Nightmare on Main Street
HBO’s pulp-inflected new drama ‘Lovecraft Country’ is a no-punches-pulled treatise on race in America
HBO’s Lovecraft Country is a no-punches-pulled treatise on race in America.
Atticus “tic” Freeman, the young Korean War-veteran hero of HBO’s fantastic — in every sense of the word — new drama Lovecraft Country, has a weakness for pulp stories. “I love that the heroes get to go on adventures in other worlds,” he explains, “defy insurmountable odds, defeat the monster, save the day.” But he’s also painfully aware that these tales have little room for someone who looks like him. His favorite author, the 1920s horror stylist H.P. Lovecraft, was also a vile bigot who once wrote a poem comparing black men to “a beast” filled with vice. (Lovecraft used a far less gentle term than “black men.”)
In this adaptation of Matt Ruff ’s novel, written primarily by Misha Green, who also produced with Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams, Tic gets a chance to live out a plot like in his beloved sci-fi and fantasy novels. He battles both monsters from myth and flesh-and-blood ones courtesy of Jim Crow’s America — and, on more than one terrifying occasion, members of the second group who have transformed into the first.
It’s 1954, which means Tic has to ride in the back of the bus on a return trip to his native Chicago, where his Uncle
George (Courtney B. Vance) produces a Green Book- esque travel guide. Tic’s estranged father, Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams), has gone missing, so Tic, George, and Tic’s old friend Leti ( Jurnee Smollett) pile into George’s woody wagon to rescue him — little realizing that his predicament will involve demons, shape-shifters, and, oh, yeah, white supremacists who can cast magic spells.
“Seems the KKK isn’t just calling themselves grand wizards anymore,” Tic observes.
Using supernatural terrors as metaphors for the more down-to-earth kind is a genre staple, but Green and her collaborators employ the device with particular deftness, toggling between racist cops and shoggoths, burning crosses on lawns and ghosts in subbasements.
The Freemans and Leti are stalked by Christina (Abbey Lee) and William ( Jordan Patrick Smith), a mysterious, unnervingly white-and-blond duo, and the series argues that whiteness itself can seem like a superpower when you’re black in a country with so much racism coursing through its veins. In any era, this material would be potent; in the post-George Floyd reckoning, it couldn’t possibly feel timelier, even though the story takes place in the Fifties.
But then, Green has far more on her mind than any one decade or genre. Lovecraft Country is a collage of influences and time periods, traveling backward through old atrocities (Montrose looks at a fire and mutters, “Smells like Tulsa”), then forward to consider the hopeful moments and disappointments from the decades after Tic and Leti’s journey. Sometimes the soundtrack is era-specific, but get used to the likes of Cardi B or The Jeffersons theme backing the action — or even monologues, like an excerpt from James Baldwin’s 1965 debate about racism with William F. Buckley Jr.
More important, get used to it all working spectacularly well together. Each hour seems full to bursting, as if Green wants to squeeze in as much as she can while she has the chance. (Can you blame her? She’s one of only a handful of black series creators in HBO’s otherwise progressive history.) After the road trip in search of Montrose, there’s a crackerjack haunted-house story, then an Indiana Jones-style treasure hunt. So much is happening, all so stylishly presented, that each episode could last twice as long and not get dull.
Majors ( Da 5 Bloods) will be the show’s big breakout, and he has screen presence to spare. Smollett is pure dynamite as the story’s wild card. There’s a sequence in the third episode where Leti uses a baseball bat to attack a group of cars parked around her home by racists; Smollett plays it equally as a dance number and an action sequence, and it’s as riveting as it is cathartic.
As long as there have been men, there have been monsters. Lovecraft Country lands in a specific time and place for both, but in a way that feels universal as much as it feels scary. It’s one of the best shows HBO has made in a long, long
time.