It is important for me to tell you that, while I love horror movies, I am also a big fat chicken. There is a method to my watching anything horror, which typically involves daylight, and a comedy afterwards. Back when I wore glasses, I would watch said movies over their rim, because I could still hear everything but not see it clearly. Even after I got contacts, I made it a point to wear glasses on movie night. After Lasik, well, I resort to covering my eyes, peeking through splayed fingers.
This is a phenomenon for me that is only on first viewing. I’ve watched a lot of the classics several times over, but that initial viewing always makes me squirmy, scared and feel silly. I have to repeat to myself that it’s a lot of makeup and CGI. The good ones, like The Shining and The Changling know how to crawl under your skin and pulsate there. And even though the bad ones will at first scare me, I can finish up a bad horror movie and say, with relief, meh. But not during. During, I’m a bundle of fraidy-cat mewing.
So I’m still baffled as to why I volunteered to review American Horror Story weekly for PinkRaygun. Apparently, I’m a bit of a masochist.
Which, seems fitting, considering one of the “characters” on AHS is a liquid leather clad S&M suit; embodied by who? We don’t know yet.
I was for sure intrigued. I knew that I would want to watch the show, not so much for the pedigree but for the content (I don’t really watch Glee, no did Nip/Tuck, though I have seen enough of both to form an informed opinion of each). I just liked the idea of something out of convention, and this seemed to fit the bill.
I’m always careful to form an opinion of the show based solely on the pilot; so often the shape of a show isn’t formed until later in the series – the pilot is the calling card on which the show is sold, not made. So it has to be good enough, but leave room for growth. It has to whet the appetite for more. (Plus I’ve also got a theory as to shows really showing their worth in the 6th episode, as that happened for me with both BTVS and Dollhouse).
So far, so good. The pilot gives us as much information as we need to move forward in the series. One thing I already love is that this mystery will not be solved in a slotted 120 minute movie, but carry over, if not one season, but several. (this show should be picked up for the season, at least). Here’s the show in a nutshell:
Vivien and Ben are married with teenage daughter Violet. About a year before, Vivien suffered a horrible stillborn birth.. During the grieving process, Ben had sex with one of his students where Vivien literally caught him in the act in their bed. As a way to rebuild their lives, they travel from east coast to west, and buy an old Los Angeles Victorian which has a history of death (the former tenants, a gay couple, committed murder/suicide). Vivien is having issues forgiving Ben, not letting him touch her for too long. Violet is a cutter and an outcast. Ben is sort of a scumbag, but he does love Vivien. He’s also a psychiatrist and begins seeing patients in an in-home office, the only of which we meet is Tate, a troubled teen who fantasizes about killing his classmates. He’s also creeping on Violet (I mean that in the literal way). She’s for sure intrigued until, well, something really weird happens.
We’ve also got the neighbors, Southern Belle Constance and her “mongoloid” (her word) daughter Adelaide. I love love love that Adelaide, a young woman suffering from Down’s Syndrome, is connected to the house in a psychic way. And we’ve got the maid, Moira, who has always been with the house, and who appears to Vivien in the form of a woman in her sixties with a clouded eye, and appears to Ben as a voluptuous 20 -something donning the slutty version of her maid outfit. We also meet Larry Harvey, former occupant of the “Murder house” that burned his family while they slept. He is warning Ben to leave, but at the end of his diatribe, and Ben’s violent “leave us alone!” admonishment, Larry smiles evilly, his partially burned face stretching with glee.
There are conventional horror movie images that also pop up but don’t feel conventional necessarily. There is the creepy music, shots through small spaces, shadows and darkness. Stairs, weird paintings, body parts in jars, blood, a dead rodent, creepy Weasley-like twins. Vivien wields a knife at one point, and I’m relieved she’s not scantily clad in a too small white tank and booty shorts.
A lot of things did sufficiently creep me out. I kept waiting for their fluffy dog to get hurt or wind up hanging, blood drained, in the closet (the dog survived this first show). I loved that the show blipped, much like an old film unspooling from its reel, complete with vague cigarette burns and blurs and – if I heard correctly – the same whirring background noise. We can tell there’s screw loose when it comes to Constance, and her lowered voice threat to Vivien should she ever touch Adelaide sliced like a smooth blade, in and out. There is definite anger in the air, with a great screaming match between Ben and Vivien finally letting it all out about his infidelity and her lack of forgiveness. It was in this scene where I really felt there was love between them, but the trust very deeply cracked. They finally consummate in passionate sex, and while Vivien goes for Round 2 with whom she thinks is Ben clad in the S&M outfit they found in the attic, Ben is sleepwalking through the house literally playing with fire. When they come back together in bed, they both exchange zombified “I-Love-you’s”. And ben is still struggling with that infidelity, as he walks in on Young Moira playing with herself, which leads him to jerking off and crying with shame, and them allowing her to crawl all over him before pushing her off.
I am feeling pretty certain I will love Violet most of all. Sardonic in a Winona-Ryder-in-Heathers kind of way, she is defiant and not afraid to wear her disdain on her sleeve. Her teenage naiveté is also at play in her interactions with Tate, who definitely likes her in his own way – chaste in a physical way but dirty in his twisted mind relating to his take on violence (when he fantasizing killing his classmates, he says he kills the kids he likes). When they conspire to scare the mean girl at school that is tormenting Violet, the house basement really does a number – a deformed gnarly toothed creature-child attacks the mean girl, and Tate seems to transform in the strobe-like flickering light into several blink-and-you-miss-it demon imagery. When Violet rejects him, he screams that he thought she wasn’t afraid of anything, His disturbance is not being afraid of anything but rejection, the very thing Violet hands him.
I do hope that as the series unfolds we’ll continue to peel the layers off of all mysteries without compromising the mood and some believability (after all, there has to be an element of fantasy). I want to meet the former occupants of the house, (and see more of Larry, as I love Denis O’Hare), who the basement creature is, what Tate’s connection to the house is (I believe there is one). I also want to know if Adelaide is truly psychic, what Constance’s investment in the house is, and how, exactly, she killed Moira (as she threatens her late in the episode “Don’t make me kill you again”). And, more importantly, with the reveal of Vivien’s new pregnancy, if the child is begat of her husband or of S&M guy. This could be a very fun Rosemary’s Baby element woven into everything else this show promises to reveal.
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Aspiring screenwriter and seamstress, Sonia's dream is to write life-tweaking films while product-placing her own line of handbags. In 1999, she wrote, co-directed and co-starred in the short film Dr. Lovestrange, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bug, a satirical homage to Stanley Kubrick set amidst the panic of Y2K. She is working on her next short about the Mayan Calender that she hopes to finish before the end of the world. Ever the late bloomer, she finally started a blog chronicling her misadventures as one half of a long distance relationship (http://llddr.wordpress.com). She still struggles with which picture to kiss before bedtime: her boyfriend's or Bruce Campbell's. And, in the interest of time, she'd like to start thanking the Academy now. 
