In Lovecraft Country, the racists are scarier than the monsters

The cast and crew of HBO’s Lovecraft Country tease this wild, scary, action-packed journey of a show, which combines terrors both imagined and very real.

Lovecraft Country is a new drama from Misha Green, who worked on WGN America’s little-seen but much beloved Underground. It’s an ambitious, special effects-heavy genre bender, a horror odyssey that inspired by Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name about Atticus Black (Jonathan Majors), a Black man who takes a trip through Jim Crow-era America in search of his missing father, along with his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) and friend Leticia Lewis (Jurnee Smollett-Bell). That’s scary enough…and then the monsters turn up.

Lovecraft Country presents viewers with two kinds of terror: on the one hand, you have monsters drawn straight from the pages of cosmic horror author H.P. Lovecraft, with other classic horror images thrown in for good measure. “You’ll see we use Nightmare on Elm Street and Freddy Krueger to tell what it’s like to be a young Black girl in America,” Green said during a Lovecraft Country panel during the virtual TCA press tour. “Everything in the genre space is a huge influence and genre fans will definitely see those Easter eggs and influences throughout.”

She also credited Jordan Peele’s horror hit Get Out with paving the way for something like Lovecraft Country. “I think that paved the way for people to really open up to the idea of seeing more black people in genre spaces.” Peele is a producer on the show.

But the monsters are often less a danger to the characters as the racists they encounter throughout their adventure. “I would say for me, the white racist, or racist in general, are extremely that much more terrifying than the Shoggoth or Cthulhu,” said Majors. “A monster is something that is driven by an inside system, and that system is to either terrorize or destroy, and there’s no compromising with it. That’s interesting when it’s a feral dog for instance, where the dog is being told by its internals to attack, fight, kill. It’s quite different when that monster is disguised in the same body as you, and the only thing that’s different is the skin color.”

Smollett-Bell agrees, pointing out that the monsters can be easier to stop that the widespread systems that reinforce racist ideologies. “What we explore in the show is how [with] a monster, you know what you get, right? If you see a Shoggoth, you kind of know what you’re up against,” she said. “The unfortunate thing about the spiritual warfare that our characters are engaged with in bringing down the racism is that you don’t really know where it’s coming from. And that is sometimes even more of a threat because it’s unexpected. It affects your livelihood, and it affects you on every single level, your pursuit of happiness, your pursuit of joy, your pursuit of family. Trying to live in a neighborhood that is all white, the isolation the loneliness but also the trauma that you’ve experienced on so many levels in being Black and American… the attacks come on every level for a racist, but the monster, you just gotta outrun it.”

According to Green, drawing parallels between these two kinds of horrors was very much part of the show’s mission statement. “We definitely talked a lot about putting [racists] on the same plane as the monsters,” she said. “The fact, even in the pilot, that you might even be relieved when the Shoggoth actually shows up, because you’re like, Wow. That parallel was very clear for us and we were very adamant at making sure that we kept that throughout the season.”

With news headlines for the past few months being dominated by calls for racial justice in the wake of the police killings of people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, it’s easy to look at the themes Lovecraft Country explores and call it timely, but Smollett-Bell isn’t a fan of that descriptor because of the way it underplays how long these issues have been a problem. “We’re telling the story of heroes that go on a quest to disrupt white supremacy, and it’s maddening that in the year 2020 it’s still relevant,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, adding that the series would have been timely had it come out on any day of any year since 1619.

I’ve seen some screener episodes of the show, and although I can’t say much yet, I will tease that: 1) It’s exciting stuff, and; 2) Smollett-Bell all but steals the show. “I was so wildly convinced that there was no fucking person who could play Leti Lewis but me that I became obsessed,” she said, recalling the audition process. “I was like, ‘What the fuck, does [Green] not see that I am Leti Lewis? Does she not think I can stretch and do a different character?’ I mean, I was freaking out, literally losing sleep for months.”

When Lovecraft Country premieres on August 16, on HBO, we can all see how good a choice she was.

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