Racism Is America’s Lovecraftian Horror
In 2020, the real terror arises from realizing there’s no good ‘normal’ to get back to
The weekend that Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country premiered on HBO, a house listing went viral on Twitter. The property is, at first, lovely, with marble countertops and hardwood floors. It’s old-fashioned but not rundown. Then you keep clicking through the realtor’s photos, and it happens: A door in the kitchen opens and you are descended, slide by slide, into a vast metal-lined basement, filled with rows and rows of jail cells. The floors are stained with something that might be puke, the metal toilets are covered by with police tape, the locks on the cell doors, as per the listing, still work.
The house was once the town sheriff’s appointed living quarters, back when the sheriff was expected to live on the grounds of the jail. Generations of families, most likely, ate their breakfast and read to their children and kissed each other good night with the groans and shouts of prisoners audible through their walls. I thought of that house often, watching Lovecraft Country, and during one scene in particular. Our protagonists, a Black family taking a road trip through rural America in the 1950s — Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), nephew Atticus (Jonathan Majors), and family friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett) — have…
