Dawn Keetley
Season one of HBO’s Lovecraft Country (there are rumors of a possible season two) ran from August through October 2020. Created by Misha Green, the series featured a panoply of talented writers and directors, including Green herself, Cheryl Dunye, Shannon Houston, Sonya Winton-Odamtten, and Ihuoma Ofordire. The series is based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, and, like the novel, it explores the convergence of weird and horror fiction with the recalcitrant fact of racism in the United States. The series features a central group of characters from Chicago in the 1950s who are drawn back into their past, out into dangerous territory, and even into their future. They become entangled with an occult secret society, the Sons of Adam, which has its roots in slavery. But they must contend not only with the occult machinations of white people but also with their malign presence in the real world, as the series incorporates into its storyworld the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
Lovecraft Country has already generated robust commentary, not least the series of articles Professor Kinitra Brooks, Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies at Michigan State University, has written for The Root. And in mid-February, 2021, a series of articles was assembled for In Media Res by Professor Asha S. Winfield at Texas A&M University on “Black Identity and Storytelling Inside HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country.’” There is also an online symposium in the works: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country, organized by the Centre for the History of the Gothic at the University of Sheffield, and you can find their call for papers here.
In Horror Homeroom’s entry into the conversation about Lovecraft Country, we begin with Christy Tidwell’s essay, which takes up the way in which the series transforms what Carol Clover dubbed “urbanoia”—the revenge-of-the-city-on-the-country plot that has become a staple of the horror genre. Exploring the first two episodes, “Sundown” and “Whitey’s on the Moon,” Tidwell argues that the HBO series reclaims urbanoia for Black characters and audiences, combining it with a critique of racism, including racist attitudes toward nature. (As a bonus, Tidwell raises an intriguing connection between “Sundown” and Tobe Hooper’s classic 1974 horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.)
In “Cool Pose and Black Geeks,” Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., explores the relationship of main character Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) to the science fiction, fantasy, and horror traditions—a relationship that draws him into the categories of “cool” and “geek.” In the end, though, Tic, “is able to transcend these racialized categories (cool and geek),” Wetmore argues, “through the trope of the talking book. Tic is a ‘talking book’ in Henry Louis Gates’ sense: his cool pose is what allows him to find the Black voice in the white text.” Tic finds a way to turn the literary traditions he loves into survival guides.
Ayanna Woods considers two of the other main characters of the series in her essay, “Creating New Images: Black Feminist Thought and Lovecraft Country.” Woods reads Hippolyta Freeman (Aunjanue Ellis) and Leti Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) through the lens of Patricia Hill Collins’ 1990 book Black Feminist Thought, in which Hill Collins argued for the radical rewriting of the “Controlling Images” of Black people. Focusing on Hippolyta’s journey in episode seven, “I Am,” and Leti’s journey in episode one, “Sundown,” and episode nine, “Rewind 1921,” Woods explores how Lovecraft Country does exactly this kind of feminist rewriting of harmful stereotypes.
In “Christina Braithwhite’s Strange Love Craft,” Amy Hough takes up the enigmatic character of Christina Braithwhite (Abbey Lee), whom she reads through the lens of Donna Haraway’s cyborg. “Like Haraway’s cyborg,” Hough writes, “Christina is capable of pure fluidity, of transgressing borders of gender, race and class.” But that is by no means the end of the story. Hough looks at Christina’s failed relationship with Ruby Baptiste (Wunmi Mosaku)—especially in episode five, “Strange Case,” episode eight, “Jig-a-Bobo,” and episode ten, “Full Circle”—as a testament to Christina’s spectacular failure as an ally. Christina, Hough argues, “isn’t evolved enough to conceive of the responsibility of dwelling in another person’s skin.”
In conclusion, we turn again to questions of genre. In “All Over the Map: Locating Genre in Lovecraft Country,” Bethany Doane reads episode one, “Sundown,” in relation to the racist tradition of weird fiction and episode eight, “Jig-a-Bobo,” in relation to gothic horror and racial violence in America. “Both of these episodes,” Doane writes, “are quite aware of their own literary origins, and, in both cases, the series layers racial terror with the genre conventions of horror, not so that monstrosity can serve as a metaphor for racism, but such that the two forms of horror amplify one another.” In this way, Doane concludes, Lovecraft Country “retells the story of genre.”
