To say a movie scene or performance gives us chills evokes something common, especially when we're talking about a horror film, which "Sinners" is, according to the genre's most basic definition. Rarer still are moments on par with what director and writer Ryan Coogler conjures at that movie's spiritual peak, where music, dance, cultural reverence and natural sorcery coalesce.

If you've watched "Sinners," you know which scene I'm talking about. (If you haven't, stop reading this story right now.) The most accurate description I've seen in online forums captures its primal radiance: They call it the movie's "holy s**t" moment.

In the way of all provocative works of art, the subtext of a story is where the treasure is.

It is exalted and sweaty, uplifted and earthy; it is many things at once. The scene is a stunning introduction to Miles Caton's prodigious abilities, both as an actor playing the movie's burgeoning Delta blues guitarist Sammie Moore, and as a musician. That man can play, alchemizing melody into a presence that brings together tribes from across time and space. All the while, the cinematography captures the sensation of floating on “the veil between life and death," gazing down at the past and future coming together to party.

That glimpse of heaven on Earth also establishes the stakes, no pun intended. Once the notes die out, the vampires appear — first to mimic the living’s glory, then to claim their distinct power for themselves.

In the way of all provocative works of art, the subtext of a story is where the treasure is. A halftime Super Bowl performance can be a rap concert by a Pulitzer Prize-winner with a massive hit, or "a diss track to America," as poet Tiana Clark described Kendrick Lamar's Feb. 9 performance in the New York Times. Either way, the audience tuned in to Lamar's signal with a curiosity that inspired conversation for days.

"Sinners" may have people talking for weeks about what it's supposed to mean, and what it means to them. Its runaway success is a product of feeling and meticulous messaging, some of it hiding in plain sight.

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Take the title's smirk at the idea of piety, and the way the script implicitly questions the legitimacy of that label. The story's heroes are bootleggers named Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan, in a dual performance), World War I veterans who struck out to find their fortune in Chicago only to return home to the Jim Crow South, and the devil they know.

You may recognize its reference to what's been called the nation's original sin and its primacy in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, where the story takes place.

In the main, though, Coogler created "Sinners" as a celebration of the motivating joy, genius and fury of American Blackness in the face of trauma, and that is the siren call pulling people to multiplexes, sometimes twice or more. "Sinners" is culture vulture bait, laden with multiple meanings and dog-eared history pages, and who can resist a puzzle? Even within this lurks a subversiveness, since "Sinners" points to chronicles informing how we've arrived at this version of our present that those working to re-establish segregation want to bury or erase.

Miles Caton as Sammie Moore in "Sinners" (Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures). Only this time, the threat isn't wearing white hoods when they appear on our doorsteps. They sport toothy smiles and play Black music just fine, hitting every note correctly. And they want nothing more than to make everyone equal, which is to say, just like them. Because that’s what vampires do.

Reading "Sinners" as an allegory of cultural assimilation and appropriation is obvious, and it's also simple enough to get a variety of folks to walk through the door. Of course, it operates perfectly well as a straight monster story, too.

But the expanding, deepening discourse surrounding the theatrical blockbuster invites us to do a little homework, if only to better enjoy the music.

Reading "Sinners" as an allegory of cultural assimilation and appropriation is obvious, and it's also simple enough to get a variety of folks to walk through the door.

Coogler's Mississippi Delta is ripe with beauty and painful memories. Cotton fields carpet the land to the horizon, and Black sharecroppers labor........

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