Lovecraft Country season 2 would’ve featured a zombie epidemic

The other day, HBO announced that it would not be making a second season of Lovecraft Country, the 2019 adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel about a Black family dealing with supernatural horrors on the one-hand and the real-life horrors of 1950s-era white racism on the other. The first season was bracing and bold if perhaps a little less than the sum of its parts in the end, but it was too bad to hear it wouldn’t be continuing. Then again, the first season adapted the whole of Ruff’s book, so where was there to go?

Well, after the announcement, showrunner Misha Green took to Twitter to show us:

We don’t have all the details here, but it looks like the second season would have been called Lovecraft Country: Supremacy. The country is divided into four quadrants: the Tribal Nations of the West, the Whitelands, the New Negro Republic, and the Jefferson Commonwealth. Would this have been a continuation of the first season, with characters like Dee and Hippolyta and Montrose navigating this very new America? Or would it have picked up with a new cast of characters in a new time period, anthology style? My money’s on the latter.

Green provided some further details in another tweet:

"The Whitelands is a territory that is completely overrun by zombies — most of them of the slower variety, but with pockets of fast-moving zombies too. One price of “The Origin” spell was the creation of a zombie population. Years into the epidemic, a joint effort was undertaken to corral the zombies into one location in the center of America. The Whitelands now function as a dangerous border between the South, West and Northern territories. (X marks the spot where “The Source” will appear.)"

Sounds fun! Although I will admit to being a little tired of zombie stories. Is there nothing out there that’s scary?

Lovecraft Country creator invokes #noconfederate

Also of note: Green included the hashtag “#noconfederate” in her first tweet. This is a reference to the aborted HBO show Confederate, which was going to be about an alternate history of the U.S. where the Civil War had been fought to a standstill and the institution of slavery survived into the present day. The show was to be headed up by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss alongside husband-wife producing team Nichelle and Malcolm Spellman. But after people made their displeasure over the idea known using the #noconfederate hashtag, HBO basically pulled the plug. Benioff and Weiss moved on to Netflix while Malcolm Spellman went on to serve as showrunner on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Disney+.

Mashable reads this as a dig from Green at HBO. Maybe they rejected her idea for Lovecraft Country: Supremacy because they were afraid it was too much like Confederate, what with the U.S. divided up into different territories and themes of racial tensions? Perhaps we’ll never know, or perhaps Green will share more details.

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