‘Lovecraft Country’ Review: Nightmare on Jim Crow Street (Published 2020)

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.