After spending the film fighting for his life and trying to protect others from the ravenous ghouls, this noble hero gets shot down without warning, and his corpse is quickly burned by his killers. On the other hand, Smoke didn’t just see his death coming at the end of Sinners. He welcomed it.
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Smoke could’ve used the time he had before the KKK’s attack to get to safety. His wife Annie had died the night before in their fight against the vampires, so Smoke wanted to reunite with her and their son in the afterlife. He ripped off Annie’s voodoo charm in the hopes that he wouldn’t be protected during the shootout. Not only did he get to kill a racist mob and make the world a little safer, he got his wish, as he reunited with Annie and the infant child in a vision as Smoke passed on to the afterlife.
While both Sinners and Night of the Living Dead helped highlight the horrible racial injustice in American society, Coogler’s film gave audiences a much more pleasing ending by having Smoke gain justice for this racism.
Smoke faced several tragedies in Sinners, having lost his brother, his wife, and most of his friends to Remmick’s band of vampires. However, after so much loss and death in Sinners, he found satisfaction as he died, since he got to be with his wife and child in spirit and achieve victory over some of the white supremacists who have tried to destroy their family. While both Sinners and Night of the Living Dead helped highlight the horrible racial injustice in American society, Coogler’s film also gave audiences a much more pleasing ending by having Smoke gain justice for this racism.
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