Written by Kianna Best on May 12, 2025. Posted in Interviews

Set the scene: Behind the locations of Sinners with Elston Howard

When dusk falls over the haunted cotton fields and shadowy juke joints of Ryan Coogler’s latest horror film, Sinners, it is not just the characters who tell the story—it’s the land beneath their feet. Starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, and Miles Caton, the vampire horror breathes life into Southern Gothic lore. While the story sinks its teeth into the supernatural events and racial tension of the south, it's the haunting Southern landscapes that make Sinners so immersive. And those landscapes? They are pure Louisiana. We spoke with veteran location manager Elston Howard about the real-life places that brought Coogler’s eerie vision to life.

 

 

With a 37-year career that spans The Bodyguard, Interview with the Vampire, and Girls Trip, Howard is no stranger to navigating the geographic and creative demands of a wide range of productions. A Louisiana native, Howard once again returned to his roots for Sinners—a project he calls one of his most ambitious yet.

 

One of the key collaborators who brought him on board was production designer Hannah Beachler, best known for her Oscar-winning work on Black Panther. “Hannah resides in New Orleans like me,” Howard shares. “So when she got a call from Ryan about his new project—code-named Grilled Cheese at the time—she reached out to me with the script and concept. I gave it an honest read, and creatively and visually, I knew we could pull it off right here in Louisiana.”

 

While the story unfolds in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Louisiana's varied terrain—from the swamps of Lafayette to the fields of Thibodaux—provided a fitting stand-in. Aside from one interior scene shot in the French Quarter, all filming took place within a 50-mile radius of New Orleans.

 

 

When I read a script, I'm always thinking of the ultimate location.

 

Still, authenticity didn’t come easy. One major hurdle? The absence of cotton fields in southern Louisiana. “We don’t grow cotton in the flatlands down here,” Howard explains. Instead, the team turned to the sugarcane fields of Thibodaux. “We shot a third of the movie there. Around July, the sugarcane hadn’t been harvested yet, so we added alfalfa plants to mimic cotton being picked.” The area’s Laurel Valley Plantation—a site with preserved slave and sharecropper cabins, though no main house—served as the backdrop for many of the film’s most evocative scenes.

 

But not every location could be found. Some had to be built.

 

The film’s sawmill and juke joint—two crucial settings—were designed from the ground up by Beachler on a sprawling, overgrown golf course that hadn’t been touched since Hurricane Katrina. “Ryan really wanted a water feature nearby,” Howard recalls. “So I used a drone to scout from a neighbourhood about a mile away, and found a spot.” The commitment was intense. “Hannah and I walked through grass waist-high for a mile and a half. I told her, ‘If you bring Ryan out here in two days, I’ll carve a football field out of this.’” Two days later, Coogler was sold.

 

It took USD 250,000 and more than three months just to build the roads to reach the location. “That was one of my biggest roll-of-the-dice moments,” Howard says.

 

 

Authenticity remained a guiding principle throughout. “Some areas we didn’t cut the grass for 12 weeks—just to avoid anything looking too manicured,” Howard notes. To recreate Mississippi’s iconic red clay roads, the team trucked in tons of dirt to transform the landscape.

 

Through painstaking attention to detail, down to the finest blade of grass, deep-rooted collaboration, and a profound respect for the Southern landscapes, Sinners transforms Louisiana into a hauntingly beautiful stand-in for 1930s Mississippi. Howard’s decades of experience, combined with the vision of Coogler and Bleacher, reveal just how critical location work is in crafting an immersive cinematic world. Behind every eerie field, dusty road, and time-worn cabin lies a story of creative problem-solving and place-based storytelling—reminding us that sometimes, the land itself becomes a character all its own.

 

Images courtesy of WarnerBros. Media