From the opera-film Dingjun Mountain (1905) to the propaganda films of the Cultural Revolution, mainland China’s film history has been rich since its infancy and continues to develop in fascinating ways. Since the early days of the global movie market, China has struggled to categorize its approach to film both politically and economically. As with other forms of media, film became a nationalized industry in the PRC in the 1950s,tasked with promoting the values of Chinese communism.
Although the industry, like many others, was opened to "free-market" forces in the 1980s, the CCP remained committed to influencing the production of film (Su, 99). To this day, the Party retains tight control of what shows up on screen and, to an extent, the capital-flow around the industry (Frater).
China's largest film studio: Hengdian World Studio
In the years since the film industry’s liberalization, the Chinawood-Hollywood relationship has been in constant flux. Though the PRC has consistently attempted to compete with Hollywood films in their domestic market, it opened up to the possibility of using Hollywood to its advantage in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Rather than struggle in vain to overpower the Hollywood machine, the CCP switched tactics, and in 1994, introduced 10 revenue-sharing American productions to the box office per year (Su, 94). This quota was increased each year, and in 2019, 38 Hollywood movies were imported to China (Zeitchik). Using the revenue from Hollywood movie ticket sales, China has revitalized its film industry; in fact, they have saved the studios from the near bankruptcy they were facing before this reform (Su, 96). Consequently, the Chinese film industry has grown exponentially so that by 2010, the PRC became the world’s third largest film producer behind the US and India (Su, 94).
Though some see Chinese studios struggling to match Hollywood’s revenue, there is one week where domestically produced films unquestionably win: Lunar New Year. The phenomenon of the Chinese New Year Film likely originated in Hong Kong, and is still associated with the city today. Therefore, it is worth mentioning that the historic Cantonese-Mandarin culture divide persists and, predictably, extends to the film industry, manifesting in differently themed/focused films being produced in Hong-Kong and Guangzhou versus in the rest of Mandarin China (Liu et al). However, though there remains a unique Cantonese film culture, the seat of which lies in Hong Kong, the New Year film has become far more universal over time. As of now, it is the biggest time for the Chinese box-office, raking in a record $860 million from Feb 4th-10th alone in 2019 (Davis). On the other hand, the divide between styles of New Year films may be growing stronger.
Many Hong-Kong natives report an aversion to seeing mainland Chinese films, especially with the city’s churning political turmoil and pro-Western sentiment in recent years. Some are put off by the role of the Chinese government in the film industry-- to be fair the "free" United States whose flag people had been waving also uses Hollywood as a massive propaganda wing. The Dept. of Defense essentially subsidizes war movies via access to military equipment, locations, and expertise for films in exchange for the final say over scripts in order to curate an image of American Military intervention that justifies imperialism (Second Thought). But in this region of China, a bastion of liberal sympathy, there is anecdotal evidence as well as box office stats to suggest that Hong-Kong residents much prefer local movies with a uniquely Hong-Kong quality (Frater).
2020 Lunar New Year alone was predicted to generate as much as 1 billion dollars in ticket sales, so it was an especially devastating blow to the Chinese film industry when the Lunar NY weekend releases were cancelled due to the outbreak of coronavirus (Brzeski). In fact, the distributor of one of the movie’s share values “dropped 21% in the four-trading-day week” and another “fell 13%” (The Guardian). Not only is this turn of events financially devastating, it is also presumably very disappointing to Chinese people.
To the Hong-Kongers, this cancellation of a long and joyous tradition may even feel like an additional jab from the PRC. Regardless, the cancellations serve only to further demonstrate one of the obvious entertainment downsides of Coronavirus. Though China's total box office revenue for 2020 was down by a staggering 68% from the previous year, it still reached over 3 billion USD, while the US box office limped along at 2.28 billion (Shackleton; Yiu). However, this lunar new year (2022) is a massive improvement. In fact, holiday ticket sales have already reached 1.2 billion USD (Heng).
Historically, the Chinese box office generates lots of revenue from Hollywood imports. Box Office Mojo cites Paw Patrol, Encanto, and The Matrix:Resurrections as box office toppers along with Chinese films like military action flick, Water Gate Bridge (BOM). In fact, it seems like Hollywood movies just keep gaining popularity (I would guess, to the chagrin of many government officials and Chinese movie industry professionals).
How will Chinese releases continue to fair opposite Hollywood imports?
The future of the global movie market hangs in the balance.
Brzeski, Patrick. “Chinese New Year Film Releases Canceled in Response to Coronavirus Outbreak.” The Hollywood Reporter, 23 Jan. 2020, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/chinese-new-year-film-releases-canceled-response-coronavirus-outbreak-1272282.
“China's Biggest Box Office Weekend Scrapped amid Coronavirus Crisis.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 23 Jan. 2020, www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/23/china-new-year-film-releases-scrapped-coronavirus-crisis.
Davis, Rebecca. “China's Lunar New Year Box Office Sets Record, Despite Rampant Piracy.” Variety, 13 Feb. 2019, variety.com/2019/film/news/piracy-wandering-earth-chinese-new-year-1203138142/.
Frater, Patrick. “Hong Kong and China Box Office to Take Separate Directions at Chinese New Year.” Variety, 22 Jan. 2020, variety.com/2020/film/asia/hong-kong-china-box-office-separate-directions-at-chinese-new-year-1203473523/.
“Hong Kong Box Office Weekends For 2020.” Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/by-year/2020/?area=HK.
Lui, Hui, et al. “‘Guangzhou Film’ and Guangzhou Urban Culture: An Overview.” Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China: Kaleidoscopic Histories, edited by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, University of Michigan Press, 2018, pp. 134–155. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22727c7.9.
Su, Wendy. “Cultural Policy and Film Industry as Negotiation of Power: The Chinese State's Role and Strategies in Its Engagement with Global Hollywood 1994-2012.” Pacific Affairs, vol. 8, no. 1, Mar. 2014, pp. 93–114. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43590825.
Tartaglione, Nancy. “Chinese New Year Films Cancellation Could Mean A $1B+ Loss For Global Box Office In 2020; What's The Impact On Hollywood.” Deadline, 24 Jan. 2020, deadline.com/2020/01/chinese-new-year-films-cancellation-impact-global-hollywood-box-office-analysis-1202838847/.
Zeitchik, Steven. “The Trade War's Unlikely Victim: Hollywood.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 14 June 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/06/14/trade-wars-unlikely-victim-hollywood/
Shackleton, Liz. “China Box Office Topped North America in 2020 Thanks to Quicker Post-Lockdown Recovery, Strong Local Titles.” ScreenDaily,
13 Jan. 2021,
https://www.screendaily.com/features/china-box-office-topped-north-america-in-2020-thanks-to-quicker-post-lockdown-recovery-strong-local-titles/5156165.article.
Yiu, Enoch. “China Displaces Us as the World's Biggest Box Office Market in 2020.” South China Morning Post,
1 Jan. 2021,
https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3116128/chinas-box-office-expands-worlds-largest-defying-year-disastrous.
Heng, Cheryl. “China's Holiday Box Office Soars to Record as Covid Restrictions Limit Travel.” South China Morning Post,
23 Feb. 2021,
https://www.scmp.com/business/money/spending/article/3122812/chinas-lunar-new-year-box-office-revenues-soar-third-record?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article&campaign=3122812.
Let me start by saying that I really enjoy Lovecraft's works-- both the originals and the many contemporary cosmic horror pieces which take inspiration from Lovecraft.
It is also important to note that white supremacy can be found throughout Lovecraft’s works, obviously deeply entangled with all of his ideas of fear. White supremacy, I argue, forms the roots of Lovecraftian horror in general-- though I do believe that it can be shifted so that white supremacy is no longer the root cause of the fears in cosmic horror, a fact which is exemplified by the great work done by many who are in critical conversations with Lovecraft-- particularly authors/creators of color.
Background
H.P. Lovecraft was an interesting character to be sure. He has been described by turns as neurotic, mentally ill, haunted by nightmares, awkward, and reclusive. He was born and raised in New England-- Providence, RI. He rarely left that setting apart from a brief stay in NYC when he was married for a little while.
He has the background of a veritable gothic protagonist, coming from a wealthy and mysterious white family plagued by tragedy. He was a quirky, sickly person; melancholic and introverted. He had a genuine love of science (and pseudoscience) and history, relishing in obscure morsels of knowledge (Herrmann, 304).
He was also violently racist and anti-semitic. He was a self-described conservative who subscribed to white supremacist theories of race science. He wrote numerous things both published and unpublished which attest to this racism. Lovecraft's obsession with history often manifested in decidedly unwholesome ways.
Informed by an inflated sense of his own paternal genealogy and an awareness of the Phillipses’ direct connection to distinguished New England lines, Lovecraft’s emphasis on his friends’ ancestry suggests that for him, it is not enough simply to be a Yankee, culturally speaking; ideally, one ought to descend from the bloodlines of New England’s ancient Dutch and Anglo-Saxon settlers. (Ralickas, 46% in e-book New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature)
Lovecraft was a pioneer in what he and his compatriots termed "weird fiction," and is, arguably, the inventor of the genre we call "cosmic horror," which plays on fears of massive, mutating, uncategorizable, mysterious forces of the universe beyond human comprehension or agency. According to Ann and Jeff Vandermeer:
A “weird tale,” as defined by H.P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est. 1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s. As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale “has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane.
Known for short stories which were published consistently in the pulp sf/horror mags, Lovecraft also worked within the New England gothic tradition-- lots of stuff about old settler NE families and mysterious histories, strange small NE towns, the landscape… When transplanting the gothic from its ancient European setting to the New World, it is clear that settler colonialism is indispensable to the new context. Many of the anxieties expressed and the language’s interaction with landscape and communities reflects deep seated fears and misconceptions about indigenous people.
His Cthulhu mythos perhaps his best known and certainly most iterated upon and adapted body of work. This fictional universe/series develops a rich lore, a pantheon of otherworldly elder gods which are inconceivable to the human mind, and the various cults which worship them.
But besides his extensive fiction canon, Lovecraft also dabbled in literary theory. He published an essay about the development of horror fiction in 1927 called “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (SHL). It is a seminal horror studies text which examined the genre as it stood at the time. In it, we get to see glimpses into Lovecraft’s psychology through his philosophy on fear. In it he talks about his theories (which are not really based in much research) about human fears of the universe. However, as we will examine in more detail later, these “universal” fears are not as universal as Lovecraft thinks. In Sean Moreland’s intro to New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature:
The racial politics of Lovecraft’s atmosphere are prominent in SHL’s typological approach to the supernatural literature of different cultures. While justifying Lovecraft’s claim that the “literature of cosmic fear” (22) is a trans-cultural, almost universal, human phenomenon stemming from a “profound and elementary principle” (21), his brief discussions of non-Anglo-Saxon examples emphasize their insufficient seriousness and cosmicism.
Lovecraft reveals a lot about white America’s settler fears. In the footnotes to her article, Newitz points out that in the SHL monograph:
...Lovecraft defines the three “terrors” that fuel the weird tale in America as a fear of the wilderness, a fear of Indians, and the repressive heritage of the Puritans.(Newitz, 214)
Themes
Civilizational decay is found in the lost civilizations of the "old ones" in the cthulhu mythos like in the Call of Cthulhu etc. The weird and uncanny is in everything. There is fear of the other, but more prominently, I think is the fear of BEING the “other”, very much exemplified in “The Outsider” and other stories where the protagonist finds out he is different than these other primary beings/just a side character or that he himself is the monster, etc. Of course, we see a lot of cosmic insignificance. And finally, there's ambivalence towards religion-- religion/cults are shown to be very powerful yet something to be feared; moreover, they’re always painted as unsophisticated and uncivilized people.
Why white supremacy is at the root of Lovecraftian horror
The settings: deeply colonial
The central fears and themes: problematic
The aesthetics: racism dressed up as science
Though for some reason there are still Lovecraft apologists who write him off as a “man of his time,” there are countless un-ignorable indications of Lovecraft’s unsavory views (which he expresses constantly through his works).
We should address his apparently contradictory marriage to the Jewish Sonia Greene. As Speculative fiction/fantasy author P. D. Clark (whose book I will mention later) says in his article “The ‘N’ word through the ages: The madness of HP Lovecraft”:
Apologists look for any sliver of hope in Lovecraft’s life that might point away from his rampant biases, such as the fact that he married a Jewish woman. Yes, andStrom Thurmond, segregationist and believer in black inferiority, fathered a child with a black woman. Lovecraft’s random act does little more than prove that racism is illogical, contradictory and filled with psychosexual complexities of Freudian proportions. Besides, one of the reasons cited for the eventual divorce from his Jewish wife, according to her letters, was his virulent anti-Semitism. She claimed he enthusiastically devouredMein Kampfin one sitting, and that she often had to remind him that she herself was Jewish whenever he launched into one of his diatribes.
The Horror at Red Hook
This story, told from a third person omniscient perspective following a detective called Malone, is about uncovering a dark mystery right under the streets of Brooklyn. Detective Malone is investigating the case of Robert Suydam, a strange old anthropologist who was investigating the religious and folk traditions of “foreigners”. Eventually, Suydam was done with his research and began to hang out with fancy high society again, looked better and rejuvenated, and even was married. Simultaneously, there are more and more kidnappings going on in Red Hook, until finally some kids who actually matter are kidnapped-- “two blue eyed norwegians” (Lovecraft)-- which sets the law in motion.
Meanwhile, Suydam and his wife are mysteriously murdered on a ship and his body is taken by “a horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers’ dress” (Lovecraft). Malone knows the kidnappings and strange happenings are connected with Suydam’s death somehow and goes to Suydam’s apartment to investigate. There he is sucked into a hellish realm where he witnesses the wretched rituals of the Kurdish “Yezidi clan of devil worshippers” performing a dark ceremony to summon a monster and re-animate Suydam’s corpse.
In this story, there is a lot of obvious racism (particularly against Middle Easterners), orientalism, and coded anti-semitism going on.
Here is the first description of the slums of Red Hook:
Here Lovecraft: expresses utter revulsion at the entanglement of immigrants of various backgrounds; basically calls the slums and the people therein infectious; engages in “law and order” discourses.
It's clear that this passage generates great fear and revulsion for the NY slums. And, what do you know, Lovecraft was actually living in poverty in NY at the time and was married to a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene for a couple years. This brief stay clearly directly inspired Red Hook.
In the end, the Kurds get the honor of being Lovecraft’s most demonized villains in this story. This satan worshipping, human-sacrificing, child-killing death cult is made up of Kurdish immigrants whose rituals (even the above ground ones just in a regular church) he describes with utter disdain.
Moreover, he expresses fear (as mentioned before) of a pre-racial past and losing his (privileged) identity as a white man. Describing the cult, Detective Malone thinks:
They must be…the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition…. There had survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world.
This sentiment is compounded by the later statement:
The strange dark men danced in the rear, and the whole column skipped and leaped with Dionysiac fury. Malone staggered after them a few steps, delirious and hazy, and doubtful of his place in this or in any world.
So as the text makes obvious, the fear here is rooted in the pre-Aryan past, a time when European cultures were still grounded in traditional cultural/ethnic distinctions rather than homogenized under the colonial project of creating a new “white” identity. In Newitz’s words:
A “pre-Aryan” past is essentially a preracial past. Ultimately Lovecraft fears that this past might live again, become “reanimated,” if the races mix to the point where distinguishing between them becomes impossible (Newitz, 114)
Detective Malone, just after witnessing the orgiastic mania of these “dark” men, finds himself questioning his place in the universe-- cosmic horror-- however, more specifically, I feel like this statement is reflective of him questioning his place in the order of things as a white man. We know that Lovecraft himself certainly had an identity crisis about this and ultimately chose euro-American whiteness over everything else.
In a letter he wrote, Lovecraft once said:
It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which gave us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is—since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever. (Lovecraft, Selected Letters III, 208. via Kneale)
Lovecraft knew that his attachments to New England and to family lineage and to his whiteness were contradictory to the nihilism he expressed about the universe; it seems that in his almost post-human cosmic horror way, race would not make sense as a social construct in this world… However, he chooses, foolishly and cowardly, to cling to this rock of whiteness instead of relinquishing the self. In the words of Kneale:
Lovecraft chose ‘Englishness’ over cosmic pessimism, even though he knew the former to be meaningless and arbitrary. Lovecraft clung to conservative, familiar and local constructions of nation, self and—above all—race while proclaiming the meaninglessness of human standards in the face of an uncaring universe. (Kneale, 98)
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Shadow Over Innsmouth can pretty definitely and clearly be interpreted as a story about racial “degeneration” via miscegenation.
It is told from the POV of an amateur antiquarian and anthropologist who encounters a strange town on a “sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical” trip through New England (Lovecraft, 331). The people, he realizes, look and act strange and he encounters esoteric artefacts unidentifiable with any extant culture. He hears a story from a drunken old man which at first he doesn’t believe but later, to his horror, discovers is true. The old man tells him that the Natives had begun to worship “god-things that lived under the sea” and were sacrificing many people to these beings in exchange for prosperity and good fishing (Lovecraft, 361).
Eventually these things wanted to interbreed with the natives and they reluctantly agreed, creating fish-like human hybrids which become more and more fishy as they age (Lovecraft, 362).
The narrator begins to see more and more monstrous fishlike people all while receiving premonitions/dreams.
The fish people are at times described as:
dirty simian-visaged children (345)
perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor (350)
[speech is described as] hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognised human speech (379)
bestial abnormality of their faces and the dog-like sub-humanness… One man moved in a positively simian way (391)
limitless swarms (397)
The protagonist eventually comes to realize that an ancestor of his was an Old One, and he transforms into a fish-person, escaping to the depths of the sea which by that point he accepts as his fate and is anticipating “Stupendous and unheard-of splendours” (405).
First of all, there's the assigning of blame here: racial degeneration comes from the whites learning from the Indigenous about these beings. The whites learned to participate in this wretched hybridity from the Indians (Newitz, 112; Lovecraft). Perhaps this is even symbolic of certain Indigenous populations inter-marrying with Black folks and the fear that white people would follow suit?After all, these hybrid children are born only after the Civil War in the story (Lovecraft, 370).
Regardless, a major factor here is thethreat to white power from within-- miscegenation and race traitors.
As Newitz argues...
“But there is something in Innsmouth more menacing than the threat of black and immigrant breeds: whites who want to breed with them, and who flourish in the process” (Newitz, 112)
Contemporary Adaptations
Countless creatives have adapted, built on, discussed, or been in dialogue with Lovecraft’s works. Video games, RPGs, fiction prose, poetry, comics/graphic novels, music, TV, movies. Writers/directors have adapted the cosmic horror genre into something actively anti-racist, explicitly challenging Lovecraft’s own white supremacist views.
Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s Lovecraftian comicbook series Providence features a gay Jewish protagonist; Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez’s Locke & Key graphic novels feature gay characters, and there's a recent Netflix TV adaptation of it which retains this, too!
With regard to misogyny (racialized), Gina Wisker writes:
Two common problems emerge in our reading of the work of Lovecraft, master of horror: his fictional representations of or absence of women, and his terror and disgust at otherness, which manifests itself most obviously as racism. The two come together in the terrifying results of miscegenation, a Lovecraftian staple. (Wisker, "Speaking the Unspeakable" in New Directions in Horror Supernatural Literature)
So it comes as no surprise that contemporary women writers may want to subvert, interrogate, and complicate these tropes. Why not turn the Lovecraftian into something feminist?
Angela Carter wrote a fantastical story called Nights at the Circus about a bird-woman who goes through life’s trials at a brothel and as a freakshow performer with humor and sass. In what I think is a great choice, the cosmic horror is eventually undermined in favor of a more empowering ending, as the protagonist narrowly escapes cultish sacrifice in the end.
Within the neo-Lovecraftian tradition, there's lots of anti-racist works.
Phenderson Djèlí Clark wrote a Lovecraftian type horror story called Ring Shoutwhere the monsters are KKK members and DW Griffith (Yes, the Birth of a Nation guy) is an evil sorcerer.
Clark says:
"We're gonna do what we want with it, and there's nothing you can do about it. My writing is not an ode to Lovecraft, it is more so a jab." (CBC)
Victor Lavalle is a Black speculative fiction and fantasy author. His 2016 novella “The Ballad of Black Tom” is an adaptation of H.P.’s “The Horror at Red Hook,” one of Lovecraft's more explicitly racist and xenophobic pieces. In this adaptation, Tommy Tester is a young Black man in Harlem who is trying to make a living to support his sick dad. He is a smart guy who uses social perceptions to his advantage-- he dresses as a jazz/blues musician because: “When he dressed in those frayed clothes and played at the blues man or the jazz man or even the docile Negro, he knew the role bestowed a kind of power upon him. Give people what they expect and you can take from them all that you need.” (Lavalle, 32). Through smuggling a forbidden book, Tommy Tester gets involved in this cultish awakening of the Old Ones, interacting with Lovecraft’s own characters like the anthropologist Suydam and detective Malone.
Something very important to take from Lavalle (and the analysis of it by James Kneale): cosmic horror may not be as "universal" as Lovecraft and others posit.
Facing murderous racist violence, hostile policing, and residential discrimination, Tommy has a revelation: “A fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naïve… What was indifference compared with malice?” he thinks. “Indifference would be such a relief.” (Kneale, 104)
Basically, if your experience of the universe is that everything seems set up to tear you to pieces, and you’re used to feeling less agency already, why would you fear being “insignificant” in the grand design of the universe? If on a day to day level, you are just trying to get by, and in fact, the universe seems maybe like it even hates you… Indifference would be a relief indeed.
Throughout the book, Tester AKA Black Tom views the happenings of Lovecraft’s story through his own lens as a Black man, creating his own alternative weird and eerie geographies around the city. He feels more at home in Harlem and is constantly confronted by stifling whiteness in other spaces throughout the city. As Tester rides the subway, he notes feeling more conspicuous as he gets more into white neighborhoods (Lavalle, 12). His life is significantly complicated in mundane ways by the pervasive blanket of racism. For instance, at some point Tester wants to leave Suydam’s house but feels trapped, thinking: “A Negro walking through this white neighborhood at damn near midnight? He might as well be Satan strolling through Eden” (Lavalle, 45).
“In this respect Ruff and LaValle turn Lovecraft’s weird geography inside out, with African-Americans as the alien outsiders in white America’s sun-down suburbs and towns… Ruff says…'with just a few changes [The Shadow Over Innsmouth] could easily be the story of a black traveler caught in the wrong place after dark.'"(Kneale, 100)
Various Black authors have hinted at race and racism as a construction not unlike the "eerie". DuBois uses strange metaphors to describe his experiences of race and talks about the pervasive (eerie) sensation of always "being a problem" (Kneale, 98). Fanon knows that race and therefore his own identity has been defined solely by the whites as the "other;" he writes that race is but a collection of many insubstantial details, a carefully constructed web of social symbols. Race itself is the immutable, incomprehensible law of the cosmos, the machinations of strange beings.
“Perhaps places can be eerily racist despite the absence of a specific agentive source for that racism” (Kneale, 99).
Lovecraft Country (HBO), a series based on the novel by Matt Ruff, does a great job expressing this. This diner scene in the pilot shows George (Courtney Vance), Atticus (Jonathan Majors), and Leti (Jurnee Smollett), realizing that they are not only unwelcome, but in active peril when they stop in a small town. The characters have that kind of "Spidey sense" for racism, where all these subtle clues cue them into the eerie racism of this geography of fear and hate.
A particularly pertinent (and real) passage from The Safe Negro Travel Guide for 1954: JIM CROW MILE—A unit of measurement, peculiar to colored motorists, comprising both physical distance and random helpings of fear, paranoia, frustration, and outrage. Its amorphous nature makes exact travel times impossible to calculate, and its violence puts the traveler’s good health and sanity constantly at hazard. (Kneale, 102)
Now, does that not sound Lovecraftian to you?
The cosmic horror, the eerie/weird fiction sensibility of this reality is reflected in the show when the characters are trying to escape a sundown town before the sun sets, being pursued by an officer. Just a few moments stretch before them as they struggle against the warping of time.
To add to the arbitrary and cruel nature of the sundown town race against time, in the end, it doesn't even matter if the clock tells them they should be safe: the officer has driven them into a trap.
I was thinking to myself, especially after reading Black Tom, cosmic horror is obviously not universal. So what about cultures that don't have that concept at all, peoples who don't look at the unknown or the cosmos with fear, but instead... wonder.
Cosmic wonder. I thought that I basically was the first person to articulate this, since I looked for writings about this to no avail… until I found a chapter in Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic (edited by Greve and Zappe) by Gry Ulstein which discusses just that.
Do we have to look at the vast unknown with fear and cynicism? Ulstein discusses the limitedness of cosmic horror and the potential role of hope as a counterweight:
Emanating from this peculiar form of realism, Lovecraft’s cosmic dread “silence[s] the dominant human,” and can make sobering interjections into anthropocentrism and individualism. But the traditional weird leans heavily on nihilism, and seems uninterested in whether the human silencing might allow other realities to resonate. It does not typically evoke affects like hope or affirmation, which Alexa Weik von Mossner suggests might be crucial “to even the most gruesome views of the future”—or the present. (Ulstein, 130)
I am not writing off the concept of cosmic horror and those themes of smallness and fear at the great mysterious beyond as inherently white supremacist or eurocentric. I have seen these fears crop up in many cultural traditions around the globe. I think to an extent these feelings are almost universal, however, they may not be culturally dominant.
Whether it’s Lavalle’s challenge to cosmic indifference, responding with “indifference would be a relief,” or whether it’s the hope in the unknown expressed by Ulstein, cosmic horror can and should be complicated.
A hopeful twist on the Cthulhu mythos is Donna Haraway’s concept of the "Cthulucene" (something I read about in a class a while ago and scoffed at… I still do think it’s a little hypocritical since Haraway talks about how inaccessible esoteric academic language is and yet, like, is this term any better though?). Here it is.
Cthulucene: “Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen—yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story." (Haraway, 55)
As for cultures which look on the unknown, the cosmos, etc. with more wonder than fear...
The Shahnameh (an ancient Persian epic) looks on the strange twists of fate with acceptance instead of fear and resistance: “And while one is brought up with luxury and caresses, and is thrown bewildered and despairing into a dark pit, another is lifted from the pit and raised to a throne where a jeweled crown is placed on his head. The world has no shame in doing this; it is prompt to hand out both pleasure and pain and has no need of us and our doings.”
This statement could seem bleak to some, but it is tinged in a neutral to even positive way given the context. For instance, Ferdowsi also says:
“Our lives pass from us like the wind, and why Should wise men grieve to know that they must die? The Judas blossom fades, the lovely face Of light is dimmed, and darkness takes its place.” ― Abolghasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings
Buddhism is also the antithesis of cosmic horror. There is an emphasis on the acceptance of suffering and the unknown and uncontrollable nature of things, since in this acceptance, there is peace.
Plus, instead of cruel or indifferent god creators, many cultures feel that ancestors or deities or spirits are looking out for them in some way, even if the universe is mysterious and full of tragedy. The stars themselves (so far off and filled with terrifying otherworldly beings and forces in a Lovecraftian context) are our family, watching over us from another life, another plane.
In fact, let's complicate the concept of darkness itself-- why must the dark be feared? Lovecraft uses the adjective “black” a LOT to describe evil. I have heard authors of color, black authors, who want to try to undo this trend. Courttia Newland talks about this in the episode “Moonlight” of the podcast BBC’s Shortcuts. He says: “In terms of talking about darkness and light, one of the things that was really lowkey hurtful to me was… the dark side was always bad... I made a conscious decision in my writing to not talk about darkness in that sense...to talk about darkness as healing, and warmth, and empathy”
And this, in turn, reminds me of this passage by Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo Indian author, in her memoir:
“Night. Heavenly delicious sweet night of the desert that calls all of us to love her. The night is our comfort with her coolness and darkness. On wings, on feet, on our bellies, out we all come to glory in the night.” ― Leslie Marmon Silko, The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir
I do think cosmic horror and weird fiction, even the themes of existential dread, are a useful framework in many cases, even for marginalized groups-- honestly especially for us. Many have adapted and worked within this genre for just this reason. These massive elusive and changing fears are a relatable feeling to oppressed people. But, that isn't all there is.
Sometimes, we should stare into the abyss and smile.
Sources
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Herrmann, Lee. ““Bothersome Forms, of Course, Were Mechanically Exterminated”: Colonialism, Science, Racial Dysgenia, and Extermination in the Work of H.P. Lovecraft, Intertextually and Beyond.” CoSMo | Comparative Studies in Modernism (2019): n. pag.
Newitz, Annalee. “The Undead: a Haunted Whiteness.” Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, Duke University Press, Durham, 2006, pp. 103–137.
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Lovecraft, H. P. “‘The Horror at Red Hook’ .” Hplovecraft.com, https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hrh.aspx.
Kneale, James. (2019). “Indifference Would Be Such a Relief”: Race and Weird Geography in Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff’s Dialogues with H. P. Lovecraft. 10.1007/978-3-030-28116-8_7.
I will figure out which edition/collection of Lovecraft I have when I get back to school.
Wisker, Gina. “Speaking the Unspeakable: Women, Sex, and the Dismorphmythic in Lovecraft, Angela Carter, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and Beyond.” New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature: The Critical Influence of H.P. Lovecraft, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, 2018.
“How Writers Are Turning H.P. Lovecraft's Racist Work on Its Head | CBC Radio.” CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, 20 Oct. 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-writers-are-turning-h-p-lovecraft-s-racist-work-on-its-head-1.5883881.
Lavalle, Victor. The Ballad of Black Tom. Tom Doherty Associates, 2016.
Green, Misha. “Sundown.” Lovecraft Country, season 1, episode 1, HBO, 16 Aug. 2020.
Ulstein, Gry. “Through the Eyes of Area X: (Dis)Locating Ecological Hope via New Weird Spatiality.” Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities, edited by Julius Greve and Florian Zappe, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019, pp. 129–147.
Haraway, Donna J. “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 30–57, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw25q.7.
