Traveling While Black: Revising Urbanoia in Lovecraft Country

Christy Tidwell

Misha Green, the creator of HBO’s Lovecraft Country, says the show is “reclaiming genre space for people of color” (O’Connell). From its opening scenes, the show establishes itself as both science fiction (alien spaceships appearing over a Korean War battlefield) and horror (a tentacled Lovecraftian monster, fought off by Jackie Robinson). Throughout its first season, it embraces a wide range of science fiction and horror elements – weird cults, magic spells, ghosts, Indiana Jones-style exploration, bodily transformations, time travel, and more. Importantly, it puts Black people at the center of each of these stories, thus “reclaiming” these narratives.

But some genre spaces are more easily inhabited by people of color than others, and Lovecraft Country – as its title indicates – is situated in a specifically racist genre history. H. P. Lovecraft himself was overtly racist, a fact emphasized in the first episode by direct reference to his 1912 poem “On the Creation of Niggers.” The audience’s introduction to Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors), known as Tic, expands this issue beyond Lovecraft alone and raises the broader question of the response of Black readers to early 20^th century science fiction. Tic attempts to explain the appeal of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (1912) to a Black woman he has just met, but she objects to the casting of an ex-Confederate soldier as the hero in the book, saying, “You don’t get to put an ‘ex’ in front of that.” Their brief exchange about this is telling. Tic says, “Stories are like people. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You just try and cherish ‘em, overlook their flaws.” She replies, “Yeah, but the flaws are still there.” “Yeah,” Tic acknowledges, “they are” (ep. 1, “Sundown”).

How do fans of genre fiction deal with flaws like these? Racist diatribes from loved authors, “ex”-Confederate heroes, or, more simply, the complete absence of people of color in many texts? Can we cherish these works (or authors) without endorsing the harmful parts of them? When Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award, whose statuette at that point was a bust of H. P. Lovecraft (it has since been changed), she wrote about her own struggle with these questions, ultimately saying, “What I know I want is to face the history of this leg of literature rather than put it aside or bury it” (Okorafor). Lovecraft Country does this work by embracing parts of genre fiction and – in a step past what Tic is willing to do – not simply overlooking other parts but challenging them. In doing so, the show isn’t only “reclaiming genre space for people of color,” as Green argues, but revising it to account for Black experiences and Black history.

One element of genre fiction that Lovecraft Country reclaims and revises in meaningful ways is urbanoia. Carol J. Clover, best known for defining “the Final Girl,” established the concept of urbanoia as a way of discussing horror films that represent “the revenge of the city on the country” (115). Urbanoia is usually associated with films like Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972); The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), plus its sequels, a prequel, and a remake; and The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977), plus sequels and remakes – all of which focus on well-to-do city people traveling to the country, where they are threatened, hurt, and killed by poor country people. (These movies are also sometimes referred to as hillbilly horror or backwoods horror.) 

Despite being quite different from these films in many important ways, Lovecraft Country functions as an urbanoia narrative at key points, thus reclaiming this genre trope for Black characters and audiences. The first two episodes, “Sundown” and “Whitey’s on the Moon,” prime viewers to expect an urbanoia narrative as they center on George (Courtney B. Vance), Leti (Jurnee Smollett), and Tic’s trip out of Chicago and into the countryside. Urbanoia often opens with an initial drive into the country, focusing on the transition from city to country, from familiar to unfamiliar; similarly, “Sundown” features shots of their car from above, alone on an isolated country road, and includes a scene of them driving winding forest roads where they get lost far away from home. And when they are not isolated, George, Tic, and Leti are outsiders who do not belong. They pass a billboard telling them, “Don’t let the sun set on you here”; they encounter White young men at a gas station who make racist gestures at them; they pass German shepherds barking and straining at the leash in their direction. These details contribute to an overall sense of the non-urban as threatening and dangerous and, more specifically, establish these spaces as White supremacist spaces.

This sense of racialized danger underpins the entire show. After all, one of the central conceits of the show is that George writes and publishes The Safe Negro Travel Guide (based on the real-life Negro Motorist Green Book), necessary because of the dangers for Black people of leaving the city. Chicago’s South Side may be – as later episodes show more clearly – segregated and constrained, but it is also a safe and joyful home for the main characters that contrasts sharply with the unfamiliar rural spaces they enter, spaces marked by dark forests, hostile villagers, and the threat of death. White townspeople chase them out of town while shooting at them; the Devon County sheriff threatens to lynch them if they don’t get out of his county by sundown (“If I had found you pissing in my woods, like animals after dark, it would’ve been my sworn duty to hang every single one of you from them trees”); they are stopped by the police and held at gunpoint on the ground while being questioned. In addition to all this, “Sundown” introduces Lovecraftian monsters, a supernatural threat unique to the nocturnal rural forest. These cosmic horrors aren’t necessary to create fear, however. Whiteness alone is enough. As Lovecraft Country makes clear, the threat of anti-Black violence is ever-present; in this context, the mere presence of White people serves as a source of fear for Tic, Leti, George, and the other Black characters. A later episode, “Jig-a-Bobo” (ep. 8), makes this point by opening with the funeral of Emmett Till, another young Black person killed for venturing out of the city and into the country. As Jonathan Majors (who plays Tic) has said, “to be a Black man in America, you are born into the horror genre. You are not safe” (Oyeniyi). The guide is necessary quite simply because it’s not safe out there. Lovecraft Country uses the tropes of urbanoia to acknowledge this lack of safety.

Lovecraft Country does not simply reclaim urbanoia but diverges from – and revises – a traditional urbanoia narrative. Although it uses movement from the city into the country to organize “the confrontation between haves and have-nots, or even more directly, between exploiters and their victims” (Clover 126), the exploiter/victim relationship is reversed here. In Clover’s examples, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Deliverance, “the city approaches the country guilty” (128) – whether of economic devastation and the loss of rural jobs (as in Texas Chain Saw Massacre) or of environmental exploitation and the destruction of people’s homes and natural spaces (as in Deliverance). However, Tic, Leti, and George are guilty of nothing as they approach the country; they are simply trying to survive. The Braithwhite family (the ultimate White threat that they meet in episode 2 and grapple with throughout the season), on the other hand, have built their wealth – historically and in the present – on the enslavement and labor of Black people. Thus, where the city people in the films Clover discusses fear hillbillies and the poverty they represent, Lovecraft Country’s city people fear White power. Not the Ku Klux Klan – since, as Christina Braithwhite (Abbey Lee) puts it, “They’re too poor” – but White people who wield economic power (rich people like the Braithwhites, business owners who refuse to serve them), legal power (police officers), and social power (White young men shouting threats at them in public).

Lovecraft Country thus uses familiar elements of urbanoia but adds to them specifically Black fears. In doing so, the show draws attention to the very different relationships to rurality and nature that Black people and White people have had in the US. As Aaron Jones (a Black man in his 30s from Chicago) explains, “It’s a very real fear for black people, especially those from urban communities, that bad things happen to black people in the woods, like lynching. It’s something that you see again and again when you look at the history of the civil rights movement and slavery: black people going into the woods and not coming back” (Pires). This attitude toward the natural world is dramatically different from what Kimberly N. Ruffin has described as “a strain of environmentalism informed by a limited triumvirate of Ws: wilderness, the West, and whiteness” (25). In a discussion of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Ruffin writes, “Gore and his family enact one of America’s celebrated environmental activities: white families journeying westward through America’s grand wilderness” (26). As Lovecraft Country makes clear, this freedom is something that Black families do not share.

Fears of the forest (and the country more broadly) are not only Black fears, but there is a specificity to Black fear here. Although Clover argues that the trip into the country or forest “rests squarely on what may be a universal archetype” (124), Lovecraft Country provides a historically and culturally specific narrative instead, reminding us that not all fears of the forest are universal. Clover also writes that “rural Connecticut (or wherever), like the deep forests of Central Europe, is a place where the rules of civilization do not obtain” (124), but Lovecraft Country reveals another perspective. Here, after all, the rules of “civilization” do obtain, enforced by representatives of that civilization (police officers and wealthy landowners). Sally J. Morgan argues for a more specific (but still White-oriented) reading of the fear of the woods in American film, arguing that it is based on “colonial anxiety” (144). She notes that the woods are “the quintessential, Godless, American wilderness, peopled with phantoms, devils and savages” (147). Here, too, something is missing. The woods are peopled not with the typical “phantoms, devils and savages” but with the descendants of European colonizers and slaveholders, the inheritors of White colonial power. Thus, the woods George, Tic, and Leti encounter are not the same as European forests because they are shaped – and still inhabited – by racism and the history of slavery.

Urbanoia is not simply about traveling into the frightening countryside, however; it is also about revenge, specifically revenge by the oppressed enacted upon the oppressors. But when the terms of oppression are reversed (the city people are the oppressed rather than the oppressors), what happens to revenge? Joshua Rivera writes, “Each episode of Lovecraft Country becomes a fable where the moral is the same: racism is a monster, and perhaps it’s time the racists fear something, too.” And the show certainly provides pleasure for its audience in seeing the racists defeated; however, it also asks the viewer to consider whether revenge is satisfying or helpful. Largely, the oppressed (e.g., Tic and Leti) choose against revenge. (This is undercut somewhat by Dee’s final vengeful action, however, indicating that the show, and perhaps oppressed people more broadly, are rather torn on this point. The division represented here is an important element of the show’s approach to revenge, however, because it interrupts a desire to see Black people as monolithic.)

Tic’s choice to sacrifice himself is central to the show’s turn away from revenge. This revision of the revenge narrative in Tic’s sacrifice is reinforced by the soundtrack. As his body is raised up to be used by Christina, a guitar begins to play. Just for a moment, it sounds like bluegrass, reiterating the show’s connection to urbanoia (think of the dueling banjos in Deliverance), but instead this moment turns toward Blackness as Mississippi Fred McDowell sings “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning.” The use of Black blues – which originated in Black, rural settings – instead of rural White music helps reclaim rural spaces for the Black characters and thus shifts the focus of this scene: this moment is not about the threat inherent in the country and the rural villains but about Tic’s choice and the urban heroes. Tic is able to become more than a victim and to live up to what his (dead) mother tells him: “You’re a hero, just like in those stories you used to cherish” (ep. 10, “Full Circle”). Tic’s final letter to Montrose (Michael K. Williams) further rejects revenge. Tic asks him to “teach my son new ways of living, instead of repeating what we’ve been through,” indicating a desire to change the future rather than to avenge the past (ep. 10, “Full Circle”).

By drawing attention to fears of the country that are often overlooked and by presenting an urbanoia-based revenge narrative that questions revenge and therefore the foundations of urbanoia itself, Lovecraft Country hijacks the urbanoia narrative. It uses urbanoia to point out how Black experiences and fears have been ignored in genre fiction, and it then explicitly writes Black fears into the genre, reclaiming and revising it so that it speaks not only to White fears. As horror set in a recognizable historical moment, the show challenges “shared myths of the past” and instead “produces unease, like a dark-mirror image, a doppelgänger. It redirects the historical imagination to less comfortable ends” (Morgan 140). This challenge – to both historical ideas and to genre limitations – matters because it reflects and acknowledges reality. The Lovecraftian monsters and cultic magic are actually the least frightening part of these episodes, after all, as they are far overshadowed by the threat of violence by real White people. Where “positive myths of the past are structured into what we tend to call heritage, i.e. shared narratives affirming a positive sense of self and region or nation,” Lovecraft Country provides instead “a dark sense of history, a heritage noire, which in turn unsettles [the audience’s] confidence in the present” (Morgan 148). In order for the horror of these episodes to work, the audience must be willing to see and also feel the threat of racism, both historical and contemporary.

 

Works Cited:

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Green, Misha, creator. Lovecraft Country. HBO, 2020.

Morgan, Sally J. “Heritage Noire: Truth, History, and Colonial Anxiety in The Blair Witch Project.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2001, pp. 137-148.

O’Connell, Michael. “‘Lovecraft Country’ Creator Misha Green Wants to Reclaim Genre for People of Color.” Hollywood Reporter, 22 Oct. 2020.

Okorafor, Nnedi. “Lovecraft’s Racism & The World Fantasy Award Statuette, with Comments from China Miéville.” Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog, 14 Dec. 2011.

Oyeniyi, Doyin. “Jonathan Majors, the Star of HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country,’ Transforms His Race Into Art.” Texas Monthly, Sept. 2020.

Pires, Candice. “‘Bad things happen in the woods’: The Anxiety of Hiking While Black.” The Guardian, 13 Jul. 2018.

Rivera, Joshua. “Lovecraft Country Reclaims Pulp Fiction for the Black Men and Women It Excluded.” The Verge, 19 Aug. 2020.

Ruffin, Kimberly N. Black on Earth: African American Ecoliteracy Traditions. University of Georgia Press, 2010.