from Europe's Fairy Book, Joseph Jacobs, John Joseph Batten, Wikimedia Commons
A fox spirit inhabits a Korean woman and steal’s men’s souls in the 2020 HBO series Lovecraft Country. She’s a fox with nine tails, and originates in ancient Korean shamanistic culture.
Her name is Kumiho, and her episode takes place when the main Black American character (played by Jonathan Majors) serves in the Korean War. The Nine-Tailed Fox is something of an outlier in Lovecraft Country, the only episode that does not focus primarily on Black American life in 1950s Chicago.
So far, I have not found an interview of the series’ creator where she explains why she includes the Nine-Tailed Fox story in the series. Its not in the original novel.
For me, it was a revelation, a jolt from the collective Indigenous unconscious.
There’s a Mvskoke-Creek folktale, “The Hunter’s Wives,” featuring a pair of hunters who get lonely for their wives while on a long hunting trip. The Fox spirits, or Culv-hoktvlwvt (Chula-Hok-tal-waht, or “Fox-Old-Woman”) can shape-shift into images of their wives, so convincingly the men believe they are real and take them to bed.
Without spoiling the outcome, it’s a horror story.
Two of the minor members of my household follow several forms of Japanese, Chinese and Korean animation. From them I knew about the Nine-Tailed Fox, and how she serves as both an empowering spirit and a potential danger.
The Kumiho in Lovecraft Country, inhabits a beautiful Korean nurse, Ji-Ah, who has been deliberately implanted, as a child, with the Nine-tailed Fox spirit by her vengeance-fueled mother. Ji-Ah, now a woman, is forced to consume the souls of a hundred men, in order to lift the curse and free her of the spirit.
The actual consumption of men’s souls is an R-rated sight to see.
Its unclear if the original girl is even present anymore. Ji-Ah has grown up to be a fan of Judy Garland movies. She has no memory of the sexual abuse that her mother has sought to avenge in the first place. Its unclear that if the Kumiho is released, Ji-Ah’s original personality will return without any adult memories, or if the two personalities have merged into one.
And we will never find out. Lovecraft Country was not renewed for a second season.
Colonial genocide of Native Americans was addressed in the series, with a Yahima, Native Two Spirit character who was not onscreen for very long. There was also no mention of American Indians in the scenes during the 1921 genocidal destruction of the Black Wall Street, which started as the Black Creek town of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Lovecraft Country, as ambitious as it was, couldn’t cover everything. It was radical just by centering 1950s Black folks whose minds reach into the minds of astronomy, Science Fiction and time travel. It delves into the Occult, New Orleans Voudun, scientific experimentation on Black people, racial passing and actual 1950s racial atrocities.
The second season was supposed to feature an alternate United States when the huge swathes of the country had returned to the control of Indigenous Americans.
But we’ll never know how that will turn out...Not on TV, at least.
Sources:
Earnest Gouge, 1865-1955, Totkv Mocvse New Fire, “The hunters’ wives,” p. 23-26, University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Lovecraft Country, “Meet Me in Daegu”, Season 1, episode 6,originally aired September 20, 2020, HBO Max.
