There were a lot of ways “Lovecraft Country” could have gone wrong, but timing didn’t turn out to be one of them. It’s a good moment to get attention for a scary-monster series that rejuvenates the horror genre by making the heroes Black and putting America’s racist history at the center of the story.
HBO, where the 10-episode season of “Lovecraft Country” premieres on Sunday, offered something similar last year with “Watchmen.” But the new series, based on a novel by Matt Ruff and developed for television by Misha Green (“Underground”), is different in a couple of key ways. Race was one theme among many in “Watchmen”; in “Lovecraft Country,” it informs every scene and relationship.
More important, though, is the new show’s attitude to the popular entertainment genres — pulp fiction, comic books, popcorn movies — from which it draws inspiration. It bypasses the high-cult pretensions that, for some of us, made the “Watchmen” adaptation a bit of a drag.
“Lovecraft” fully integrates a noxious real-life history into its fantastical narrative — and reminds us how little some things have changed in the six decades since the story’s setting. But its goal appears to be to scare us into having fun, something it achieves about half the time in the five episodes made available in advance.
That’s not to diminish the impressively seamless job Green has done in wielding the cultural metaphors. (She’s credited as a writer on all 10 episodes, the first three solo.) “Lovecraft” is a quest story: Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors), once a shy, scholarly child and now an embittered Korean War veteran, sets off across 1950s Jim Crow America to find his missing father, learn about his dead mother and perhaps exorcise some of his own demons.
He’s accompanied by various Chicago-based friends and family, including the intrepid, politically active Leti (Jurnee Smollett) and his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), publisher of a “Green Book”-like guide for Black travelers and an aficionado of pulp fiction. Their initial journey takes them to eastern Massachusetts, the Lovecraft country of the title, and to a town called Ardham — one letter away from Arkham, the fictional scene of some of the ghastly H.P. Lovecraft tales that inspired Ruff’s novel. There they run into murderous white cops, a secret society and terrifying vampiric slug-monsters that burrow into the ground in an endearingly meek way when frightened.
Within that Saturday-matinee framework, Green consistently, and not too heavy-handedly, finds ways to link the horrors the characters face with the everyday horrors of Black life. It’s something that’s been done before, going back at least to the original “Night of the Living Dead,” but perhaps not this thoroughly and inventively.
Sometimes the links are literal, as in the idea of poor Blacks being used as subjects for scientific experimentation. But others are more ingrained in the story’s fabric, like the way in which the supernatural illusions the white antagonists inflict on the Black characters constitute a form of gaslighting, making them doubt that the attacks on them are real, or making them think that they’re self-inflicted.
A standard horror-movie device, the magic spell that transforms a character’s appearance, has a different resonance when a Black character is made white and is suddenly treated — by both races — as if she were a human being. In an episode built around Leti’s attempt to integrate a neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, the violent reaction of the white residents is in counterpoint to, and eventually intertwined with, the violent reactions of the ghosts who haunt the house she buys. Throughout, the abuses perpetrated by everyday whites — technically non-monsters — take on an extra malevolence; the occultists, obsessed with eternal life, have at least an understandable motivation.
Most of this material works as both allegory and action, and particularly in its first few episodes, directed by Yann Demange (“White Boy Rick”) and Daniel Sackheim, “Lovecraft Country” gets the blend right. The characters and story are engaging, and the production has a dreamy but vivid feel that hints at Lovecraft’s mesmeric quality while avoiding his florid excesses. (The racism and misogyny that scar Lovecraft’s writings are briefly mentioned.)
And it’s amusing how the love of lowdown pulp is embedded in the story: The expertise that Atticus, George and others have in Lovecraft, Dumas and Edgar Rice Burroughs gives them a tactical advantage in their battles with the monsters. The energy and freedom of pulp serves as both our way into the story and as a means for the Black characters to create an alternate, improved mythology for themselves.
“Lovecraft Country” doesn’t maintain its early momentum, however — the third and fourth episodes don’t have the same allusive pleasures, and the stylistic cues shift to a Spielbergian action-adventure mode that no one involved appears to have much affinity for. The narrative also starts to wander, with questions piling up and a seemingly important chunk of the story, located in South Korea, remaining offscreen — perhaps a warning sign of distracting flashbacks to come.
The actors compensate to some extent for the drift, particularly Vance as the peaceable George and the formidable Wunmi Mosaku as Ruby, Leti’s no-nonsense sister, who aspires to a salesclerk’s job at Marshall Field. (It’s Ruby’s second choice after a singing career, and the Nigerian-born, British-raised Mosaku is both powerful and credible belting out “I Want a Tall Skinny Papa” and “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby.”) Smollett is excellent, too, and adds some needed touches of humor as the feisty Leti, while Majors is charismatic but a little opaque as Atticus, perhaps because so much about the character is being held back.
“Lovecraft Country,” despite its fully hourlong episodes, would be a good candidate for binge viewing — its verve and variety would help carry you through the slow spots, and you could hold the kaleidoscopic story in mind. On HBO, we’ll have to wait and see how Green and her collaborators, including the high-powered executive producers J.J. Abrams and Jordan Peele, carry it across the finish line.
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