Lovecraft Country Is a Necessary Reimagining of Genre Fiction

[Karlston]

Lovecraft Country Is a Necessary Reimagining of Genre Fiction

HBO's new series reclaims sci-fi and horror from their exclusionary, often racist roots.

Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett star in HBO's Lovecraft Country. Photograph: Elizabeth Morris/HBO

 

 

If the title of Lovecraft Country doesn't let you know what you're in for, the opening sequence does. First comes young Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) humping his way through a Korean War trench battle while planes roar overhead and dramatic music swells. As he crests a hill and the black-and-white scene gives way to technicolor, though, we enter another realm entirely: chaos by way of pulp, a garden of unearthly delights familiar to any fan of Golden Age science fiction and horror.

 

Flying saucers hover. War of the Worlds' Martian-controlled tripods stomp across the valley, their heat-ray beams scything through throngs of soldiers. Octopus-headed Cthulhus wing through the sky. Most unsettling of all is the voice piping above this mountain of madness. "This is the story of a boy and his dream," the narrator intones in an anodyne croon like something out of a newsreel. "But more than that, it is the story of an American boy in a dream that is truly American."

 

This dream, at least, is literal; Atticus shakes awake in the back of a bus leaving Kentucky on its way to sweet home Chicago. ("Good riddance to old Jim Crow," he mutters, flashing a middle finger out the window.) But HBO's phantasmagoric new series revels in its dissonance. The voiceover in question, from 1950's The Jackie Robinson Story, is the first of a long series of nondiegetic flourishes that transform Lovecraft Country from its already satisfying source material into something more befitting the unrelenting dread of 2020—and something more apt for the urgent new wave of genre fiction Black creators have sent washing across the planet.

 

In early episodes, things hew fairly closely to Matt Ruff's 2016 novel of the same name. It’s the 1950s and Atticus has returned not just from Korea but from the South, and he's convinced his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) and childhood friend Letitia Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) to accompany him to Massachusetts in search of his father. His uncle, the publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—based on the real-world "Green Book" that Black travelers depended on for road trips through small-town America—sees an opportunity to check out a few tips, and off they go. What follows, as everything up until now has prepped you for, is a journey through the twin atrocities of Lovecraftian horror and American racism. Creepy crawlies may come out at night, but in sundown towns, menace bares its fangs even under the broad noon sun.

 

As with the book, the show functions as a pulp anthology of sorts, a collection of interrelated tales that visit various members of the Freeman/Lewis clans. Showrunner Misha Green pulls some of Ruff's heavier-handed punches—shedding Atticus Turner and Letitia Dandridge's original last names, for example—content to let the subtext speak for itself. But she finds another way to wallop you: music. Specifically, music that tunnels through generations. Hip-hop bumps over a ’50s Chicago block party; George and Letitia explore a Massachusetts castle to the strain of The Jeffersons' theme song; Gil Scott-Heron's arch lament "Whitey on the Moon" accompanies the cult ritual that ensnares Atticus. Each addition to the soundtrack feels like an echo across time.

 

This isn't a new move, not even for the network it's on. HBO darlings Westworld and Watchmen both use music to similarly disorienting effect. A player piano pumping out "Black Hole Sun." A haunting instrumental cover of "Life on Mars." But on Lovecraft Country, that music doesn't just puncture the veil of period specificity in order to unsettle you—it does so to remind you that racism, like the music about revolution and aspiration and sufferation it spawns, weaves through the whole of American history.

 

In that, Lovecraft Country finds itself part of a much larger project: reimagining genre fiction down to its exclusionary, often racist roots. H. P. Lovecraft, the "father of modern horror," was a virulently hateful man, but his work and mythos influenced the very writers and dreamers he might have despised. Now those writers are turning his tropes into triumph. Victor Lavalle's Ballad of Black Tom functions as a modern-day version of Lovecraft's story "The Horror at Red Hook," with a Black man as the protagonist. N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became finds the eldritch in the urban (the literal urban, not the entertainment industry's most regrettable euphemism).

 

Matt Ruff, meanwhile, poses an interesting counterexample to that trio of writers, because Ruff, who is white, penned a book about Black life that passes whatever the racial version of the Bechdel test is. Its protagonists do not flatten when they are alone. They are not defined by the racism that dogs them in the larger world, nor by the contrast offered by the book's white characters (:cough: The Help :cough:). That's not to say the book delves deep into psyche—it's pulp, even if it's literary pulp—but its interiority is genuine and unforced.

 

 

Yet, the HBO show still feels like a reclamation of sorts. Misha Green, who previously created and ran the WGN series Underground, wrote or cowrote all 10 episodes, and suffuses them with an ease that Ruff did not. (In one moment early on, when our protagonists are told that a 19th-century magnate made his fortune in shipping, Letitia mutters to George, "That's code for slaves.") The show wears its genre roots on its sleeve, from its title screens evoking drugstore paperbacks to its typeface that does the same, but still soars when it needs to—lifted by a veteran cast and an assured vision for the fantastical.

 

Lovecraft Country is in fact one of two genre projects coming from Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw Productions with Black women at the helm. The other, director Nia DaCosta's take on Candyman, similarly revisits a white-authored story about Black characters, and looks to delve far deeper into ideas of generational trauma among Black Americans. (The original Candyman, based on a Clive Barker story, arguably needs redemption far more than Lovecraft Country.)

 

Both of these stories, and their storytellers, come at a time when they’re particularly needed. Despite the recent high-profile successes of films like Black Panther and Get Out, Hollywood's studio heads have still been unconscionably slow to tap Black creators—and slower still to give Black women the call. That Lovecraft Country and Candyman arrive in a year as disrupted and disruptive as 2020 feels almost cosmically right. (Similarly, the news that DaCosta's next gig will take her to the MCU for Captain Marvel 2 feels like a cosmic corrective to the dude-director problem.)

 

Yet, none of it would mean anything if the results didn't work. And with Lovecraft Country, at least, they do. The show isn't as existentially expansive as Westworld, nor as dizzyingly metatextual as Watchmen, but HBO's newest genre star doesn't need to be. It's something different. Smart without being scholarly, fantastic without being fey. It's a drugstore paperback for a country that's finally coming to terms with its own dark, monstrous legacy.

 

 

Lovecraft Country Is a Necessary Reimagining of Genre Fiction