The Delights of "American Horror Story"

I wanted to write up a post on the first season of TNT's "American Horror Story" for Halloween, but didn't quite make the deadline. However, I enjoyed the show so much, I still want to recommend it for all your non-Halloween horror needs.

What I like about "American Horror Story" is that it's so unrepentantly exploitative and trashy, every opening shot slapped with a TV MA rating. The content level goes beyond anything else on basic cable. Adultery! Crimes of passion! Devious maids! Burn victims! Children with birth defects! The pilot features a kinky sex scene set to music lifted from Hitchcock's "Vertigo." And of course there's the show's mascot, the guy in the black rubber gimp suit. Every episode has some juicy twist, or some licentious new secret to reveal. The characters are completely over the top, but so much fun to watch, you don't want to stop. So while "American Horror Story" is often a spectacular mess, it's immensely entertaining. It's also one of the only properly horrific pieces of horror television currently on the air.

The bones of the plot are as follows: The Harmon family, comprised of psychiatrist father Ben (Dylan McDermott), mother Vivien (Connie Britton), and teenage daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga), move into their new Los Angeles home, a palatial Victorian with a dark history. Their new neighbors include the very friendly, manipulative Constance Langdon (Jessica Lange) and her daughter Addie (Jamie Brewer), who has Down's Syndrome. Ben is treating a troubled teenager named Tate (Evan Peters), who takes a liking to Violet. Other regulars include a horribly burned man named Larry (Denis O'Hare), who claims to be a former resident of the house, and a maid Vivien hires named Moira, who appears as a sweet old woman (Frances Conroy) to Vivien and Constance, but men see her as a provocatively dressed young woman (Alexandra Breckinridge).

The series borrows bits and pieces from dozens of horror stories and murder mysteries. The history of the "Murder House" spans nearly a century, and the series spends a lot of time tracking what happened to the various inhabitants who met terrible misfortune within its walls. Home invasions, school shootings, tragic accidents, mad doctors, and a few monsters all make appearances, and the series even recreates a few famous, real-life slayings. Even though the creators didn't know at the time that "American Horror Story" would continue in an anthology format, the first season is a compendium of different horror tales all by itself. The early episodes are the most bizarre and the most intriguing, because you never know what you're going to see next. We learn the origins of some things, like the guy in the gimp suit. Others, like the thing in the basement, are never really explained.

I want to reiterate that the series is really not very good on a fundamental level. The writing is wildly uneven, and the characters are little more than cyphers. All the women are prone to hysterics. All the men have roving eyes and are easily provoked. Ben and Vivien end up in shouting matches about every other episode. The wild twists and salacious content often comes at the price of bad characterization and shoddy logic. I don't think I've seen a show with so much convenient amnesia since "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." It often feels like the writers take the kitchen sink approach, just dumping more and more characters and horrible events into the mix every time things slow down. It's only well into the second half of the season that we start getting decent chunks of character development and proper through lines.

In many episodes, the biggest saving grace is the performances, particularly of Jessica Lange as the tough old Southern Belle, Constance Langdon. She's a twisted woman who does monstrous things, but it's hard not to sympathize with her. Constance could have so easily been another caricature, but Lange imparts her with a steely, knowing awareness and aura of tragedy. No matter what she claims, there's never a doubt that she knows better than anyone else what's going on. The kids, Evan Peters and Taissa Farmiga, are also very good. In a show where all the emotion is cranked up to operatic heights, it makes sense that the hormonal teenagers are the ones who seem the most emotionally genuine.

The only thing I did not like at all about the first season of "American Horror Story" was the ending, which felt like the creators were leaving things open-ended for another season with the same characters. This didn't happen, as the new "Asylum" storyline started over with an entirely new setting and characters, though several of the actors stuck around to play new parts. So I'm really looking forward to the next chapters of "American Horror Story," since the creators don't have any reason to hold back this time.
---