The Twins of Xibalba: Seeing the Popol Vuh in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners
When I sat down to watch Ryan Coogler’s Sinners at the cinema in 2025, I didn't just experience for a vampire story. This was so much more. As the creator of the Aztecverse, I am always scanning the horizon for ancestral echoes—for the moments where our ancient stories (and many archetypes of the collective unconscious refuse to stay buried.
I found one in the characters of Elijah "Smoke" Moore and Elias "Stack" Moore.
To the casual viewer, they are twins played by Michael B. Jordan. But to me, they were the living, breathing iterations of Hunahpu and Xbalanque—the Hero Twins of the Maya sacred text, the Popol Vuh.
A Southern Xibalba
In the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins descend into the underworld of Xibalba to face the Lords of Death. They don't win through brute strength, but through wit, cunning, and an unbreakable dualistic bond.
Watching Smoke and Stack return to the 1932 Mississippi Delta felt like watching a modern descent into Xibalba. The Delta, in Coogler's hands, becomes a contested geography of supernatural trial. The "Lords of Death" here are the vampires—vicious, insatiable creatures who function as political proxies for the "insatiable greed" of colonial forces.
The Physical Language of Myth
What truly stunned me was the intentionality Michael B. Jordan brought to the physical language of these twins. I saw the mythic archetype of the "Two" in their very movement:
- Smoke (Elijah) is the "immovable force," wearing shoes a size too big to stay "planted and grounded."
- Stack (Elias) is the "buoyant" one, wearing shoes a half-size too small to stay "light on his feet."
This isn't just great acting; it is a masterclass in archetypal dualism. In Maya thought, "even divinity was changeable," and these two brothers represent the complementary forces required to restore balance to a cosmos thrown into chaos by colonial predation.
Vampires and the Church as Colonizing Forces
This film also presents the monster of the story by showing how organized religion, as well as greed and the rejection of one's own traumas and ancestral sins, embody the pain, the evil and the outcomes of colonialism. In this film, the vampires want access and proximity to the patrons of the Juke Club, but they refuse to acknowledge the severity and hurt that has forced black and POC characters to take refuge inside the club. The vampires feel entitled to something they didn't earn, as as well as something that is not even accessible to them, even if they feel like they can step inside and take it away. The notion of the church also dovetails with the vampires by selling the idea that we must stay quiet and diminish ourselves in order to be compliant, even as crimes are perpetrated against their own people.
Connecting the Lens: Black POV and Mexican Myth vs. Colonialism
Coogler’s film is a radical "affirmation of full humanity." He rejects the "edited soul" of the church in favor of the "full body" of the blues—a soundscape he calls a "methodology of freedom."
This is the exact same frequency I am tuning into with The Coil series. While Coogler utilizes the Black POV to resist hegemony, I am using a modern Mexican queer lens to excavate the underworld of Mictlán. Whether it is the Hoodoo of the Delta or the Aztec rites in my own books, we are both arguing that our only hope for freedom lies in the "unbroken threads" of our heritage.
Step Through the Portal
I have spent the last week obsessing over these parallels, and the result is a longform essay over at 13 Secret Cities.
If you want to see how we are using ancient myth and modern POC culture to fight colonialism, I invite you to read the full post.