American Horror Story: A New Kind of Weird

By CHRIS SURPRENANT

Arts Editor

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 11, 2011

What do you get when you cross a troubled teenager, a cheating husband, and an unstable wife with a large, dilapidated mansion and the creators of Glee? Pretty much every horror cliché in the book. However, American Horror Story manages to take that cliché and turn it on its head, with a unique combination of horror and humor for a highly entertaining, psychosexual creep fest. It’s so messed up, you can’t help but watch. It’s like Glee, but with more blood and nudity.

The pilot episode first starts off in 1978. A pair of miserable red-headed twins—armed with baseball bats—decide to stir up a little trouble in a crumbling Los Angeles mansion. Before they enter, they are given a foreboding warning by a girl in a yellow dress, Adelaide. “You’re going to die in there,” she coos. The twins scoff at her and enter the mansion in spite of the warning. After trashing the interior of the house, they head down to the basement, where they are met with a miserable, torturous force that ends them, just as Adelaide said.

In the present day, we meet the disjointed Harmon family. Wife Vivien (Connie Britton), recovering from a still birth discovered her psychiatrist husband Ben (Dylan McDermott, who rarely decides to wear clothing) in bed with one of his students shortly after the awful news. Their angst-ridden teenage daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga) is just as troubled as Vivien and Ben’s marriage, so the family decides to move from the East Coast and buy the charismatic (and cheaply priced) LA mansion, despite the fact that the previous owners died in a murder/suicide. Hey, a deal’s a deal.

Here’s where the real fun begins. Jessica Lange plays the Harmon’s neighbor, Constance, who runs a doggy daycare. Constance has a problem—she’s a kleptomaniac. But not just a kleptomaniac, she’s also faded Southern belle who never reached her dream of being a movie star! But wait, there’s more! Constance, eternally bitter, takes her frustrations out on her mentally challenged daughter, who is none other than Adelaide! So many surprises, it’s just too much. Lange is the most fun in the cast, and you can’t help but love to hate her character.

We are also introduced to the character of Moira (Frances Conroy), the apparent former housekeeper. However, there’s a problem with the old woman who wears funeral clothes and has one good eye, that problem being that she is also a very young woman scantily clad in maid’s uniform. Vivien, when she hires Moira, sees the older model, a woman who seems to know everything about her new home. When Ben sees Moira, he sees her as a seductive home wrecker. Moira is the show’s most direct metaphor for love gone wrong. For Vivien, Moira is a barren loveless being (the result of the still birth), but for Ben, she is another object of lust and desire (his affair).

Moira and Constance are perhaps the most interesting, scary/funny characters American Horror Story has to offer, but the fun doesn’t stop there. The pilot episode also introduces a burn victim (a former tenant of the house) and teenage patient of Ben’s who is obsessed with death. Along with these tangible characters, comes the man in the black rubber suit. Yup. The Harmons make the discovery of the suit in the attic, and presume it belonged to the former owners. The suit apparently takes on a life of its own, and one evening makes love to Vivien, who thinks it’s her husband trying to rekindle a freaky flame. Classy.

The downside of the pilot is that it doesn’t really go anywhere. We are given one hour and eleven minutes of freaky, funny, and disturbing horror all at once, without much of a story. The viewer knows that the family is troubled, and that they have really odd people in their lives, but that’s about it. We are never really rooting for the main characters, but rather for those who are out to get them. Lange’s Constance delivers the best line of the night to Moira, “Don’t make me kill you again.” What? Please tell me more.

American Horror Story is laughably absurd at times (rubber suit interaction), yet genuinely scary at others (Adelaide’s eerie premonitions). The combination of campy humor and creepy terror make American Horror Story uniquely fun. Tune into FX on Wednesdays at 10:00 p.m. for a creepshow/freakshow.