There are still people out there (dads) who dismissively call Game of Thrones, one of the biggest commercial and critical hits in television history, the “dragon show.” But it’s obviously much more than that, just as another HBO series, Lovecraft Country, has higher ambitions than being known as the “monsters show.” The 1950s-set horror drama is about racial inequality, police brutality, and being Black in Jim Crow-era America.
And also “really f*cking cool” monsters.
“We have the ghost story. We have the adventure, the Indiana Jones story. We have the mystery story. We have the sci-fi story,” showrunner Misha Green told Entertainment Weekly about Lovecraft Country before praising the special effects team for the digital beasts they worked on. Originally, she wanted to put a dragon into the show, but that proved to be too expensive (no wonder Daenerys went from three dragons to one), so she and the team came up with a replacement monster that looks “really f*cking cool”:
“The idea that there’s not just one monster. I didn’t want to wait till the end of the season to see some big effects. I wanted to start in episode one and keep building from that.”
Episode one will also have an “extremely frightening” scene involving a small-sundown town Massachusetts police officer threatening to lynch three Black people if they don’t cross the county line in time. “The slow chase is probably the most tense thing I had experienced,” Da 5 Bloods breakout Jonathan Majors said. “You see a cop car, it could be a hearse. So that sequence was extremely frightening… You want the tension. But when it all came down, when it was all over, we had each other. And that’s a great theme in the [show]: that this family is so tight.” Lovecraft Country premieres on August 16.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)