THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020 AR 11Television
what we’re willing to do for metaphorical
and physical survival. Horror just moves to-
ward that in a really easy way. I remember
seeing “Aliens” and thinking: “Oh my God,
you’re stuck on the ship with this alien, but
you’ve got to survive. What does that bring
out of you?” But my real interest started
with R. L. Stine’s “Goosebumps.” It was
lightweight horror, but those stories were
scary to me as a kid. But I was also like,
“Ooh, I’m intrigued.” Stephen King’s “It” is
my favorite book of all time. I was that kid
that would come to the library and be like:
“There’s more Stephen King? Great.” The
next day: “Give me the next one.”While Lovecraft himself wrote racist stories
and letters, did you find it refreshing that
Matt Ruff, who is a white author, tried to
depict the multidimensionality of his Black
characters in “Lovecraft Country”?
I have read H. P. Lovecraft, and I under-
stand why he has influenced so much of hor-
ror writing. But because of his history, I
wasn’t a huge fan. When I read Matt’s novel,
I said: “Oh, it’s legit. Thank God.”
But here’s my thing: For a white writer
notto be able to step into the shoes of people
of color confuses me. That should be the de-
fault — many people of color have to step
into the shoes of white people. Women have
to step into the shoes of men. It’s sad that we
say, “Thank you for doing some research
and for actually seeing people as people.”You make some significant changes to the
story, including adding a major female
antagonist, Christina Braithwhite (Abbey
Lee), who didn’t exist in the book. Why?
The novel was very feminist-forward. Leti
was doing a lot of the saving of the day and
was a character who had such an inner life
— I wanted to see more of that. Other than
giving this really beautiful gift of his book,
Matt gave the gift of saying: “It’s yours now.
Go for it.”
In terms of Christina, it’s really not that
complicated. If we’re exploring levels of
power and using magic as the overlay of
that, it just felt right to explore what it
means for a white woman who doesn’t tech-
nically have power to have stolen some of
that power. Just like our people are techni-
cally stealing the power that was stolen
from people like them. And by changing
[the teenage boy character] Horace from
the book into Diana, we were talking about
#SayHerName [the campaign dedicated to
Black girls and women who are victims of
police violence]. When we were writing, we
were seeing depictions of what this stuff is
like for teenage Black boys. What does it
look like for Black girls, who also are in a
horror movie everywhere they turn?
Is it even fair to describe your show as
horror? Is that too restricting?
I never thought horror was limiting. Every
time people talk about “elevated horror,” I
ask, “What’s the problem with the ‘not ele-
vated’ horror?” I love slasher films like
“Nightmare on Elm Street.” But when I re-
ally started to think about this genre, I won-
dered, “Why don’t they have Black people,
or why do the Black people have to die in the
first 10 minutes?” So when I read Matt’s
book, I thought he beautifully reclaimed
this genre space that hadn’t been for people
of color.
That’s what I pitched to HBO. We can
launch off the platform of his book, reclaim
the reclamation, and make a television
show for people of color. In that respect, the
show isn’t just horror but really an all gen-
res space. When we were in the writers’
room, we would have our syllabus for each
episode. For secret societies, we thought of
“The Shining” and “Eyes Wide Shut.” Or a
ghost story: “Poltergeist” and “Amityville
Horror.” Or adventure: “Indiana Jones” and
“The Goonies.” I was like, “This can be all of
it.”
But at the end of the day, it’s just a family
drama, and we want to love the characters
and what they’re going through. What’s so
exciting is to see people of color, who don’t
typically get to be in those genre spaces, in
these spaces now.
What does horror give you the ability to do
that another genre doesn’t? Isn’t American
racial history a horror unto itself?
I question that [everyone believes that
about our history]. I look around and I
think, “This is horrific.” But other people
are just like, “I saw that video online. That’s
terrible. Let me post a black square about
it.”
We shield ourselves a lot from having to
step into that true horror because it’s really
bad. The art in this genre is that it gives you
this doorway because the heroine is going
to kill him in the end and win. That makes
you feel safer than the normal horror that is
around us. That is what genre is, at its best:
It’s the metaphor on top of the real emotions
we all experience.The show is coming out in a very different
political climate compared with when you
started working on it three years ago. Now,
as you are editing, how is that affecting your
process?
I feel like the moment has been this moment
since the first enslaved person was brought
over here. People are shifting their empa-
thy, and that has to do with Black creators
who are shifting their empathy.
Which is it, the chicken or the egg? Is it
because the gaze is different that’s helping
us see differently? Or is it that people are
seeing things differently? I think probably
both of those things.
What does Black safety look like for you
right now?
Black safety is always wrapped up in hor-
ror. I don’t have to do much to bring that
anxiety out, because it’s already there. Only
a minority [of Americans] are not part of
the movement right now, but they’ve gotten
really good at distracting us and making
sure we don’t ever feel empathy and don’t
collectively come together.
This is also part of what “Lovecraft Coun-
try” is about. How does this family deal with
its shame and pain to come together to fight
against this thing? And what does it mean
to take that power? What and who can you
be, once you take that back and own it your-
self?HBOELI JOSHUA ADE/HBO
WGN AMERICA“Lovecraft Country,” premiering Aug. 16 on HBO,
follows a Black family entangled in eldritch phe-
nomena. Based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, the series
is a sideways look at the terrors of Jim Crow Amer-
ica that nods to and reframes the work of H. P. Love-
craft, the widely cited if narrowly read pulp fiction
writer from the early 20th century.
Broadly — and with plenty of exceptions — Love-
craft’s stories suggest huge and unfathomable hor-
rors lurking just beneath the surface of the mun-
dane world. Filled with miscegenation, tentacles
and unspeakable dread, his works often begin with
ordinary or ordinary-seeming men drawn into ex-
traordinary and otherworldly situations. Almost no
one gets out alive or sane. His brand of weird is goo-
ey and misanthropic.
To adapt a Lovecraft work is to deal with a trou-
bled and troubling legacy — blatant racism and
sexual phobias blight much of his work. Still, he re-
mains influential, with his sinister, squishy quali-
ties still felt across media —
television, film, fiction,
comics, video games, role-
playing games, visual art,
plushies — and multiple gen-
res. The stomach monster
from “Alien”? Extremely
Lovecraft. That giant squid
from “Watchmen”? Lovecraft
again. The devouring Shog-
goths from the “Lovecraft
Country” pilot? A squelching
tip of the hat.
If you don’t know your Yog-
Sothoth from your Shub-Nig-
garath — good! Run while you
can! But if you hold your san-
ity lightly, here is a brief guide
to the man, the monsters and
the popular culture slime trail
his works have left behind.The Man
Born in Providence, R.I., in
1890, to a well-off family who
quickly tumbled down the so-
cial ladder, Howard Phillips
Lovecraft was a precocious
child who became a deeply
strange adult. (When both of your parents die in the
same psychiatric hospital, two decades apart, may-
be that’s not a huge surprise.) After dropping out of
high school during his senior year, a move precipi-
tated by a nervous collapse, he began to write short
stories indebted to Edgar Allan Poe, and dabbled in
amateur journalism as well as racist and xenopho-
bic poetry.
He devoted himself to horror fiction just after
World War I, creating unsettling and often interre-
lated stories, many of them published in the pulp
magazine “Weird Tales.” He married and spent a
few years living in Brooklyn, a period that inspired
stories like “The Horror at Red Hook.” When his
marriage ended, he returned to Providence, where
he expanded into novellas like “The Shadow Over
Innsmouth” and “At the Mountains of Madness.”
Many of his stories take place in an invented re-
gion of Massachusetts that his disciples would later
christen Lovecraft Country. Lovecraft’s fiction re-
veals strange preoccupations — slime, crus-
taceans, the revelation of forbidden knowledge. A
profound discomfort with sex runs through several
stories; others display a deep-dyed racism, with
nonwhite characters used as examples of bar-
barism. His fiction and ghost writing paid poorly
and Lovecraft died in poverty in 1937.The Mythos
Lovecraft created a genre of his own, cosmic horror
or “cosmicism.” Think nihilism, with occasional
cephalopods.
The basic idea: Humans are an irrelevancy
within the greater universe, a cosmos governed by
forces so alien and terrifying that our tiny minds
cannot encompass or bear their knowledge. Most
characters who glimpse it promptly go insane. Cos-
micism’s big bad is Cthulhu, a winged, octopus-like
ancient god. But Cthulhu and his associates aren’t
so much evil as indifferent to pesky human life.
As pantheons go, Lovecraft’s cosmogony is fairly
imprecise, with much of it enfleshed by his immedi-
ate disciple, August Derleth, and other writers.
There are Great Old Ones, the Outer Gods, the Eld-
er Things and assorted monsters like the Shoggoth,
a slave race of many-eyed, protoplasmic amoeba
doodads. Lovecraft typed these beings as explicitly
extraterrestrial, though some are former rulers of
the earth and still lurk within its depths. (So no
more expeditions to Antarctica, OK?)
Gods to know and then run from in crazed terror:
Dagon, a sea monster god; Nyarlathotep, a malign
shape-shifter god, who appears sometimes in the
form of a pharaoh and sometimes as an upsetting
bat thing; Shub-Niggarath, a cloudlike lady god
sometimes called “the Black Goat of the Woods
With a Thousand Young”; Yog-Sothoth, the “All-in-One and One-in-All,” a collection of glowing circles,
but scary.Five Essential Works
If Lovecraft remains a prized writer, that has more
to do with the atmosphere his stories evoke than
with the turgid prose. His pacing can be slow, his
dialogue stilted, his humorlessness suffocating. But
for a taste of his crawling chaos, here are some
ghastly places to begin.
‘AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS’ (1936) Dr. William
Dyer, a professor of geology at Miskatonic Univer-
sity (think Harvard, but eerier), joins a trek to Ant-
arctica in this harrowing novella. His team discov-
ers frozen prehistoric life-forms. Then mayhem be-
gins. Dyer uncovers the remnants of an ancient
alien civilization, a race of Elder Things and inti-
mations of an even greater evil waiting nearby.
‘THE CALL OF CTHULHU’ (1928) This twisty story fol-
lows a man piecing together various writings left
behind by his recently deceased professor uncle.
Had his uncle stumbled on a series of cults devoted
to the worship of an Elder God? He had! Note
Cthulhu’s big debut: “It lumbered slobberingly into
sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green
immensity through the black doorway.”
‘THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE’
(1927) A surveyor assigned to
an odd corner of Arkham,
Mass., discovers that a fallen
meteorite has poisoned the lo-
cal floral and fauna in this
short story. The meteorite af-
fects humans, too, driving one
farm family to depredation
and death.
‘THE DUNWICH HORROR’ (1929)
In this story set in Dunwich,
Mass., strange things are
afoot at the Whateley farm-
house. So strange that Wilbur
Whateley tries to break into
the Miskatonic library and
steal a copy of the “Necro-
nomicon,” a spellbook. With
Wilbur thwarted, an invisible
horror begins to roam the
countryside.
‘THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH’
(1936) A novella dripping in
genre elements, this odd tale
stars an unnamed 21-year-old
college student who stops off
in Innsmouth, a dumpy, insu-
lar fishing town. Our narrator notices that the locals
have narrow heads, bulging eyes... and hey, are
those gills?Eight Uncanny Adaptations
Though Lovecraft’s influence echoes throughout
popular culture, his works often resist successful
adaptation. Disturbing and prim, his corpus de-
mands adventurous artists who can embrace his
sinister ambience while also cracking it open to al-
low fresh perspective and tone.
‘ALAN MOORE’S THE COURTYARD’ (2003) AND ‘NEONOMI-
CON’ (2010-11) A gallimaufry of murder, conspiracy,
bad drugs, worse sex magic and forcible impregna-
tion by an alien fish thing, these limited series
comics by the graphic novel genius and sometime
magician Alan Moore have a staggering night-
mare-per-page ratio. Moore also concocted the
short story “What Ho, Gods of the Abyss?,” a mash-
up of Lovecraft and P. G. Wodehouse.
‘THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM’ (2016) Like Ruff’s “Love-
craft Country,” Victor LaValle’s novella re-evalu-
ates Lovecraft’s deeply racist preoccupations. This
retelling of “The Horror of Red Hook,” centers a
Black protagonist and particularizes Red Hook’s
lower-class, immigrant denizens. Its dedication
reads, “For H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted
feelings.”
‘COLOR OUT OF SPACE’ (2019) Nicolas Cage stars in
Richard Stanley’s film adaptation, playing an al-
paca farmer ( just go with it) whose life goes awry
when a meteor lands. “Stanley and Cage,” Jean-
nette Catsoulis wrote in The Times, “leap so far
over the psychological top that they never come
back to earth.”
‘MEDDLING KIDS: A NOVEL’ (2017) What if Scooby and
the Gang grew up and faced Cthulhu? In Edgar
Cantero’s allusive, inventive comedy-crime-horror
pastiche, three young adults and one trusty dog re-
turn to the haunts of their youth to confront an old
— like, Great Old Ones old — enemy. Zoinks!
‘RE-ANIMATOR' (1985) A film adaptation of “Herbert
West — Reanimator,” set in contemporary Chicago,
this horror comedy centers on Herbert West, a
medical student with some funny ideas about the
Hippocratic oath. A shock-a-minute gore fest, the
movie became a cult classic.
‘WINTER TIDE’ (2017) AND ‘DEEP ROOTS’ (2018) Like
Ruff and LaValle, Ruthanna Emrys also works a
reclamation of the Lovecraft legacy. These two nov-
els focus on Aphra March, a former Innsmouth resi-
dent who recently survived an internment camp.
Because the U.S. government does not trust gill
people. Emrys’s work humanizes Lovecraft’s mon-
ster, laying his xenophobia bare.H. P. Lovecraft’s winged ancient god Cthulhu.DIPPER HISTORIC/ALAMYLovecraft in 1934. He wrote short stories,
eventually devoting himself to horror fiction.ARCHIVE PL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTOGods, Monsters and Legacy
Modern adapters of H. P. Lovecraft’s
work grapple with his racism,
sexism and profound weirdness.
By ALEXIS SOLOSKI