Serious Fun in 2020: HBO’s Lovecraft Country

It’s Halloween, but the scariest thing has already happened: we’ve been asked to stay home for another four weeks. We might go trick-or-treatingTrick-or-Treating (verb): The phrase (or the threat) that children say at the door, implicitly telling adults that they want a treat, or they are prepared to perform a prank or vandalism. with the kids, but even that’s frightening, and not in a good way. Europe is suffering from a massive second wave of COVID, and the American election has reached some terrifying new combination of tedious, bizarre, and terrifying.

What to do, then, with Saturday night, or All Hallows’ EveAll Hallows’ Eve (noun): Halloween. It’s the old name for the holiday: it refers to the fact that Halloween is the night before (the Eve) All Saint’s Day, the feast day in the Catholic (and later Anglican) calendar where the Church’s dead saints are celebrated.?

Might I strongly recommend the new(ish) HBO series Lovecraft Country? The series will allow you to work on your English, provide seasonally appropriate scares and chills, and will provide a thoughtful reflection on the current American—and international—political moment.

Based on a novel (by Matt Ruff) of the same name, the series is set in 1950s America, at the height of the Jim Crow-eraJim Crow era (noun, historic period): Jim Crow refers to the American historical period that began (roughly) two or three decades after the conclusion of the American Civil War, and a set of laws in America that created post-slavery segregation and robbed Black Americans of key human rights. of racial segregation. The horror, as a result, comes from both literal and metaphorical directions. There are real monsters in this show, things with long teeth and tentacles and slime. But the show also captures, in any number of ways, the horror that can be experienced as a Black person in America. That car driving a little too close behind you? The one with a blond-haired, blue-eyed driver? That’s a different kind of threat, one very real. The novel and the TV series use the mythology created by famous horror and science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s strange monsters have become justly famous; his tendency to use those monsters for racist and xenophobic purposes justly infamous. The show repeatedly folds in, on the level of the soundtrack, famous speeches and performances from Black writers.

Reviews of the show have been, on the whole, quite enthusiastic. One take comes from the left-wing socialist magazine out of the States, Jacobin, which places the show against a context of the political subtext of B films and blaxploitation movies, and notes that the show cleverly plays on the racism inherent in Lovecraft’s original canonCanon (noun): Canon, in this context, is used to refer to a revered body of work, usually of literature or film.: the show points out that the white racist cop is a true monster. The Atlantic’s Hannah Giorgis was less impressed, pointing out that the show too often sacrifices deep characterization for gory monsters and thrilling plot turns. That charge is more than just a criticism of the show’s plot, it’s also a charge that the show replicates the racial simplification it appears to be wanting to take on. Lawrence Ware, writing for Slate, connects the first episode of the show to his own grandfather’s experience in ‘sundown towns,’ and makes a compelling connection to the summer of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed that tragedy in Minneapolis.

I love the show. Potential viewers, on a superficial level, should be warned that the show is violent and gory and certainly not appropriate for young children. On a deeper level, potential viewers should be warned that the show is utterly absurd to the point of being ridiculous: it replicates, winkingly, every B horror movie trope, and the characters are perhaps not as well developed as they are in the works of Toni Morrison or Fyodor Dostoevsky: Giorgis likely has a point. But if you’re looking for campyCampy (adjective): Adjective used broadly to refer to entertainment that is too extreme to be taken seriously as realism, but works on a subtextual level. Rocky Horror Picture Show is an arch example. horror fun that experiments, in a surrealist way, with the racism that lurks deep in the Freudian id of North American colonialism, well, Lovecraft Country might be the show for you. It’s not realism. But as the James Baldwin speech employed in the first episode indicates: North American racism was always creating its own horrible anti-reality to begin with.

by Nathan R. Elliott

1. “Bringing H.P Lovecraft to Jim Crow America.” The Jacobin, Aug 29, 2020. 9 mins. Advanced.

2. “What Lovecraft Country gets wrong about Racial Horror.” The Atlantic, Aug 14, 2020. 7 mins. Advanced.

3. “Lovecraft Country ‘s Premiere Captured the Horror that Almost Killed my Grandfather.” Slate, Aug 19, 2020 8 mins. Intermediate.