Lovecraft Country exposes the true horrors of the real America
A young black man searching for his father must fight the racist terrors of white America and frightening monsters in Lovecraft Country.
I’ve just managed to catch up with HBO’s Lovecraft Country, produced by the distinguished team of Jordan Peele (BlacKkKlansman, Us), J. J. Abrams (The Force Awakens) and showrunner and writer Misha Green, and can’t recommend it more highly. While not as well known as her famous horror and sci-fi collaborators, Green was co-creator of the critically applauded Underground, the story of the American heroes who built the Underground Railway to allow slaves to escape the apocalyptic horrors of the South in the early 19th century.
I’ve never read H.P. Lovecraft, whose moniker features in the title and who passed away in 1937 at age 46, but he lurked around in the counter culture years of the 1960s and ’70s, along with equally oddball figures like sci-fi writers Philip K. Dick, and Philip Jose Farmer and their worlds of parallel universes, cloning, intricate time circles and collective delusions.
Go online these days, taking a gamble with sanity, and you will discover a bewildering array of audio dramas, video games, musical projects, prop replicas and documents for gamers and collectors, T-shirts, and other Lovecraftian entertainments. Many are themed around Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, a literary cosmos it seems ruled by a pantheon of awesome divinities, shape-changing occult wizards. For the interested, Lovecraft pronounced Cthulhu as “Khlul-hloo”, with the first syllable “pronounced gutturally and very thickly”.
Lovecraft, while a trenchant racist and anti-Semitic bigot, possessed a cult reputation for having invented the so-called “cosmic horror” genre, hair-raising stories of creeping terror crawling with his mythological demons and creatures. His reputation, despite his racist views, has gained with horror geeks over the decades. And in the series Lovecraft himself serves as a kind of a thematic connection between the supernatural awfulness of what he termed “serious, weird stories” — and Green sure delivers on those — and the revulsions of white supremacy.
This certainly was the abiding notion informing Matt Ruff’s novel of the same title, on which the 10-part series is based.
His story, tunnelling deep into the Lovecraft mythos, is of an African American family who in one part of the narrative has to contend with all kinds of supernatural evil, but must also deal with the kind of commonplace racism confronting black Americans.
Ruff was initially concerned when contacted by the producers of the TV series: “You’re talking about a weekly show about the horrors of racism, which sounds kind of like Schindler’s List: The Series, and the natural response of some TV execs is to ask, ‘Who’s going to tune in to that?’” Ruff continues: “But the focus of the story isn’t suffering. It’s about the struggle to get through the day in a world that is set against you, and that can be a really amazing and heroic story while still telling the truth about what it was like.”
It’s a story that, like the brilliant Emmy-winning Watchman, is a fierce confrontation with the racial horror of America’s past and of course present day, but which is also vastly entertaining, pulling a lot of tricks with genre.
“The basic idea of this show was to bring in all of the pulp genres and to see black people doing them because we are notoriously completely absent from the genre,” Green says.
“In the idea of repurposing and reusing Lovecraft, who was a major racist, we take what’s great about the horror tropes he created and infuse them into a new way of thinking.”
As a filmmaker, accompanied by her director Yann Demange, the talented French/Algerian responsible for the critically acclaimed British TV series Criminal Justice and the award-winning Top Boy, Green sure knows how to play with genre. At different stages the series riffs off not only the ghost story and horror, but the adventure novel, the mystery thriller, and time travel science-fiction. And Green manages effortlessly to echo Kubrick’s The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, Poltergeist, Nightmare on Elm Street and Amityville Horror, the Indiana Jones movies and The Goonies.
And she does that with brazen audacity, scenes at times bringing tears to your eyes but others also making you laugh at loud at the sheer outrageousness of her concept, even if you have to completely suspend disbelief. (It's not hard in this show given the consummate filmmaking on display.)
The creatives are mightily assisted by a huge team of visual effects artists and compositors led by VFX producer Stephen Nixon.
HBO provided a massive budget, the series taking eight months to complete and requiring 162 different sets and around 200 special effects shots per episode. Demange, his actors and their adroit cinematographer Tat Radcliffe (Queen & Slim) obviously had to work constantly in what’s known as a green screen setting, backgrounds obliterated during filming and replaced by massive frames filled with neon green fabric.
The technique allows the special effects teams to drop in whatever background images they desire behind the actors – and there are eye-popping versions on display from Lovecraft’s cosmic, creature-filled world of horror – and combine live action with animation. While it’s increasingly commonplace, it’s still difficult for actors who have to use a kind of inner vision to interpret their surroundings, coping with countless tape marks and strings outlining their physical boundaries, and still remain in character. Natalie Portman says, it’s “kind of the purest form of acting because you’re inventing both what’s outside of you and what’s inside of you as an actor”.
It all begins with a wonderfully mystifying dream sequence, a futuristic war movie within a movie idea with Martians descending from space ships and flying winged octopuses, the surreal narration from the 1950 film The Jackie Robinson Story about the black baseball hero.
“This is the story of a boy and his dream. But more than that, it is the story of an American boy in a dream that is truly American.” For moments we are submerged in a trench battle in the Korean War watching a young black soldier run for his life as tripod robots wreak havoc as overheard, glowing flying saucers move through the sky and destroy aeroplanes.
Then we are introduced to Atticus Freeman, played by Jonathan Majors, the young African American Korean War veteran we glimpsed in the pulpish dream vision, riding in the back of a bus with an older coloured woman, their fellow white travellers in the front section. It’s a lovely sequence, Atticus reading a copy of A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs as he chats to the lady, explaining the way stories work, how they’re like people and you need to overlook the flaws.
He’s charming and self-effacing, travelling home to find his father Montrose, who’s gone missing after sending his son a cryptic letter in which he confided that he had at last tracked down Atticus’s dead mother’s ancestry. “The past is a living thing,” the letter says, stating that Atticus has “a secret legacy, a birthright that’s been kept from you”.
The letter seems to reference “Arkham,” a fictional Massachusetts town that shows up in stories by Lovecraft.
He then reunites with his uncle George, played as impressively as always by Courtney B. Vance, another sci-fi freak who runs an auto shop and is the editor of the Safe Negro Travel guide, directing black travellers to places around the country where they’ll be welcome and safe.
George points out that Montrose mentioned “Ardham,” not “Arkham”, a grim place near the New Hampshire border known for vicious segregation. Undeterred, after recruiting Atticus’ childhood friend Leti (Jurnee Smollett), they set off on a quest to find his father, last seen driving an expensive silver car with a fancy woman who looks like a fashion model, which takes them into the heart of Lovecraft Country.
Along the journey they pass through “Sundown” counties with signs saying, “N-----s don’t let the sun set on you here. Understand”, and encounter fierce confrontations with racists. There are also monsters and vicious cosmic creations straight out of Lovecraft’s imagination.
It is deliciously ambitious, dense and stylised, a dazzler, a series that creates what is possibly a new genre altogether: high tech, sci-fi, horror noir with pungent social overtones. Stephen King, that master of the scary, once suggested that we are drawn to horror because we’re mortal, and we keep trying to fit our minds around this concept of dying. “A lot of what horror is for me is a contemplation of the things that could go wrong.” So, in so many ways, Lovecraft Country is TV that’s come just at the right time.
Lovecraft Country streaming on Foxtel on Demand and Binge.