Creative revaluation of the racist HP Lovecraft: Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett in a scene from "Lovecraft Country"
Photo: HBO / SkyNothing against series that gently develop their tension, but often it takes a while until it finally gets down to business. Not so in "Lovecraft Country": The first of the ten episodes runs for just two and a half minutes, when the young black hero has already completed a sprint through a horror course.
In the breathtaking opening sequence we see him to heroic music, as he stabs opponents in uniform in the trenches with the bayonet. Suddenly the images change from black and white to color, and UFOs shoot their laser cannons from the sky. And finally the soldier is attacked by a monster with tentacles. Rescue appears in the form of the legendary black baseball star Jackie Robinson, who dismantles the creature with his bat - to be eaten himself.
Making amends for segregation
Then the young Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors), returning from the Korean War and horror fan, wakes up from his dream in one of the back seats of an intercity bus. It is 1955, US society is segregated, blacks are not allowed to travel in the front section. There are famous black athletes like Robinson, but almost no famous black film actors, not even in the horror shocks typical of the time about aliens and flying saucers.
"Lovecraft Country" is a kind of reparation for racial segregation that Hollywood has done for a long time. The HBO series picks up on the horror films of the fifties - and rigorously stages them with black heroes.
Racist in action: white farmer with dogs
Photo: HBO / SkyThe focus is on Atticus and his relatives and friends who are out and about in the states to collect material for a travel guide entitled "The Safe Negro Travel Guide". Such manuals actually existed; they helped black travelers to find safe accommodation in states where segregation laws were particularly brutal. The terror to which Atticus' troops are exposed therefore emanates from two sides: from bloodthirsty monsters and vindictive undead, but also from murderous hillbilly and reactionary sheriffs. The monsters look almost cute against the racists.
Creative revaluation instead of cancel culture
Sometimes they even come to the aid of Atticus and his family. For example in the episode in which the group drives through a so-called Sundown Town, one of those cities that blacks must have crossed before the sun goes down. After a police officer and his henchmen cling to the African Americans to lynch them, vampiric hybrids burst into the scene, which look like giant mealworms with sharp pearly whites. They make amends to the whites and let the blacks escape.
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Cult author HP Lovecraft: Sex grouch and horror god by Marc von Lüpke
The model for the spooky panorama, which is staged with many splatter effects and light thunderstorms, is a novel by Matt Ruff. Its title "Lovecraft Country" refers to HP Lovecraft, the American pioneer of fantastic literature.
Ruff's book functions as a homage and a dismantling at the same time. Lovecraft may also have advanced the genre with his stories about fantastic parallel worlds - he propagated the supremacy of whites in his writings. There is a nice irony in using motifs from the work of the racist Lovecraft to tell about black self-empowerment. Creative revaluation instead of cancel culture, so to speak.
Police violence yesterday and today
Those responsible for the series basically follow the story of the writer Ruff, but load the 1950s setting with references to the present. The police violence depicted in it cannot be viewed without thinking about the video showing the death of George Floyd. The soundtrack is made up of, among other things, current hip-hop tracks.
Bessie Smith sends his regards: Wunmi Mosaku as blues singer Ruby
Photo: HBO / SkySongs are often identity-building here. This can be seen especially in the furious episode, which is about a black blues singer in Chicago who, like the legendary Bessie Smith, sings about alcohol and the devil. The crash artist, who appears in bars for a few glasses of whiskey, is entering into a very special alliance with the devil: As a kind of shapeshifter, she can switch between bodies and begin a double life - as a black blues singer and white department store clerk.
A change of perspective that is played out with relish. The series creators revel in the different scenes, the bourgeois prosperity of the temple of consumption and the musical wealth in the Schwarzenviertel. At the same time, they show in their perfectly formed horror era painting how the white middle class discovered the black lifestyle and unleashed rock 'n' roll in the fifties.
"Lovecraft Country" also tells of this: of the fantasies, desires and projections that are directed at the black body - and which, according to the genre, are destroyed in bloody excess.
From August 17th on Sky Ticket, Sky Go and Sky Q
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