Real horror and true evil in Lovecraft genre-bender
He may have created the unique literary genre that still bears his name but horror writer HP Lovecraft was also a horrible, grotesquely misguided man of his time. He was a virulent white supremacist, bigot and anti-Semite who believed that black people were subhuman and Jews were involved in a conspiracy to degenerate the Aryan race. He once wrote of Adolf Hitler, “I know he’s a clown but god I like the boy!”
It has always been difficult for Lovecraft devotees to accept that the writer could have been such a deplorable monster.
Author Matt Ruff’s celebrated 2016 novel Lovecraft Country took on the challenge of being true to the particular creative genius of Lovecraft while re-imagining a position from which his shameful politics could be subverted by recasting the horrors from the perspective of black characters dealing with the terrors of racism in the Jim Crow-era
US. In Ruff’s vision the evil the characters must destroy is the white supremacy championed by his literary hero.
Now, in the hands of creator Misha Green and executive producers Jordan Peele and JJ Abrams, Ruff’s novel receives a screen treatment that is given a new immediacy by a creative team who are pointedly aware of the racial tensions of the current moment. They skilfully mesh the pleasure of pulp horror with the terrifying realities and often lethal threats of racism.
We begin with a nightmare in which black baseball legend Jackie Robinson faces off against an army of gruesome aliens. Things only get stranger and more horrific from there as we follow the quest of returning Korean war veteran and horror fiction fan Atticus “Tic” Freeman on his journey to find his missing alcoholic father (Michael Kenneth Williams). He’s accompanied on his journey by his erudite uncle (Courtney B Vance) who’s compiled a “safe hotel guide for black travellers”, and by independent adventure-loving love interest Letitia “Leti” Lewis (Jurnee Smollett).
Through smart nods to the conventions of the genre, the works of Lovecraft and the omnipresent signifiers of racism that face the characters at every turn, Green and Peele successfully present a mad and fractured vision of a world in which it’s easy to accept that monsters and bloodsuckers and occult-obsessed white supremacists are logical realisations of the simmering and deadly forces of prejudice.
It’s a sometimes bewildering blend of genres and styles but, thanks to solid performances and a keen eye for detail, Lovecraft Country generally succeeds in presenting a fictional world that’s attuned to the perplexing mood swings and uncertainties of the present era and offers a gang-busting heroic set of characters who are fighting a cause we can all get behind.
The first four episodes of Lovecraft Country are on Showmax from September 4. The rest on October 4 and October 8.