Warning: This article contains discussion of racism, violence, torture, death, murder, and spoilers for Lovecraft Country.

This week’s Lovecraft Country picks up — thematically if not temporally — from where its predecessor left off. With a wound comes a fallout, with loss comes grief, and all are both sharply present and painfully stifled in the aptly titled “Holy Ghost.” After the loss of Uncle George last week, this theme makes sense.

Centering on Leti, “Holy Ghost” primarily tackles her death, resurrection, and struggle to reconnect with the life and community surrounding her in a genuine or fully-experienced way. Threaded throughout is also the pain of George’s loss. Another prevailing theme in this episode is the secrets the various members of this family, both born and chosen, keep from each other.

The episode picks up nearly a month after “Whitey’s On The Moon” wrapped up, but the time jump is smoothly laid out and nothing feels lost in the jump forward. The show’s tone is just as vibrant, unsettling, and intimate as ever. If anything it runs more fluidly than the second episode. I’ve said before that I don’t agree with criticisms that the second episode’s pacing felt choppy and unwieldy. However, I do agree that it was nonetheless very full with exposition, and that some of its CGI effects left something to be desired.

“Holy Ghost” offers a chilling but reassuring answer to both, confidently finding its stride again if indeed it was ever lost. The threads of continuity are acknowledged and very present in the text while also allowing some powerful character-driven story to move forward. This forward movement comes through a well-crafted “monster of the week,” offering a very clear sense of how the anthology-style adaptation of the book is going to feel and operate henceforth.

Tic has spent the past three weeks living with Hippolyta and her daughter Diana. He has been attempting to support them around the house. His welcome is ultimately wearing thin as Hippolyta senses he and Montrose have not told her the full truth about her husband’s death. They disagree — in one of several deeply chilling sequences in this episode — about whether or not to tell her the truth about the Sons of Adam and the magic they wield.

All the same, they have spent the past three weeks telling her he was killed by the sheriff from the first episode. Thus they are further splintering relationships with things they all collectively know but (for one reason or another) don’t speak of out loud.

Meanwhile, Leti faces her own splintering relationships: chiefly her bond with Ruby. She faces equally (if not more significantly) her connection to herself in the wake of her death, and her resulting struggle to find connection in her community. This sense of alienation and attempting to bluster and perform her way through a lively, vibrant humanity that she doesn’t entirely feel pervades the episode. It is palpable even before the more truly supernatural elements settle in.

The opening scene of this episode maintains the deeply evocative use of voiceover recordings that mark out Lovecraft Country’s constant tug of temporality. Those recordings have roots in the 1950s, and a persistent meaning in the modern context. Leti, attending church, is already haunted-looking, struck with something hollow and walled off from those around her as they engage in their joy and their spirituality.

Meanwhile, Precious Ebony (a black trans woman) provides the deeply moving voiceover from a 2017 Nike ad starring trans Afro-Puerto Rican dancer and ballroom star Leiomy Maldonado. This powerfully evokes the loneliness and the struggle to connect and belong and self-actualise, that Leti herself experiences. With it, it showcases her resiliency and her determination to survive.

Indeed, that determination is a large part of what throws Leti headlong into pioneering her way into an all-white neighborhood in North Chicago. This occurs following an unexpected windfall of money she believes came from her mother’s will. She uses it to buy the old, sprawling Winthrop House. Leti plans to refurbish it and turn it into a boarding house for other Black Chicagoans.

So too does she somewhat desperately attempt to reforge her connection with Ruby. That is, she tries until she lets slip that she received an inheritance Ruby did not, and that she hid it from her sister. This reveal deepens and widens a preexisting fault line in a loving but deeply complicated familial tie.

Leaning on familiar horror tropes — and revitalizing them in compelling ways — “Holy Ghost” soon proves that all is not as it seems. First, we encounter the external threat: Leti’s white neighbors, who don’t take long to mount a torturous campaign against her and her housemates. They begin by turning up the heat in the house and providing constant noise by parking their cars out front, with bricks strapped to their car horns.

Walking hand in hand with these, though, is the threat from inside the house that remains as-yet unknown: a haunting. Not to be denied, though, Leti insists on setting down her new roots. She converts the basement room into a darkroom, and throws a house party for herself, her new housemates, and her friends and family.

In a characteristic move to throw the kitchen sink at a problem — something that marks out much of Leti’s behavior throughout the episode — she attempts to grasp onto the life and liveliness that eludes her with both hands, flirting, drinking, thrilling in music and dance. Yet, none of it altogether hits home until she has a moment of truer intimacy with Tic. It is quick, intense and marked in blood, yet the scene nonetheless represents the shattering of a both literal and figurative barrier between Leti and those nearest to her.

It’s no surprise, then, that this raw, intimate, messy experience peels back the scabs on everything else Leti has been denying herself or is unable to access and truly feel. Once she pulls herself together, she emerges to find a burning cross standing in her front garden. Newly revitalized, scraped raw, a vibrant swell of well-deserved rage rises up in Leti. She picks up a baseball bat from inside the house, which is by now emblematic of ways in which Black heroes assert themselves. It is a recurring image throughout the three episodes to date.

She sets to work smashing the windows, headlights, and side mirrors of the still-blaring cars parked in the street in front of her house. This scene is at once intense and heady with a visceral joy and vibrancy that exists alongside her anger and her hurt, and shows us a genuine Leti. A Leti that isn’t performing anymore. She is absolutely stunning, raw, vulnerable, and alive.

Equally striking in this scene is the nearly wordless coordination of solidarity as Tic and several other men in the house gather up their guns and stand silently by to have Leti’s back. Not a shot is fired, but the image is so powerful. It speaks to an incisive awareness of not just inter-community, but pivotally intra-community issues in the writers’ room. It evokes a freedom to have those conversations and bring them to life in the show.

They aren’t issues that I, as a white viewer, can speak to. Instead I’ll just refer you to the official Lovecraft Country Radio podcast: “I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen, in a film, men gathered to protect a black woman. I cannot think of the last time or moment I’ve seen a scene where a black woman was protected in the midst of her reasonable rage.” And Lovecraft Country clearly feels it too.

“Holy Ghost,” though, is an episode that gifts us with not one but two climaxes. Leti — through a violent, chilling encounter with local police officer Lancaster — learns that eight Black people had previously died in the Winthrop House. This revelations plants within her the suspicion that Lancaster himself was involved in the deaths.

This is an episode that starkly confronts the capitalist, racially-charged and highly contemporary system that prizes property over people. In turn, Leti provides us with the most believable instance of someone insisting on staying in her house after she learns it’s haunted I might have ever seen.

She is motivated not by fear or paralysis but by a determination to plant and keep her roots. She is determined to assert for herself a space in the world that she has spent years moving through disconnected and closed off. Leti refuses to be chased away from the space she wants, and needs, to make her home.

Similarly, Leti rejects the frozen disbelief or ignorance often seen in the protagonist of a haunted house film. She researches. She digs. She skips out on sleep to go down the proverbial rabbit hole, and (equally importantly) Tic believes her. Absent is the trope of people — specifically, men — close to a woman doubting her, disbelieving her, or casting aspersions on her grip on reality.

Leti’s research ultimately informs her that the house is haunted by two sets of ghosts. Dr. Hiram Epstein, the previous owner of the house, was a professor at the University of Chicago. Epstein was terminated for “unethical conduct,” which we soon learn was a series of elaborate experiments on Black Chicagoans. It is emblematic of a long history of medical exploitation of Black bodies. You guessed it: these are the eight who previously died in the house, and the second set of ghosts still trapped in the house and mired in their anguish and fury.

For the second time in the episode, Leti throws the kitchen sink at the problem, but now in a much more targeted and deliberate way. She has not found the community and resolve she needed at her local church. However, the act of going to the service in the first place was important, even necessary, to alert her to the rootlessness and isolation she felt. She arms herself with a deep dive into the facts of her new situation, refusing to deny her circumstances with ignorance or more palatable explanations.

Finally, she calls on a former connection of her mother’s, a practitioner of a Yoruba spiritual tradition, in an effort to cleanse the house. “Holy Ghost” rounds off Leti’s journey back to herself and to her own spirit with this engagement seamlessly. It powerfully acknowledges the functioning and significance of the syncretic spirituality found in many African diasporic religions.

Equally important, it continues to pull on the pervasive thread of how meaningful our characters’ ancestors are to not only understanding, but living and growing through the very real, supernatural and natural, threats they face.

In a sequence full of much improved CGI over last week’s snake, and gorgeously ghastly practical effects, Leti, Tic, and the priestess proceed to the basement, calling on the Yoruba orisha, Ọya, to cleanse the house and release the spirits therein. Meanwhile, three of Leti’s white neighbors sneak into her house, believing everyone is gone or asleep. Instead of finding their intended targets, they each meet grisly (yet perversely satisfying) ends at the hands of the Black ghosts residing within.

Returning to our leads, things are not altogether going to plan either. Swift on the heels of what looks like success, Hiram Epstein’s ghost returns with a vengeance. He begins by first possessing the priestess and then Tic. Then he turns viciously on Leti, in perhaps the most truly frightening sequence of the episode.

Leti, however, reaches the culmination of her resurrection — indeed, her healing — by calling on the Black ghosts with whom she shares this terror. She is able to heal them in turn, and together they oust Hiram from the house for good. She stands, in the end, alone, drenched in sweat and pale as a ghost. However, she is panting, vibrantly alive, and ultimately stunningly triumphant.

It wouldn’t truly be an ongoing horror series if things ended there, though. In the aftermath, while Leti has learned and grown from her previously narrow or limited understanding of her own activism and opened the house to board those who truly need it most, all is not resolved. Tic, walking through town, spots the return of Christina Braithwhite’s silver Bentley. Confronting her takes a sharp turn to the poisonous.

Tic finds out that she masterminded Leti purchasing and moving into the Winthrop House to further her own — in many ways still unnervingly mysterious — goals. Additionally he discovers that she has been exploiting the tension between Leti and Ruby by misleading them that the money came from their mother, to her own benefit.

He also finds that she has inherited her father’s invulnerability and grasp over at least this variety of magic. As Tic pulls a gun on her, she reminds him in a nearly-nauseating exchange that, “You really have to be smarter than this. You can’t go around killing white women.”

The house, too, may be cleansed of its threat and healed of its anguished spirits. Yet it’s hardly the last we’re going to see of it, either. In the penultimate sequence, we learn not only that there are marks in the Language of Adam inscribed into the house’s elevator walls, but there are an innumerable number of skeletons — presumably past generations of Sons of Adam — arrayed below the Winthrop House’s basement.

“Holy Ghost” hits all its beats with skill and confidence. The “monster of the week” anthology format allows the show to provide something to multiple different kinds of horror fans as it unfolds. Yet it never loses sight of its heart and, indeed, its spirit: the characters that keep it alive and thriving. This episode set up more than enough questions and engaging hooks to have me eagerly jumping into the next. My single complaint — that I wish we’d seen more of Hippolyta — is, I’m confident, going to be resolved very soon. Now, if you would, hold my drink while I go watch it again. Until next time.

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Lovecraft Country

10

Score

10.0/10

Pros

• Powerful character-driven narrative
• Solid balance between “monster of the week” and continuity
• Thematically striking and consistent
• Fantastic practical effects

Cons

• I wish Hippolyta had more screentime this week