Cast and crew tease Lovecraft Country, HBO’s new horror/history show

Lovecraft Country is one of the most interesting new shows on the horizon, a combination road trip/horror movie/period piece/family drama. Based on the book by Matt Ruff, it’s about a trio of characters — Korean war vet Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors), his uncle George Freeman (Courtney B. Vance), and their friend Letitia “Leti” Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) — who go on a road throughout the Jim Crow-era American south in search of Atticus’ missing father Montrose (Michael K. Williams). Along the way, they’ll encounter horrors both real and pulled from the pages of the wildest sci-fi horror. If the team manages to balance all these competing tones, the show could be something to remember.

That team starts with Misha Green, who worked on the popular series Underground for WGN America. “We have the ghost story,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “We have the adventure, the Indiana Jones story. We have the mystery story. We have the sci-fi story.”

It’s a lot, but Green sounds like she’s relishing the challenge of bringing Black voices to a genre where they’re traditionally excluded, the “Black guy dies first” trope being pretty well-known in horror. “The story is so ancestral,” Green said. “Our heroes are going on an adventure, essentially to bring down white supremacy, and yet there’s magic involved and all these supernatural elements, and it was just so incredibly ambitious and exciting.”

Themes like this are obviously trenchant right now, with the country still reckoning with the issue of police violence following the deaths of people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But of course, America’s race problem is nothing new. “Even before coronavirus and the murder of George Floyd, when I read the scripts last year I was like, ‘This is America right now,’” said Williams. “That was crystal clear.”

Veteran actor Courtney B. Vance also sees a lot of today in the story. “The hangings, the beatings, the killings — it’s the same thing that was happening back then,” he said. “I really wanted to be a part of something that was as important as delineating for people what it was [like] for us when we had to actually [travel] ourselves and figure out where we could stay…It is so sad that in this day and age we’re still dealing with the same issues.”

In the show, Vance’s character publishes The Safe Negro Travel Guide, a fictional version of The Negro Motorist’s Green Book, which was indeed a yearly guidebook that advised Black travelers on where in the country they could find inns, gas station and restaurants that would actually serve them, and how to avoid places where they would be in danger.

There’s a sequence in the premiere that takes place in one such “sundown town,” a city that allowed Black people to exist there during the day, but at night, they must leave or risk violence. The sheriff of the town threatens the main characters with lynching if they’re not out of the two before the sun sets in seven minutes, and then tails them to the border. “[T]hat sequence was extremely frightening,” said Majors, who avoids driving in real life. But at least, in the context of the show, he felt comfortable exploring these issues. “You want the tension. But when it all came down, when it was all over, we had each other. And that’s a great theme in the [show]: that this family is so tight.”

You may be wondering if the show even needs monsters when it’s dealing with real-life problems that’s are already plenty terrifying, but the supernatural elements are what initially sparked Green’s interest, particularly a chapter from Ruff’s book where Leti’s half-sister Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku) takes a potion and transforms into a white woman. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is something fresh. This is something crazy we can do,’” Green remembered. “Then [I felt I] had to visually see it happen, this idea of what skin color means to all of us. And so it was about going in and unpacking all that stuff and not being afraid to.”

And for the genre fans, in the audience, it doesn’t sound like Green is pulling any punches. We get ooy-gooey monster stuff right from the jump. “I didn’t want to wait till the end of the season to see some big effects,” she said. “I wanted to start in episode 1 and keep building from that.” She also wanted to include a dragon, but that pushed the show over budget. Still, she assures us that the replacement monster “looks really f—ing cool.”

Lovecraft Country premieres on HBO on August 16.

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