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Adapting Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, Lovecraft Country is HBO’s new horror series coming from showrunner Misha Green and producers Jordan Peele and JJ Abrams. And judging by this first trailer, the network might have another winner on its hands.
Lovecraft Country follows Atticus Black (Jonathan Majors), an avid sci-fi and horror reader whose missing father pulls him and his family into a world of literal terrors. Embarking on a roadtrip across the Jim Crow US, the Blacks are made to do battle with eldritch horrors and occult conspiracies… as well as the color of their skin in 1950’s America.
Like Ruff’s novel, Lovecraft Country is very much a piece of genre storytelling, though it is rooted firmly in depicting an African American experience during this time, with brutal bigotry and institutional racism as daunting as a tentacled beast.
Co-starring Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Wunmi Mosaku, and Michael K Williams, Lovecraft Country looks to be more than the sum of its parts, offering social perspective and horror thrills.
I’m all for these big-budgeted prestige television series pouring money into great period sets and costumes, and Peele and Abrams’ oversight should inspire some confidence in the monsters and mayhem going down particularly well. The series is set to premiere this August on HBO.