I love a good ritual. A good Sunday night series can make a huge difference to your week. The fun of having that ritual where you get snacks, cozy up and take part in a truly great weekly experience, is one of the little things that makes life great sometimes and maybe even comes with a little dark magic. Lovecraft Country was exactly that sort of series. The Blu-ray is out now from HBO and it’s been a very special revisit with some cool special features to boot.

Lovecraft Country’s synopsis broke down like this:

“Lovecraft Country” is based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, and follows Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) as he joins up with his friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) and his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of his missing father (Michael Kenneth Williams). This begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the terrifying monsters that could be ripped from an H.P. Lovecraft paperback.

Watching Lovecraft Country during the protests we had in our country due to the atrocity that was George Floyd’s murder by police. This show running parallel to those events were surreal.

Everyone is familiar with the fact that HP Lovecraft was a racist and bigot. It was obviously a very different time, but that is barely an excuse at all. The fact is Lovecraft was a fantastic writer of the macabre but he was not a good person when it came to real life. The series picks up on that and doesn’t go easy on him for it. The villains in the series are all obsessed with forms of purity in race and in magic. All of that while the characters are facing the very real terrors of the civil rights movement.

Our team of good guys are out to undo everything that is control and segregation. Atticus, Leti, Hippolyta and George are huge heroes and have a natural way of bringing that magic into the world of magic and spells but organically. It’s a fantastic show because of the talent involved and the natural way it does manage to combine the dramatic with the horrific. A lot of times the monsters that Lovecraft dreamed up aren’t as terrifying as the racist cops assaulting a young black girl in an alley. And that is a line that the brilliant creator Misha Green executes beautifully.

In one of Lovecraft Country’s best episodes, Holy Ghost Leti moves into a house in a white neighborhood that is haunted by its fair share of terrors. While Leti is dealing with the racists assholes trying to push her out of their neighborhood, she is also unwittingly dealing with the ghosts of several black people who were made to take part in horrific medical experiments. The house is haunted and things definitely go bump in the night and Green delivers the big scares by way of practical fx that mirrored medical experiments that were executed on those poor unwilling patients. Baby arms attached to grown men, jaw bones removed from still living souls. A lot of terrible experiments that are all revealed in the episodes finale. All of the tortured ghosts come out and show themselves to their soon to be victim and watching a racist get his via furious old souls is so damn satisfying.

That’s what the series does perfectly. Tons of real life events and locations that are constantly being thrown in along with the horror movie content. Now, that is a pretty spoiler free setup. I suppose if you haven’t read the book or watched the series you want everything to remain as spoil free as possible. But, I will say, its wildly imaginative, and provocative and plays on H.P. Lovecraft’s works by deconstructing them with no reverence what so ever toward a know racist.

There are plenty of great special features here too. Each digs into the real bits of horror as well as the stuff that the show touches on that HP Lovecraft’s works brought to the show.

The disc includes an exploration of the series that include items like:

• Compendium of Horrors (NEW)
• Orithyia Blue and the Imagination of Diana Freeman (NEW)
• Crafting “Lovecraft Country”
• Exploring “Lovecraft Country”
• “Lovecraft Country”: The Craft

Lovecraft Country hits shelves on February, 2021. Go ahead and head over here to order your copy.

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