I, for one, am glad it’s back. There isn’t much on TV that can actually make me uncomfortable, but I think AHS can do it, and it does it in a way that, while often lurid and awful, involves a fairly deep level of insight into characters who can be evil to the point of monstrosity. It can be scary to watch a person transform into a monster, or maybe more so to recognize the humanity in someone you always took for a monster. The line blurs. It turns the gears and I guess that is why I tune in.
Well here we are at Season 6, “My Roanoke Nightmare”. The basic premise seems already familiar: a couple decides to make a life change, they visit the country and discover a fabulous but creepy rural mansion on acres and acres of forested land. To get it they have to win it at auction, and their competition is a crew of unfriendly, ragged hillbillies. They tell what’s-his-name straight out that “you don’t want this house”, but apparently he does, and his sense of superiority over these people seems to become a part of the transaction.
They’re a biracial couple. She is a yoga instructor cliche (I hope there turns out to be more to her than new age relaxing), and he is a fairly successful traveling ad rep or something. The husband is hypersensitive about his blackness, always projecting racist or classist motives onto a world that doesn’t seem to be motivated by those things, and therefore generally missing the gist of events. After a series of scary things happen to wifey while hubby is away (hailing human teeth was a new one, and for a squirming second I could really feel how crazy this woman felt like she must be going), hubby brings in his sister to watch over the home and maybe report back on whether crazy shit is happening or wifey is hallucinating. The verdict? Crazy shit.
If I try to analyze every detail of Episode 1 this OP will go on forever, so let’s point out that the writing (and the production) is lush. There is quite simply a lot going on. Maybe the entire season is encapsulated in this first episode and we just don’t yet know how it all plays out. The sister is a less refined, more cliched black person than the hubby. In a way, all of the characters have an element of cliche about them, which is a disturbing aspect of the general population if you think about it. The cliches of yuppie racially paranoid hubby, alkie and slightly loony but hurting yoga instructor, gritty and smart but screwed up her life with drugs sister, plus ugly dirty deformed threatening supernatural hillbillies is at once an obvious recipe for conflict and also a tidy batch of subjects about which maybe I’d just rather stay in denial rather than confronting them over a season of horror television.
So you see, I find I can really sink my teeth into AHS. This OP only scratches the surface of all the observations I could make. Why isn’t all TV this good? Does it have to be horror-done-right to present this sort of challenging artistic aesthetic? And, is that a manbearpig squealing hideously out in the forest at night? I suspect that not everyone survives, considering the narrators are actors portraying the “real” characters in a documentary drama done, low-key humorously, in the style of Married to a Murderer. It is derivative and even copycat in certain details (I think these writers are in love with scenes from The Shining of the ghost girls in the hall), yet in a way that lends an intense uncomfortable familiar immediacy to the drama. I’d go so far as to say this horror drama reaches all the way to the epistemological. Bravo.
TL/DR: :eek:
