I’m not a big fan of horror. I’ve never really been into fantasy, and the last sci-fi show I watched religiously was The X Files.
The exclusion of these genres from my cinematic diet wasn’t solely because of a lack of interest. As a kid growing up in the church, I was always told that horror was “of the devil,” an evil that needed to be exorcised, not invited in.
But HBO’s sci-fi, fantasy, horror mashups Lovecraft Country and Watchmen have me hooked because the evil they depict is simultaneously otherworldly and more real than ever in the current political climate.
Lovecraft Country, created by Misha Green and executive-produced by Oscar winner Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams, is a provocative series. It takes Jim Crow-era white supremacists and turns them into behemoths — both literally and figuratively — whom the main protagonists, Atticus, Leti and Montrose, will have to defeat to survive. The show comments on race relations in America, depicting the racial horrors that Black people must endure, and the “supernatural” qualities we must embody to overcome the oppressive forces all around us.
Watchmen opens with a scene of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. During that attack, white mobs killed many of the Black residents of the Greenwood District, and burned what was once known as Black Wall Street to the ground.
Fast-forward 98 years and the main crime in Tulsa is racism. The detectives fighting this crime must wear masks to hide their identities from the Seventh Kalvary, a white supremacist terrorist group that masterminded “The White Night.” That assault took out the majority of the city’s police force.
The Seventh Kalvary is established as a descendant of the KKK, and to cement this comparison, we discover a KKK robe belonging to the grandfather of one of the leaders of the Kalvary hanging in his closet. Because of the racial terror the Seventh Kalvary inflicted on the citizens of Tulsa, Sister Knight — whose grandfather suffered through the Tulsa Massacre — is determined to bring them down.
Following in the footsteps of recent films like Get Out, Us and Black Panther, Lovecraft Country and Watchmen use Afrofuturism — which addresses the history of the African diaspora through technological elements and science fiction — to question America’s original sin of slavery. In both these TV series, I also finally see myself front and center in genres (horror, science fiction and fantasy) that have mostly relegated me to a position of powerlessness.
I won’t die in these shows; I might just save the world.
