It’s scary living while Black in ‘Lovecraft Country’
Series blends societal, supernatural menaces in commentary on race
“Lovecraft Country,” which debuts Sunday on HBO, tells the intersecting stories of two Black families as they travel throughout the Jim Crow North confronting monsters — some fantastical (pale grey beasts called Elder Gods) and others that are no less horrific for being based in reality (racist sheriffs, predatory oligarchs). Created by Mish a Green (“Underground”), the series follows Atticus, an army veteran played by Jonathan Majors (“Da 5 Bloods”), as he searches for his missing father, played by Michael Kenneth Williams (“The Wire”). Carrying a copy of “The Safe Negro Travel Guide” — a fictional version of the real-life “The Negro Motorist Green Book” — Atticus, his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) and his friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett) navigate the byways and backwoods of a macabre, mid-1950s New England.
With its atmospheric blend of supernatural and societal menaces, “Lovecraft Country” follows in the footsteps of works like Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” using horror filmmaking as a form of social commentary on American race relations.
“In horror, there’s a level of anxiety that your life can be taken at any moment,” Green said. “That’s the Black experience.”
Adding potency in this case is the fact that “Lovecraft Country,” like the 2016 Matt Ruff novel that inspired it, appropriates the frightening creations of a toxic racist in order to tell its story.
The title refers to H.P. Lovecraft, the early-20th-century writer who is best known for inventing the “cosmic horror” genre and for filling his hairraising stories with the same types of creeping dread, misanthropic characters and phantasmagoric demons that adorn “Lovecraft Country.”
He is also known for approving of Hitler and condoning lynching in the South as a necessary evil to prevent interracial relationships. (“Anything is better than mongrelization,” he wrote.) In the novel, Ruff upended this legacy by centring Black characters and making the story a parable about throwing off the constrictions of white supremacy.
Green expands that idea even further, blending cinematic genres and referencing works by literary figures like James Baldwin and Ntozake Shange to create a provocative show that is landing amid a broader conversation about race and representation. “I was talking about the same things and the same themes on ‘Underground’ and that was four years ago,” she said. “Now, I feel like there are more people aware of what’s going on who didn’t have to be aware of it before.”
“Underground,” a stylish period thriller about the Underground Railroad, was what first drew Peele, an executive producer of “Lovecraft Country,” to Green. Once he realized that she was a horror fan like him, “it was instant chemistry, instant realization that we love the same things, even though we do it a little bit differently,” he said in a phone interview.
Like Peele’s films — next up this fall is “Candyman,” which he co-wrote and produced as a present-day sequel to Bernard Rose’s 1992 cult horror film — “Lovecraft Country” wraps sly, sharp critiques within ghoulish imagery, and it is nothing if not committed to its own pulpy vision. “When a project does that boldly enough, it resonates hard,” Peele said.
“When I was writing ‘Get Out,’ I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this could be a disaster,’ ” he added. “The fact that it worked just validates this idea for me.”
The show’s other big-name executive producer, J.J. Abrams (“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”), was similarly captivated by the “utterly fearless writing” of Green’s scripts.
“She’s so wonderful on the page,” Abrams said in a phone interview. “She has this ability to just dive utterly and entirely into what she’s doing and not look over her shoulder and worry about what anyone might think.”
In a Zoom interview, Green said she has always had a preoccupation with “what we’re willing to do for metaphorical and physical survival. Horror just moves toward that in a really easy way.”
“I remember seeing ‘Aliens’ and thinking: ‘Oh my God, you’re stuck on the ship with this alien, but you’ve got to survive. What does that bring out of you?’ But my real interest started with R.L. Stine’s ‘Goosebumps.’ It was lightweight horror, but those stories were scary to me as a kid. But I was also like, ‘Ooh, I’m intrigued.’ Stephen King’s ‘It’ is my favourite book of all time.”
Green said she wasn’t a huge fan of Lovecraft because of his history, although “I understand why he has influenced so much of horror writing.” She called Ruff’s novel “a beautiful gift.”
Asked if the word “horror” is too restrictive a description for “Lovecraft Country,” the show, Green responded that she has never thought of horror as limiting. “I love slasher films like ‘Nightmare on Elm Street.’ But when I really started to think about this genre, I wondered, ‘Why don’t they have Black people, or why do the Black people have to die in the first 10 minutes?’ So when I read Matt’s book, I thought he beautifully reclaimed this genre space that hadn’t been for people of colour.”