Lovecraft Country: Sundown The Horror of Insignificance

Lovecraft at his best wrote about two types of horror. Cosmic horror is the one he is better known for, but he also wrote about the more mundane type of horror. The horror that comes from people or things similar enough to people to people to be malevolent. People have often tried to adapt Lovecraft, but I think one of the biggest problems was the difficulty in showing cosmic horror on screen.

Cosmic horror isn’t enormous monsters. It something so much bigger than you that you can’t fight it. it’s about being insignificant in the face of something so huge that it can destroy you without ever knowing or caning what you are. It might step on you as it walks by, but that’s because it didn’t know you were there and that horror, the horror of seeing something that shouldn’t exist, something that by knowing it exists changes you. That horror is spread across Episode 1 of Lovecraft County: Sundown, as is the first.

Lovecraft Country is set in the Jim Crow era of America. I can’t say exactly what year, but it was a time was unfriendly to African Americans. It has three principal characters. It stars with a young black soldier who has recently left Korea and is now returning home because his father has disappeared named Atticus Black. The second character is his uncle and the writer of a travel guide for African Americans. Understanding that piece of history gives you a good idea of the time. Finally, we have a young African American woman who joins the two hoping she can stay with her brother.

After a fair amount of time exploring these three characters, they travel across the country together in search on the way to where they believe that Atticus’s father has disappeared to. The middle part of the story focuses on this. It is also this part of the story that explores one of the major themes of this episode. Racism is probably as close to cosmic horror as you can get. It has its cultists, who are not as disinterested as the cosmic part, but the racism itself will only crush you if you get in its way. You can hide from it, and most of the time you’ll survive.

The cultists in this case are police officers. Men who serve their master with guns and dogs. There is a fair amount of action in this part of the story and several tense moments where you really get the feeling of the everyday horror. Then the more direct type of horror appears..

The police have caught the three protagonists and are marching them into the woods. They are prepared to kill them, though it isn’t entirely clear if there is a way out of that. But then something intervenes. They had mentioned shoggoths earlier in the episode, and this is Lovecraft Country’s version of them. From here, the police die and then someone calls the creatures away.

Lovecraft Country is one of the best pilots I have seen in years. It focuses on the real horror far more than the shock value though it isn’t afraid of the more traditional horror elements and it sets up the characters and the ongoing plot brilliantly with several interesting mysteries such as what happened to Atticus’s father and setting up a family legacy that is a huge theme in Lovecraft’s work.

The mixture of themes, ideas, Lovecraft, modern horror, the setting and even some humor is something that I didn’t expect. But even more, after so many failed attempts, I didn’t think anyone could get cosmic horror right in a movie. It’s hard enough to do in prose where you don’t have to actually show the monster and you can get inside the characters’ heads. But I think the writers and actors of this show did phenomenal in creating a show that, so far, has done cosmic horror justice. I just hope they can keep it up.

P.S. I have no doubt that endless hours will be spent discussing H.P. Lovecraft’s racism and rightfully so. People should understand who he is. And it is even addressed, though briefly in this show. I simply am not all that interested in giving Lovecraft that much attention. I like his work. I don’t like him and he’s dead so he’s unlikely to see any profit from the show.