Warning: This article contains mentions of racism and racist violence, and slight spoilers for Lovecraft Country Episode 1. 

Before I say anything else, I want to say: go read black writers’ reviews of this episode and this show. Use your search engine of choice — but here are a few to get you started. I’ve done my best to discuss Lovecraft Country’s first episode “Sundown” in a respectful and self-aware way, but I am a white viewer. Please don’t take my word as gospel. Have you read those other reviews yet? Don’t worry. I’ll wait.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvamPJp17Ds

Okay. Having read those reviews, you’ll be familiar with Lovecraft Country’s premise, but I’ll run it down again for clarity’s sake. Based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country follows protagonist Atticus “Tic” Freeman (Jonathan Majors) as he returns home from military service to track down his missing father Montrose (Michael K. Williams), who has seemingly disappeared into 1950s “Lovecraft country.” That is to say, the New England that features so heavily in Lovecraft’s own writings, and is at this time a hotbed of lingering segregationist politics and violent acts of anti-black racism. The show doesn’t hesitate to demonstrate this either.

Tic is accompanied by childhood friend Letitia “Leti” Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) and his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), the former a financially struggling activist and the latter working to assemble a guidebook for the use of black travelers seeking to journey safely across Jim Crow America. Together, these three characters — and the family and community dynamics that help to inform their distinct places and roles in this story — are intriguing and charismatic. They provide an inexorable pull into what promises to be a deeply compelling ten-episode run.

Right off the bat, it should be said that “Sundown” is visually and aurally stunning. Bright splashes of red, green and pink pop when they need to. Otherwise, they’re traded out for oppressively drab and dusty shades for a long, stifling stretch of road or a claustrophobic-ally confining abandoned house, occupied by either silently privileged or vocally hostile white people.

The costuming and set designs are gorgeous, eye-catching, and powerfully evocative of the landscapes of community and threat within and between which our central characters continuously move. Equally alluring is an already delightful creature design, with lots to offer body horror and monster design fans, while drawing them solidly into the story well before any actual monsters even show up. The soundscape is equal parts rich, fun and unsettling, taking full advantage of gross, slimy creature designs and the bustle of a lively and joyous community. It takes just as much advantage of the smothering silence or tense orchestral pieces to capture a uniquely claustrophobic terror and sense of dread as well.

“Sundown”’s musical cues generally are evocative and engaging, moving seamlessly between music reflective of the show’s setting and music from the present day. This approach to the score drives home both the strong sense of time and place, and the idea that this is a contemporary, enormously topical story. Lovecraft Country at no point lets you off the hook to comfortably sit back and think the racist violence and hatred it confronts is just “over.” The cues are expressed powerfully in visuals, sound, music, and subtle acting choices, just as much as in overt dialogue.

Indeed, Lovecraft Country’s first episode is as expressive in what it says as much as what it doesn’t. I can’t tell you how many shows spearheaded by white writers I’ve seen try so hard to be “socially aware” that they back their black characters into overwritten corners. Corners where they’re forced to give a long speech defending their identities from the very screenwriters that brought them into existence. Meanwhile, Lovecraft Country can have a whole conversation in a single moment of eye contact, a minute shift in body language, a single image or the smallest snippet of an overheard bit of dialogue.

It’s keenly aware of multiple and contiguous forms of oppression, too. Colorism runs a quiet but undeniable current of tension under some scenes, for instance. Another scene pulled off awareness of era-typical homophobia in a surprisingly sensitive and yet nearly casual depiction of that experience. It’s as simple as not making our protagonist complicit in it or turning it into a condescending “teaching moment,” while also not ignoring the systematic realities of being a black queer man in 1950s America, and the fear that could (and did) come with it.

It is worth mentioning here that Illinois, relevant as this scene takes place in Chicago’s South Side, was the first state to decriminalize same-sex sexual activity in 1962. However, it’s no secret that forward strides like this have been and continue to be applied unequally along lines of race and class. The awareness of these dichotomies and overlapping, conflicting experiences resonates in the script in (from where I’m standing) a rare and refreshing exercise of “historical accuracy” in genre fiction done right.

This approach to storytelling, confronting and yet simultaneously understated, starts Lovecraft Country off on a strong note of not hand-holding white audiences through being educated, too. It’s not pacing us slowly through what a sundown town is like we’re watching an after-school special, or translating every interaction for the “benefit” of us white viewers. Either you know what’s going on, or you look it up yourself. If you’re not willing to do either, Lovecraft Country’s writing doesn’t hesitate to move on without you.

“Sundown”’s powerful narrative work is further bolstered by a masterful ability to utilize, play with, and discard at will fixtures and conventions of the horror genre. It abandons overplayed tropes like “woman trips over an invisible obstacle when being chased” to emphasize the current of fear, survival and resilience that is so central to these characters’ experiences. At the same time, it dissects and reassembles other tropes to produce a well-executed iteration of “the (virulent racist) humans are the real monsters.”

To say nothing of cleverly borrowing images from one context and depositing them into another. I won’t spoil the context, but in particular there’s a from-above shot of a circle of flares that immediately evokes a memorial service, but ties it to survival and resilience in a way that absolutely gave me goosebumps. You’ll know when you see it, if you haven’t already.

Lovecraft Country’s first episode is a love letter to stories and storytelling, and the importance of meaningful representation. Equally, it’s an unflinching confrontation of how the stories we propagate and uphold can (and do) have violent or hateful histories. Furthermore, it highlights the trials of enjoying fiction in a genre that repeatedly and often violently reasserts that it’s “not meant for you. ”

This thread is woven together seamlessly with the beginnings of a deep-dive into the complexities of intimate and inter-generational relationships troubled by inequity, trauma, and violence. If I had to pick one dialogue exchange to summarize this episode, it might be this quote from Atticus himself, “Stories are like people. The author doesn’t make them perfect, you just try to cherish them, and overlook their flaws,” and its rebuttal from his temporary travelling companion Maybelle Cross (Shanesia Davis), “Yeah, but the flaws are still there.”

All this is tied together by an engaging and varied host of characters with compelling performances by a delightful cast, including Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett, Courtney B. Vance, Aunjanue Ellis, Wunmi Mosaku, and Jada Harris. Every one of them has me hooked and on the edge of my seat to learn more about them and their relationships on the 23rd. There isn’t a single member of our core cast so far that feels underwritten or less well-crafted than the others. I’m confident I’ll only love them more as their connection to all things earthly and unearthly expands. I am buckled in. Take my flowers. Does Misha Green drink wine? I will buy her wine.

I want you to know how seriously I take this 10 out of 10. I don’t rate anything 10 out of 10, even games or movies I’ve loved since I was in single digits. My person can confirm I would not shut up about how irrepressibly enthused this first episode left me, and how I already wanted to watch it two or three more times the moment it ended. When I give this 10 out of 10, I can say wholeheartedly that Lovecraft Country’s powerful, enthralling, confronting, creative, witty first episode deserves every bit of it.

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Lovecraft Country

10

Score

10.0/10

Pros

• Compelling, hugely topical story
• Powerful acting
• Gorgeous visuals and effects
• Masterful sound design

Cons

• I can’t inject the whole series directly into my brain