‘Sinners’ Production Designer Hannah Beachler on Weaving in Folklore, History and Sprituality Into Her Sets

When Ryan Coogler called on his go-to production designer, Hannah Beachler, to work on “Sinners,” she ended up building a deeply researched, meticulously crafted the world, filled with cultural references and Easter eggs. But the film is more than a great vampire movie; it spoke to folklore, spirituality, history and culture.

Beachler is set to receive Variety’s Creative Impact in Production Design award at SCAD Savannah Film Festival on Oct. 28.

The vampire thriller is set in the Jim Crow-era Mississippi Delta. Michael B. Jordan plays dual roles as twins Smoke and Stack, who, after a run-in with the Chicago mob, return home. They rally the community to help with their new business venture, a juke joint. But  when the sun sets and opening night kicks off, vampires show up and cause havoc.

For Beachler, the heart and soul of the set was the home of Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke’s former love.

The set was inspired by a photograph that struck Beachler. “In some way, it’s one of the first images that I was looking at in the research, and it was the sharecropper home with this mound of cotton just on the porch. There was a woman standing outside, and there was just something about that image in that small home leaning to one side in this massive field that it just spoke to me immediately. It said everything to me about that time in that place, the hard life and the meager living situation,” Beacher says. “There was something about her that still had this dignity and beauty in front of all of this, what you would say is in abject poverty. Annie was strong, and I felt that from this woman in this image.”

 Annie’s home was painted haint blue, a protective light blue inspired by the Gullah Geechee people and enslaved Africans who used that shade to protect themselves from evil spirits. Annie is the community’s spiritual leader, a Hoodoo conjurer, herbalist and healer.

“Annie served the community even though she was on a plantation … and as far as selling to the workers, and I wanted to make her feel like she was the protector in that place. She was the one that you could go to if you needed to heal,” says Beachler.

 As for the juke joint, where most of the action takes place, Beachler spent eight weeks building the set. It needed to look rusty, and to achieve that “we did levels of paint and actually used boric acid to rust the sheets of metal outside,” she explains.

Additionally, Beachler made sure every environment leading up to that set was represented inside. “There’s representation of Annie’s oak trees that protect and cover her home in the juke joint that protects and covers them. In the third act, the white wall where Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) bites Stack (Michael B. Jordan) is the representation of the white church, and there are horizontal lines above people’s heads, specifically Stack and the vampires, I should say, within that.”

To replicate what Clarksdale, Miss., looked like in 1932, dirt was laid on the roads around the train station and town sets. Over 1,200 plants were brought in for the cotton field. “We had people tying on these pieces of cotton, and each plant got 3,040 pieces of cotton,” she says.

As for the downtown set, Coogler wanted to divide the street with one side being for Blacks and one side for whites. The two grocery stores on the main street show the racial divide. With the Black grocery store, “it’s all working things to buy like hoses, brooms, buckets and mops. If somebody wanted you to be their maid, you had to be their maid. That was just the way that it was,” she says, adding, “The candy on the Black side is hard, but when you get to the white side, there are cakes, fruit and there’s more advertising.”