Chris Barker

Happy Halloween everybody!

Spoilers ahead.

The basics

The first season of American Horror Story is subtitled ‘Murder House’ and is centered on a haunted mansion in an unremarkable American suburb.

A deeply, deeply dysfunctional family buys the house, not knowing its history of murders, twisted medical experiments, mass shootings, fires, and more murders.

As they delve into the mysteries of the house, they learn that they are only the latest in a long line of families to be affected by its malice.

Can they be the ones to finally break the curse? The answer is no, no they can’t.

What does it do well?

The first ten minutes of the pilot episode are a good, self-contained horror movie. They aren’t original, but they are perfectly fine for what they are.

Some actors avoid embarrassing themselves, despite embarrassing material. Zachary Quinto is convincing as an evil interior-designing ghost – something about the man’s eyebrows adds weight to any performance- and is one of the few people in the cast who manages to be creepy despite the ridiculousness of the rest of the show.

Jessica Lange pulls off a high-camp performance as a casually bigoted neighbour from hell. Whilst Quinto plays his role as straight as the material allows, Lange knows exactly what kind of show she is in and leans into the silliness of everything, and it works.

Some of the actors get a pass because they seem like good sports and manage to wring drops of sincerity out of whatever they are given. Connie Briton struggles to make her underwritten character into something worth watching through the sheer power of her facial expressions.

Any other enjoyable things are non-artistic. Alexandra Breckenridge is playing a ridiculous character, but she also spends most of the season wearing a French maid outfit. So, there’s that.

What does it do badly?

Oh. My. God.

American Horror Story might be the most incompetent show I’ve seen in a long time.

It has big tonal problems, no clear throughline to its story, weird and unlikable characters, and an overemphasis on big, shocking moments.

Let’s break this down…

Tone problems

One of the most famous unreleased films in history is Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried, which features a clown in a Nazi concentration camp. The few people who ever saw it described it as absolute trash due to the inherent tonal contradiction between the two elements.

Simply put, you can’t combine custard pies and mass murder and expect them to work together, because people don’t know how they are supposed to be reacting and the dissonance makes them hate your movie (or show).

The first episode of American Horror Story features mass shootings, the murder of two young children in the first five minutes, and domestic drama- but it also features a gratuitous scene of the male lead jerking off and crying which goes on far, far too long.

Why is this here?

It’s amazing that a writers’ room full of people thought that this was a good idea, and not hilarious and weird in completely the wrong way.

The tone problem pops up again and again. Breckenridge’s character is played as if she is a scary monster despite being, well, a beautiful woman dressed in a French maid outfit. It isn’t scary, not even if she sometimes turns into an old woman.

Also, despite her performance being in some ways the highlight of the show, whenever we cut from serial killing, bodies being buried, psychological torture, and baby corpses being revived to Jessica Lange insulting her Down-syndrome child in her southern drawl and spewing bigoted insults, it’s funny in an extremely inappropriate way.

In fact, the whole subplot with the Down-Syndrome child is misjudged, with the only redeeming feature being that it’s hard to take it any more seriously than the rest of the show.

…I guess the main point is that the plot of the movie is ridiculous enough to work as a black comedy, but it’s played like, well, an actual horror story. Speaking of which…

Meandering story

The idea behind AHS:MH seems to have been to incorporate as many horror movie tropes and stories as possible into a single series, using the murder house to tie everything together.

The big problem with this idea is that the show’s ideas- the vampire/Frankenstein origin story for the house, the strange rubber-wearing ghost, the mysterious neighbours, the teenager who may or may not be the spirit of a Columbine-style shooter- don’t have any connection with each other, and in a way, the show doesn’t even try to make them fit together.

At first it seems as though the house’s mysterious past, and the strange monster in the cellar, will be the main elements of the story…then it seems as though it will be more of an examination of the husband’s psyche and the couple’s marital difficulties, with a bunny-boiler ex-girlfriend thrown in…then, towards the end of the show, it pivots into all of the various spooky creatures fighting over the ghost-baby of the wife, which may or may not be the antichrist, for reasons which are never completely clear.

The fact that so many of the ghosts are irrelevant to the show’s central mythology is retrospectively annoying- the home invaders from episode 2 only show up as henchmen in the final episode, and many of the other ghosts and subplots are dropped without ever getting a clear resolution.

There’s nothing wrong with most of the story ideas, if there was a central mythology tying everything together. Buffy is an example of a show which can use variety of monsters and creatures because it has a reason why they would all be in the same place.

The problem is, the show is content to spend the whole season hinting at what that central mythology might be, and in the end, nothing is really explained and the ‘rules’ and stakes that we need to understand the fantasy are never made clear.

Characters

Evan Peters plays Tate Langdon, a teenage sociopath. He has presence and talent, but the story the show uses for him is very unpleasant. He is the love interest of the family’s teenage daughter even though he’s the ghost of a high school shooter- which would be bad enough- but the show wants us to regard him as worthy of sympathy even though he remains a serial killer and rapist in the afterlife.

This goes beyond being a strange choice for the character and becomes disturbing; almost to the point of winning the rare ‘actually-a-worse-love-story-than-Twilight’ award.

Adding to the problems caused by poor writing, some of the acting is terrible. Dylan McDermott is wooden as the rat-fink husband, coming across as too blah to hate but too despicable to be interested in.

The worst performance comes from Dennis O’Hare, who is buried under a distracting facial prosthetic for most of the show and comes across as something like a parody of all the creepy outsider characters in second-rate horror films. He would make sense if he was a reflection of the darker side of the husband’s mind, and for a while that’s where I thought the show was heading, but it turns out that he is supposed to be real- and he is far too over the top even for American Horror Story.

‘Water cooler’ moments

Game of Thrones isn’t quite the must-watch event it was in the first five seasons, but it’s still a great show. Part of the reason it is successful is that almost every episode has a big moment for people to talk about the next day- normally involving copious sex or shocking gore.

American Horror Story clearly apes the GoT formula, with lots of big moments scattered throughout the first season. The aforementioned cry/jerking off scene, a character eating a (human?) brain, the opening minutes of the pilot, uncomfortable bits of people being bitten off…

The problem is that Game of Thrones is Game of Thrones, and American Horror Story is American Horror Story. GOT generally fills the space between its big moments with witty dialogue, good acting, and impressive visual effects. That’s why fans let the cheesier moments and sexploitation slide. AHS is, as I’ve explained, a very badly written show, so all the exploitation stuff stands out for exactly what it is.

Summary

Having said all that, for some reason, I watched the whole damn series all the way through. I can’t say it wasn’t fun- I was never sure what ridiculous thing was going to happen next.

I can’t actually recommend this in good conscience. I can recommend it in bad conscience. It’s terrible and reprehensible, but it’s not boring.

I’m sure I will check out the later (and better, by normal quality standards) seasons of this show, so stay tuned for more reviews.