‘Lovecraft Country’ Episode 8 Recap: American Horror Story

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Lovecraft Country used Emmett Till’s murder as an in-story plot motivator and I…I just don’t know.

I mean, what do you even say about a CGI-heavy horror/fantasy/action/adventure serial that decides one of its main characters, Diana Freeman, was best friends with the victim of one of the most infamous lynchings in American history—he even appeared in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo a few episodes back—and makes that a driver for her and her friends’ actions? The friends who are traveling through the spacetime continuum and summoning giant monsters with a thousand eyes and hunting for buried treasure in a Goonies-esque cave system beneath Boston—those friends? Is this the kind of grab the third rail and let the electricity fuel you move any politically minded drama should be willing to make, or is it a crass exploitation of a real-life atrocity just to give your ghost story instant gravitas?

What about the way in which Till’s death is handled, specifically? Is it okay for the show to soundtrack the line of onlookers awaiting admission into his funeral with Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer”—yes, the song from The Karate Kid? Is it okay for the show to literally reenact Till’s lynching on a white woman in the form of Christina Braithwhite, a sorceress who allows herself to be murdered just so she can be resurrected seconds later? What is that? Allegory, or exploitation?

Can we find the answer in the events and incidents and plot points that surround this central device? I’m not sure there, either. One one hand, this episode (directed by series creator Misha Green from a script she co-wrote with Ihuoma Ofordire) is all over the map. Ji-ah, Atticus Freeman’s lover from Korea, shows up for a single scene and is promptly forgotten about. Atticus tells his father Montrose that Leti is pregnant with his son, who will go on to write a book called Lovecraft Country (he even references differences between the events and characters in the series and those in the book, differences that actually exist in the real-life novel from which the show is adapted), which he knows because he traveled to the future when he fell through the portal in the observatory last week. Why are we told this instead of being shown?

On another level, however, this is the best-made episode of the series by a considerable margin. For one thing, it’s actually scary. Yes, it’s a first! Diana Freeman, devastated by the murder of her friend and the disappearance of her mother Hippolyta (NB: In the DC Comics universe, Hippolyta is the mother of Diana, aka Wonder Woman), is cursed by the evil racist Chicago cop Captain Lancaster and is relentlessly pursued by Topsy and Bopsy (Kaelynn Gobert-Harris and Bianca Brewton, both memorable in these extremely demanding roles), a pair of living, dancing, monstrous incarnations of the character from Uncle Tom’s Cabin whose racist caricature appears on the cover of a copy of the book Dee comes across. They’re a little bit a little bit The Shining, a little bit The Ring, a little bit Us, a little bit It, a little bit It Follows, and very, very frightening.

The episode also boasts some of the show’s strongest shot compositions. Atticus and Montrose on the street at dusk, as a rolling blackout puts out the lights. Leti in church, praying for Atticus’s safety amid a sea of empty pews. Leti and Christina in that same church, silhouetted against an inferno of candles.

There’s also another sex scene between Ruby (as a white woman) and Christina (as a white man) that tops anything the series has done with this kind of material so far. Ruby’s white body tears apart mid-coitus in huge crimson strips, even as Christina’s William-body stays intact. This is the kind of thing you serve up when you stop worrying about getting things right and just thrust your hands into race, gender, and sexuality right up to the elbows, not worrying about how wet you get.

And the intensity of Dee’s storyline is such that it stands on its own. The gruesome way in which Captain Lancaster and one of his minions corner her in an alley, using spit to seal a curse on her forehead, is white-hot with racist animus. Her ferocious retort to them later on, when she spits on Lancaster and says “Fuck you, pig,” is equally incandescent.

And then there’s the climax, where Lancaster and his men open fire on Leti’s pioneering house on the North Side and nearly murder Atticus in the street, only for one of those eyeball monsters to emerge from beneath the asphalt and tear through the cops like a fist through a wet paper bag. It’s cathartic, it’s gruesome, and it says more of value about the relationship between American policing and the enforcement of racial hierarchies in 30 seconds than Watchmen said in an entire season.

So. Does all of that justify the use of a murdered child, killed for the crime of being Black in white America? Has a show like Lovecraft Country, with its often goofy visual effects and shaky episodic structure, earned that right? Or is it not a matter of right, but of obligation? Would the show be a worse one were it not to drive home the real-life horrors that inspired the fictional ones?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Lovecraft Country Episode 8 ("Jig-A-Bobo") on HBO Max

Watch Lovecraft Country Episode 8 ("Jig-A-Bobo") on HBO Now