When the slimy, sharp-teethed monsters burst through the darkness and start biting human heads off, you’ll be relieved.
When the blood starts gushing and the screams pierce the air, you’ll thank the storytelling gods for ending the torment.
Because at least the terrifying killer creatures are a reprieve from the real monsters in Lovecraft Country: the humans.
Adapted from Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel by Misha Green, Lovecraft Country is a 10-part horror-cum-thriller-cum-social drama that will make you tense, and then deeply uncomfortable, before pushing you into true nightmare territory.
Starting today on Binge*, the 1950s-set Lovecraft Country takes the iconography of genre pioneer H.P. Lovecraft, who influenced the likes of Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro, and uses it to tell a story that Lovecraft, a white supremacist, would have abhorred.
Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) is a recently returned Korean War veteran. On the bus home to Chicago, it breaks down. When a pick-up truck arrives to transport the passengers to the next town, it’s clear Atticus is not to board that truck.
Atticus is black and the Jim Crow segregation policies of the era makes it completely legal to force him and another black passenger to walk. The backdrop of the idyllic country farm-scape is an unsettling contrast to the overt racism, but it’s nothing compared to what follows.
Atticus, with his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) and friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), embarks on a road trip to Massachusetts in search of Atticus’s missing father Montrose (Michael K. Williams).
You might expect a journey through the northern states of the US to be less perilous than if the characters were driving through the south, but much like Get Out, Lovecraft Country reinforces the fact that racism is pervasive everywhere, not just in former slavery states.
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George is the publisher of a guidebook for black Americans travelling across the country (similar to Green Book), a journey that is fraught with not just segregated windows at burger joints but being “caught” in a sundowner town or country.
For Australians unfamiliar with sundowner towns, it was a legal policy enacted by American jurisdictions which declared that black people (and often other minorities) could not be within a town or county’s limits between sunset and sunrise.
Any minorities that remain would be arrested but often were victim to more sinister fates.
One of Lovecraft Country’s most effective sequences deals with this exact experience, a high-jeopardy, dread-laden set-piece in which Atticus, Letitia and George have six minutes to make it out of the county while being followed by the sheriff who will just as easily brutalise them for speeding.
The sheriff – charmer of a man – tells them it’s his sworn duty to hang them.
The travelling companions are mocked, chased and shot at, all for daring to exist. So when the roaring, gruesome monsters show up, it’s the first time there’s release.
In the superbly crafted Lovecraft Country, whose producers include Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams, the humans are worse than any mythological creature or ghostly beings appropriated from Lovecraft’s cosmic horror – the reality of that ugliness and hatred casts a far more malicious shadow than anything in your imagination.
Horror tropes have often been metaphors for social anxiety, much in the same way Lovecraft the writer used his stories to push his fear of miscegenation and “otherness”.
Those same conventions he helped establish is now being used to explore the true terror of the very real, physical, bodily costs of centuries of overt and institutional discrimination on not just the people but the social fabric.
The spectre of racism is not one easily exorcised, and as much as the show is set in the 1950s, it’s extraordinarily contemporary to today. As a line of dialogue says, “The past is a living thing, you own it, you owe it.”.
Lovecraft Country is confronting and visceral because it has to be, not because it should be – it wants you to feel it in your bones because there’s nothing easygoing or copacetic about the story it’s telling.
Lovecraft Country starts streaming today on Binge
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*Binge is majority owned by News Corp, publisher of news.com.au
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiowFodHRwczovL3d3dy5uZXdzLmNvbS5hdS9lbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50L3R2L3R2LXNob3dzL2xvdmVjcmFmdC1jb3VudHJ5LXJldmlldy10aGUta2lsbGVyLW1vbnN0ZXJzLWFyZS10aGUtbGVhc3Qtc2NhcnktcGFydC9uZXdzLXN0b3J5L2UxZDcxMWVjMTAwMzdmZWI1NTIzZmI4ZDU3NDQxNTkz0gGjAWh0dHBzOi8vYW1wLm5ld3MuY29tLmF1L2VudGVydGFpbm1lbnQvdHYvdHYtc2hvd3MvbG92ZWNyYWZ0LWNvdW50cnktcmV2aWV3LXRoZS1raWxsZXItbW9uc3RlcnMtYXJlLXRoZS1sZWFzdC1zY2FyeS1wYXJ0L25ld3Mtc3RvcnkvZTFkNzExZWMxMDAzN2ZlYjU1MjNmYjhkNTc0NDE1OTM?oc=5
2020-08-18 07:51:06Z
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