American Horror Story: Roanoke, E2

Cafe Society
1

This episode scared me. Like, hesitating to turn out the lights! :eek: So I ask you, fellow dopers, did this episode scare you, too?

There seemed to be a set of shocks, like beats throughout the show. The episode starts with the scalping, and the pig-roast execution shortly thereafter. The discovery of the “this goes way beyond burning a cross on someone’s lawn” flaming pig head pike thing. The ghost-nurse murder. Lee’s visitation by the ghost nurses, and her horror visions. The sighting of the ghost child. The discovery of the the word Murde. The ghost on the tape. Flora’s sighting of the ghost child. And finally, Flora’s sweatshirt 100 feet up a tree. That’s a lot of surprises.

The ‘surprises’ were handled in a kind of classic horror movie fashion: zooming cameras, discordant musical crescendos, the sudden appearance of something ghastly or woefully significant, the horrified reaction. This occurred repeatedly from beginning to end, but most of them zinged me anyway- some more than others. Between these beats the atmosphere was creepy or filled with suspense or dread. It still isn’t clear what forces are at work, driving all this horror.

Anyway, the scenes were divided by cuts to the narrators, sort of the counterpoints to the beats. Back and forth, so it gave the story a kind of pulse. The narrators take us away from the creepy action, but always in a way that drives the story forward, tons of lines. On this point, I bet the script for E2 has at least twice the sheer volume of text as an episode of, say, Fear the Walking Dead. Compared to most shows, there is just more there there. Anyway, the show has a way of rotating a lot of narrators, not just the main characters but the cops, the bank dude, the professor on the tape, there was a bank or lawyer lady in there for a second, their little monologues piecing the story together, which always seems to whirlpool down to the next shock.

I am impressed. It is possibly the scariest and most lurid of all the AHS installments. The camp was fun in the previous seasons, but this one isn’t funny. The professor laughs at odd moments, and I laughed later because, ha ha, I’m actually scared, ha ha, but that’s about it. I’m glad Sarah Paulson gets to act across from Cuba Gooding Jr., she deserves it. I wonder if the “real” characters are going to go back to that house to do some ghost hunting or something, if all of this is just a prelude, a backstory within a backstory. And I like some of the little effects, like the ghost child always being blurred like an 1800’s black-and-white photograph, or the detailing of the couple’s financial motives and prejudices.

Oddly meaty horror show, no?

2

I think I would like this season a lot more if it was “American Horror Story: Roanoke” instead of “My Roanoke Nightmare.” Because I feel like the talking heads parts deflates a lot of the tension and horror. AHS is always great at building tension and creating atmosphere, and I feel like the “re-enactment” parts of the show would be fine on their own doing that, but then the real people come in and undercut it. Also, it violates the rule of “show, don’t tell” by instead doing “show and tell” with the talking heads repeating a lot of what we see on screen. Like the sister saying “and that’s when I fell off the wagon” right before we see her in the re-enactment drunk in kitchen. Or the husband and wife separated in the woods and yelling for each other and the real-life husband saying something about how quickly you can get lost in the woods.

I think the “real people” are doing the right amount of talking for if this was a usual real life crime story show, where the re-enactments are fairly minimal, and the actors in the re-enactments have few or no lines. But since the “actors” in this are putting on a regular show instead of a re-enactment, the talking heads are redundant.

It doesn’t help that the real people seem too calm for what was a traumatic experience. They seem more like people in a documentary talking about a terrible company they worked at and the terrible experiences they had there, rather than people who had threatening and bizarre experiences happen to them in and around their home. Maybe they’re starting out lower so they can build the emotion as the season goes on, one of the previews did show the sister saying the cameras need to be turned off, but just so far that’s how it feels to me.

For the actual show part, I like it fine so far. The execution thing was scary, and the bunker and the professor’s video were creepy. Denis O’Hare is always great and so I was excited to see him in the video, and I hope that’s not the only appearance he has this season. It was predictable that the daughter would be missing, but not that her hoodie would be up at the top of that really tall tree, that was a surprise and a good end to the episode.

3

Also, I thought the nurses killing elderly patients in order to spell out “MURDER” was kinda cheesy, and also weird since it’s a flashback inside of a re-enactment, but surprisingly the nurses are based on a real life pair of killer nurses’ aides. And they were actually a lesbian couple in real life, I’m surprised that so far the show hasn’t included that.

4

There has got to be some twist with the talking head interviews. It seems like a misstep at this point. The show would be much improved without them. My guess is that the talking heads are the actors and everyone in the “re-enactment” is dead.

5

Even when things venture from boring to oh hey, here comes something that could be kinda scary, here comes an interview to remove anything from having a bit of tension to it.

Also, I kind of hate the interview version of the husband. The rest are sort of passable, as in I could see them switching places with the reenactment versions, but this guy is so utterly surpassed by Cuba it’s just painful whenever his bits pop up.

6

Apparently, AHS is doing a parody of the cable TV series of “A Haunting”.

7

I could see them doing that. But I agree that unless there is some twist it seems like it could be a waste.

But according to Wikipedia, on that show most episodes had several accounts of paranormal experiences. I don’t know of any show where there was one haunting story told over 13 episodes. The format seems like a misstep so far, but maybe something will develop as the show goes along that makes the format useful.

8

I thought the concept behind the nurses was cheesy, too, and arguably the weak point of the episode. Hysterical killer nurses motivated by spelling “Murder”? C’mon (though the reveal of the word painted on the wall of the living room behind the wallpaper was successfully creepy, and the shooting was so fast and cruel it was a real shock). But now that I’ve read your link, I see that they are the “you can’t make this stuff up” part of the show. It says “Based on true events” at the beginning of the episode- now I know that is not entirely a put-on (is the pig roast also “based on true events”? It isn’t entirely unprecedented…). It makes the “unreliability” theme more meaty- the least believable scenes are actually the true re-enactments, the format may or may not be going somewhere else, the characters are wrong about what is happening and don’t really trust each other either, etc. I have to applaud the way they are framing the psych horror aspect of the show.

Do you have a reason why it is limited to that? I mean, I get the comparison, but there are a lot of shows in this general format, and AHS seems to have carved out some territory in the genre that is all its own.

9

Eh, not really. I’m not a believer of the paranormal. But I have always enjoyed “A Haunting”. Not because I ever believed any of it, but because I thought it made for a nice piece of fiction.
If there are other shows out there that follow the same format, they haven’t pinged my radar. Which is the only reason I singled out “A Haunting”.

10

I don’t care for it either… unless it turns out that once their story is told in the reenactments then we see them move on with the rest of their lives and they get haunted some more!

11

They would have been better off doing Ghost Hunters or the several similar shows. You know how scary it would be if these doofuses actually found something indisputably real like a Class 5 Full-Roaming Vapor? Me neither but it would be more fun to watch than this.

12

Actually, some real-life crime shows I’ve seen have had much calmer talking head interviews while recounting infinitely worse experiences.

For example, consider April Sykes recounting her ordeal, spoilered because it’s fucking horrifying:[spoiler]First she’s raped again and again, then stabbed with a screwdriver. Finally she’s put in the trunk of a car, then her attacker pours gasoline on her and lights her on fire. She plays dead WHILE ON FIRE until he finally leaves her for dead.

3rd degree burns on 65% of her body, 18 surgeries, loses most of her fingers…

Jesus Christ, that may very well be the most awful ordeal I can possibly imagine.[/spoiler]