Dawn Keetley Season one of HBO’s Lovecraft Country (there are rumors of a possible season two) ran from August through October 2020. Created by Misha Green, the series featured a panoply of talented writers and directors, including Green herself, Cheryl Dunye, Shannon Houston, Sonya Winton-Odamtten, and Ihuoma Ofordire. The series is based on Matt Ruff’s […]
Christy Tidwell Misha Green, the creator of HBO’s Lovecraft Country, says the show is “reclaiming genre space for people of color” (O’Connell). From its opening scenes, the show establishes itself as both science fiction (alien spaceships appearing over a Korean War battlefield) and horror (a tentacled Lovecraftian monster, fought off by Jackie Robinson). Throughout its […]
Ayanna Woods Lovecraft Country has received praise and criticism, garnering a large audience throughout its first season. Though it is successful and certainly one of the most interesting debuts in recent memory, the series is decidedly imperfect. Indeed, many critics hold that the series mishandles issues like colorism and queerness by allowing darkskin characters Ruby […]
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. HBO’s adaptation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel Lovecraft Country opens with black and white footage of trench warfare. Series protagonist Atticus ‘Tic’ Freeman (Jonathan Majors) leads the assault through the enemy. He bayonets enemy soldiers, strikes them with his rifle’s stock, and charges through the trench, displaying himself as a formidable […]
Amy Hough Christina Braithwhite (Abbey Lee), the Hitchcock-esque, icy blonde, who steps into Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country with enough explosive force to knock a truckload of racist goons off their axles, is not an easy character to define. Her motives are hard to penetrate because she does not exist in our world. She is a […]
Bethany Doane The opening scene of 2020’s HBO series Lovecraft Country serves as a perfect microcosm of the series’ themes and generic origins. It begins in black-and-white, a war scene accompanied by an old-Hollywood cinematic score. Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) is an American soldier rushing through dark trenches until an explosion brings bright-orange color into […]
“I have so much respect for anyone in the medical profession, like, any area. I really think it’s the most important thing you can do with your life. Almost.” –Maud Saint Maud is only partially about religion. It’s also about the horrors of isolation, end of life care, and mental illness. During this crucial moment […]
Red Dot is a Swedish film released on Netflix US on February 11, 2021. Directed by Alain Darborg and written by Darborg and Per Dickson, Red Dot is a hybrid of survival horror, backwoods horror, and folk horror – more specifically, it’s part of a subgenre I call survival folk horror. Other examples include Deliverance […]
Judaism is not unrepresented in horror, but it has to be handled with sensitivity since anti-Semitism is a far too real horror of its own. The stark fact of the Holocaust adds considerably to this caution. Sometimes the Holocaust has been referenced in horror film, as in The Possession (Ole Bornedal, 2012), but then it’s […]