‘Lovecraft Country’ Review: HBO Tackles Racism with Confounding Jim Crow-Era, Genre-Bending Drama

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‘Lovecraft Country’ Review: HBO Tackles Racism with Confounding Jim Crow-Era, Genre-Bending Drama

 

 

Pulp noir meets Lovecraftian horror in a series perfectly suited for the madness of the year 2020.

 

With its atmospheric mix of paranormal and social menaces, “Lovecraft Country” uses horror to comment on American race relations. It rejuvenates the genre by not just making its heroes Black, but by setting the story in the racially segregated Jim Crow era of the 1950s, putting America’s racist history at the center of the narrative. Within that setting, the series continuously shapeshifts in episodic fashion, starting with a road trip, then a haunted-house story, an Indiana Jones-esque hunt for treasure buried beneath a museum, and more, each equally manic and, at times nearing absurdity. It’s a series perfectly suited for the madness that has been the year 2020.

 

The opening scene of “Lovecraft Country” is an actual nightmare, as series protagonist Atticus “Tic” Freeman (Jonathan Majors), is haunted by ghosts from his past as a soldier in the Korean war trenches. It’s a fantasy sequence filled with flying saucers, octopuses with dragon-like wings, reddish alien life forms beaming down from spacecrafts, and Jackie Robinson at bat, except he’s swinging at indescribable monsters that ooze green slime. It’s a chaotic jumble that, on its surface makes very little sense, but such is the nature of dreams.

By the end of the first episode, audiences will have witnessed skirmishes with flesh-eating, forest-dwelling, multi-eyed monsters, racist redneck cops, and white supremacists who cast magic spells, including one who believes he is a direct descendant of Adam.

 

That sets the tone for the rest of a peculiar series beaming with ideas (although maybe too many for its own good) — including an apparent supposition that whiteness itself is a superpower, at least from the perspective of Black people in a country with racism woven into its very fabric.

 

From showrunner and executive producer Misha Green, the 10-episode series follows the aforementioned Tic — a Black Korean War veteran and science-fiction buff. He journeys with his hard-wearing childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), and peaceable uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) — who publishes a Black travelers’ guidebook — on a road trip from Chicago across 1950s America in search of his missing curmudgeon of a father, Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams).

 

Tic receives a letter from Montrose, indicating the discovery of a secret birthright that exists in a strange town called Ardham. And their mission becomes a series of bizarre chimerical adventures that ensnare the trio into ancient rituals, magical texts, alternate universes, secret societies, and transmogrifying potions, as they fight to overcome the terrors of racism, as well as grotesque monsters that could be ripped from any H.P. Lovecraft yarn.

 

indiewire.com

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