We don’t know yet if there will be a second season of Lovecraft Country, but if there is, Green knows what she’d call it: “This would be the title of it—Lovecraft Country: Supremacy.”
Interview highlights
On why she loves horror
I just like to be scared. I think it’s also one of the reasons I feel like we go to drama in the first place, to live vicariously through something. So you get to live your fears on screen and then you go, “OK, I can tackle that, maybe.” You get a little braver in life. … When I was a kid, like watching It, watching Alien, watching those kinds of movies, I was like, “OK, I’m terrified. But now I feel a little braver.” Afterwards, I feel like I can go and tackle the real horrors a little bit more.
On Black representation in genre fiction
I feel like one of my absolute favorites is the original Night of the Living Dead and then The People Under the Stairs [and] Candyman. So there [were] spaces for Black horror, they just weren’t rampant. I feel like that’s all of Black art right now. People are like, “We’re in this huge renaissance!” and I’m like, “I remember in the ’90s I could go on TV and see more all-Black casts than I can see now.” So I feel like it’s always been there, but you have to seek it out. And the mainstream—definitely when it comes to horror, sci-fi and all of these genre fantasy spaces—are all white in a way. And so that was exciting to me, to have this kind of show that could jump to all the places and be like, “Yeah, we can be here and we don’t have to die first, guys.”
On developing the sound for Lovecraft Country, which sources audio from different moments in culture, like a Nike Ad or the poem “Whitey on the Moon”
I wanted to do something different than I had done on Underground with sound. We used contemporary music on [the WGN America show] Underground [which Green co-created] and it was very successful in kind of bringing the past into the present and I wanted to build on that. I want to come in with an audio viewpoint on the show.