A search for a missing father sends three travellers across 1950s America, where the danger on the road comes from two directions at once. Lovecraft Country, a 2020 American series, folds horror, fantasy and science fiction into a period drama.
What is Lovecraft Country about?
Atticus Freeman is twenty-five when word reaches him that his father has vanished. He sets out to find him with his friend Letitia and his Uncle George, driving through a country governed by Jim Crow laws, where a wrong turn or an unfriendly town can be deadly for Black travellers. That threat is real and everyday. The second threat is not: creatures and malevolent spirits that seem to have crawled out of a pulp paperback begin to cross their path. The trio have to stay alive against both, and the further they go, the more the search for one man opens onto older and stranger mysteries.
About the cast
Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett lead the ensemble. The cast also features Wunmi Mosaku, Aunjanue Ellis, Courtney B. Vance, Michael Kenneth Williams and Abbey Lee, a group that gives the series a broad range of characters on both sides of its central conflict.
Context & significance
The title points to the kind of weird fiction associated with the name Lovecraft: cosmic monsters, forbidden knowledge, things that should not exist. The series borrows that vocabulary and sets it inside a carefully drawn historical period, so that the supernatural scares sit next to the ordinary menace of segregation-era America. The catalogue lists it under six genres at once — drama, fantasy, horror, mystery, sci-fi and thriller — and that is a fair description of how it behaves, shifting its tone and its type of story from one chapter to the next in the manner of an anthology while keeping the same central characters. Episodes run about an hour each. K-Time carries the series with a Persian dub and with Persian subtitles.
Watching Lovecraft Country on Ktime
Lovecraft Country is available to stream on K-Time, the Persian-focused service for the Iranian diaspora. Anyone can read this page; to start an episode you sign in to your K-Time account. The interface is offered in Farsi, and the player lets you choose between the dubbed Persian track and the original audio with Persian subtitles.