10 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020Television
“Lovecraft Country,” which debuts Aug. 16
on HBO, tells the intersecting stories of two
Black families as they travel throughout the
Jim Crow North confronting monsters —
some fantastical (pale gray beasts called
Elder Gods) and others that are no less hor-
rific for being based in reality (racist sher-
iffs, predatory oligarchs).
Created by Misha Green (“Under-
ground”), the series follows Atticus, an
Army veteran played by Jonathan Majors
(“Da 5 Bloods”), as he searches for his miss-
ing father, played by Michael Kenneth
Williams (“The Wire”). Carrying a copy of
“The Safe Negro Travel Guide” — a fictional
version of the real-life “The Negro Motorist
Green Book” — Atticus, his uncle George
(Courtney B. Vance) and his friend Letitia
(Jurnee Smollett) navigate the byways and
backwoods of a macabre, mid-1950s New
England.
With its atmospheric blend of supernatu-
ral and societal menaces, “Lovecraft Coun-
try” follows in the footsteps of works like
Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” using horror film-
making as a form of social commentary on
American race relations.
“In horror, there’s a level of anxiety that
your life can be taken at any moment,”
Green said. “That’s the Black experience.”
Adding potency in this case is the fact
that “Lovecraft Country,” like the 2016 Matt
Ruff novel that inspired it, appropriates the
frightening creations of a toxic racist in or-
der to tell its story.
The title refers to H. P. Lovecraft, the
early-20th-century writer who is best
known for inventing the “cosmic horror”
genre and for filling his hair-raising stories
with the same types of creeping dread, mis-
anthropic characters and phantasmagoric
demons that adorn “Lovecraft Country.”
He is also known for approving of Hitler
and condoning lynching in the South as a
necessary evil to prevent interracial rela-
tionships. (“Anything is better than mon-
grelization,” he wrote.) In the novel, Ruff
upended this legacy by centering Black
characters and making the story a parable
about throwing off the constrictions of
white supremacy.
Green expands that idea even further,
blending cinematic genres and referencing
works by literary figures like James Bald-
win and Ntozake Shange to create a provoc-
ative show that is landing amid a broader
national conversation about race and repre-
sentation.
“I was talking about the same things and
the same themes on ‘Underground,’ and
that was four years ago,” she said. “Now, I
feel like there are more people aware of
what’s going on who didn’t have to be aware
of it before.”
“Underground,” a stylish period thriller
about the Underground Railroad, was what
first drew Peele, an executive producer of
“Lovecraft Country,” to Green. Once he real-
ized that she was a horror fan like him, “it
was instant chemistry, instant realization
that we love the same things, even though
we do it a little bit differently,” he said in a
phone interview.
Like Peele’s films — next up this fall is
“Candyman,” which he co-wrote and
produced as a present-day sequel to
Bernard Rose’s 1992 cult horror film —
“Lovecraft Country” wraps sly, sharp cri-
tiques within ghoulish imagery, and it is
nothing if not committed to its own pulpy vi-
sion. “When a project does that boldly
enough, it resonates hard,” Peele said.
“When I was writing ‘Get Out,’ I’m like,
‘Oh my gosh, this could be a disaster,’ ” he
added. “The fact that it worked just val-
idates this idea for me.”
The show’s other big-name executive
producer, J. J. Abrams (“Star Wars: The
Rise of Skywalker”), was similarly capti-
vated by the “utterly fearless writing” of
Green’s scripts.
“She’s so wonderful on the page,” Abrams
said in a phone interview. “She has this abil-
ity to just dive utterly and entirely into what
she’s doing and not look over her shoulder
and worry about what anyone might think.”
In a Zoom interview with Green, who is
also an executive producer, she discussed
her own lifelong obsession with horror and
why its sense of dread and danger is not an
allegory but a living reality for Black peo-
ple. These are edited excerpts from the con-
versation.Have you always been into horror?
I’ve always had this preoccupation withJUSTIN LUBIN/UNIVERSAL PICTURESLiving While Black
In ‘Lovecraft Country’
Misha Green, the creator of this series, discusses her obsession with horror
and why a sense of dread and danger is not just an allegory.
By SALAMISHAH TILLET‘In horror, there’s a level of anxiety that your
life can be taken at any moment.’
MISHA GREEN
CREATOR OF ‘LOVECRAFT COUNTRY’Top from left, Naomi
Mack, Jurnee Smollett,
Wunmi Mosaku, Keon
Mitchell and Jonathan
Majors in the horror
series “Lovecraft
Country,” created by
Misha Green, near left.
Below center, Jordan
Peele, known for using
the genre as a form of
social commentary.
Below right, Aisha Hinds
in “Underground,”
another Green creation.