From man-eating shoggoths to racist police officers, Lovecraft Country isn’t lacking in the monster department. Based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel of the same name, the new HBO series (debuting tonight) uses the pulp and abominable cosmic horrors of H.P. Lovecraft in an effort to explore America’s demons that continue to haunt us to this day.
While the show already had the difficult task of taking on our country’s historical struggle with racial injustice, its production was made all the more challenging by another real-world threat: COVID-19. All 10 episodes of the live-action adaptation were filmed before the global pandemic hit, but the fallout from it — mainly the sudden inability to gather in large groups — immediately became a massive hurdle for the project’s composers, Laura Karpman and Raphael Saadiq.
Abruptly, everything was closed down, people were social distancing/quarantining/self-isolating, and assembling a physical orchestra became impossible. Having previously worked with showrunner Misha Green on a pair of seasons for WGN’s Underground, the two musicians were forced to pivot and record the score remotely, a process that is still ongoing, by the way.
“We had two in-person meetings and then the pandemic struck,” Karpman (recently nominated for two Emmys, thanks to her work on Discovery’s Why We Hate docuseries) told me during a recent phone interview. “There are a lot of collaborative Zoom instructions and giving out the ideas for the scores and talking to people. And, of course, there’s a kind of educational process of getting everything placed correctly and getting it to sound like everybody was in the room together.”
For this unconventional undertaking, Karpman and Saadiq recruited a laundry list of sonic talent: violinist Lisa Liu, engineer Brad Haehnel, and Baltimore Symphony conductor Marin Alsop. “I tapped them because they are great thinkers and they’re not traditional thinkers,” Karpman said. In particular, Alsop was most helpful in finding players from around the world, many of whom then needed to be trained by Haehnel in the art of solo recording.
“We birthed an orchestra that is tremendous,” Karpman added. “Some of them had had remote recording experience and some of them hadn’t done it at all, but Brad was incredibly wonderful and patient with them and really taught them how to record themselves.”
Because Lovecraft Country takes place in the 1950s, Karpman wanted to evoke the classic “modernist scores” of Jerry Goldsmith (Planet of the Apes), Bernard Hermann (Psycho), and Bebe and Louis Barron (Forbidden Planet). Ironically, she ended up getting even closer to that type of sound by way of the all-digital ensemble.
“What’s interesting, and what I didn’t expect, was the sound was like those scores of the ‘50s and the ‘60s because everything was so close mic’d,” she said. “It kind of added to that original concept of a Jerry Goldsmith, Bernard Hermann [score]. It sounds like a contemporary score, but it has a vibe of that era just by virtue of the way that we recorded it.”
As many of us have learned amid the health crisis, “being thrown into the electronic world comes and goes with success” as Karpman put it. “Interrupted Zoom calls and breaks in communication and all of that kind of stuff. It was something that was a part of everybody’s life, but every once in a while, we would have a laugh about it as well.”
Courtesy of Elizabeth Morris/HBO
Taking inspiration from 1950s science fiction, Lovecraft Country uses otherworldly entities as an allegory for something else. Just as Cold Wars fears manifested themselves in a slew of creature and alien invasion flicks, the bestial nature of bigotry is personified by the show’s various creatures from beyond the veil of earthly comprehension. Even then, the musical cues for the grotesque monsters aren’t all that different from the ones created for their human counterparts.
“Sometimes, it’s really not differentiating between the human monsters and the non-human monsters,” the composer admitted. “We didn’t want to make those sounds different, we wanted them to be in the same world. A scare is a scare, a boo is a boo. It’s all terrifying and it all needs to be that. There’s no difference in the terror of a sheriff in a sundown [town] and a monster coming out of the woods.”
Karpman credits Green with using the horror genre “as a vehicle for social justice,” a metaphorical philosophy that falls squarely in line with the films and shows made by executive producer Jordan Peele. Motifs of discrimination and inequality are prevalent in the filmmaker’s recent genre endeavors like Get Out, Us, David Weil’s Hunters, and Nia DaCosta’s Candyman.
“She’s specific and she wants what she wants,” Karpman said of Green. “But the way that she asks for it is so effective. She is so clear about what she wants music to do and she’s so clear about what’s going on in the performances ... Her notes make my music better. She asks for a lot, and it’s fun to give it to her.”
Since the ‘50s are so intertwined with rock n’ roll and doo-wop as well, Karpman “started re-acquainting” herself “with a lot of music of that time, but also Sun-Ra and Nina Simone, and things that were in a different space ... Misha loves music and she loves score and she loves using soundtrack songs. So, some of the work is literally weaving those two together and making sure that it feels like a smooth continuum.”
Courtesy of Maarteen de Boer & Aaron Rapoport
And, of course, we can’t discuss the score for Lovecraft Country without bringing up Saadiq, who has built a “constantly evolving” professional relationship with Karpman across several shows and movies. Coming from an extensive background in R&B, the renaissance musician/singer/producer brought his own flavor to the series’ sound design.
“Raphael’s voice is not only his singing voice, but also the way that he plays the guitar and the bass,” Karpman said. “His sound comes through so strongly in those instruments ... He [also] did a lot of tremendous sound design from his huge array of analog instruments. Some of them are not so far from that era in the ‘50s, coming from the ‘60s and ‘70s. There’s a lot of really groovy analog sounds [in the score] that Raphael crafted.”
When it comes to story, the show follows Atticus Freeman (Da 5 Bloods’ Jonathan Majors), an African American veteran of the Korean War, who decides to go searching for his missing father, Montrose, (The Wire’s Michael K. Williams), in the segregated South. Atticus’ dangerous road trip is joined by his good friend Leti Lewis (Birds of Prey’s Jurnee Smollett), and uncle, George (Project Power’s Courtney B. Vance). As they venture deeper into Jim Crow America, the trio realizes that skin-based prejudice isn’t the only thing stalking them. Once the tentacled and madness-inducing beasts come out to play, Lovecraft Country really starts to blend all sorts of influences together. For example, Karpman said that she just finished scoring an episode that “really leans into ‘50s sci-fi and Afrofuturism.”
L-R Vance, Majors, and Bell
Courtesy of Eli Joshua Ade/HBO
“[Misha] wanted something that really leaned into the various genres that were explored. Each episode is really a film and each film is almost a different genre,” she continued, promising a haunted house in Episode 3 (“Holy Ghost”) and a Raiders of the Lost Ark-type vibe in Episode 4 (“A History of Violence). “Every episode has a profile ... I think that being an orchestral composer and having worked in a lot of different genres was something that was really an advantage for this particular job.”
Despite the taxing coronavirus-related hurdles, Karpman is beyond grateful to have worked on a project whose themes are more relevant than ever. Referring to the anti-racism/Black Lives Matter protests that erupted throughout the globe in the wake of George Floyd’s death, she said:
“The subject matter is tough, and it’s tough with everything that’s been going on politically. It was just amazing ... working with this material, but certainly within the environment that we were with the pandemic, and then with the uprisings that went on all over the country and all over the world ... It put me into a world that is a profound and deep place that I was honored to be in, but asked a lot of all of us.”
This environment led to “one of the most freeing projects” Karpman has ever worked on, and she believes Saadiq feels the same way. “It’s like we can be ourselves,” she concluded. “We can be who we are musically, who we are intellectually, [and] who we are from a social justice standpoint. It’s like one of those projects where you feel like the work is coming out of you for all the right reasons.”
Also executive produced by J.J. Abrams (Westworld, Castle Rock), Lovecraft Country premieres on HBO tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST. Read the Forbes review here.
The cast also features: Aunjanue Ellis (When They See Us), Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road), Jada Harris (The Resident), Wunmi Mosaku (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), Jamie Chung (Once Upon a Time), Jamie Neumann (The Deuce), Jordan Patrick Smith (Vikings), and Tony Goldwyn (Scandal).