American Horror Story

Horror on television is generally hit or miss. For every successful Twilight Zone,  The Outer Limits, True Blood or The Walking Dead there’s a dreadful Harper’s Island, American Gothic, Happy Town, Fear Itself and The River to go along with it. American Horror Story falls into the former category. 

The series is smart, stylish, kinky, strange as hell, a wrinkle of retro and most importantly scary. Plus, having been shown late at night on FX, it pulls no punches with the sex, kink and harsh language. All of these traits make up what is one of the most unique shows going in all of television. 

Maybe the most surprising thing about this crazy and whacked out show is that it was created by the dudes behind GLEE (granted they also created NIP/TUCK – an equally crazy and sexy show). 

American Horror Story follows a family struggling to stay together after the death of their unborn son and a subsequent affair that nearly tore them apart. Trying to get a new lease on life and save their marriage, they move into a new house in Los Angeles. What they don’t know is that they have just moved into what the locals call “murder house” – a place of evil where countless number of people have been murdered for decades.  Worse still is that whoever dies in or around the house becomes one of the countless number of murdered people that then as ghosts come back to haunt (and kill) the living. With so many people getting killed in one location, that’s a sh**load of ghosts. This becomes very apparent in the two-part “Halloween” episode where literally every actor in both episodes are ghosts outside of the family that continues to be haunted. Naturally, this is why the two-parter is one of the best episodes of the 12-episode season. 

The cool thing about AHS is that while each episode is seemingly connected, building to the overall plight of this poor family that picked the absolute worst house to ever move into, but each episode is also, for the most part, self-contained – meaning you can watch it without missing out too much on the overall mythology aspect (granted it helps, however). 

While not every episode is a winner, the first five episodes are solid, and while some of the middle episodes drag a bit in terms of scares and plot, and some of the payoffs are predictable, luckily, the last few episodes (with the exception of the finale) pick up the pace and deliver some pretty good scares, twists and origins about the ghosts living in the house. 

Speaking of the finale, I didn’t it like one bit. It seemed rushed with an unnecessary death and nearly a "happily ever after" feeling about the situation – given what we had seen for 11 episodes, this just didn’t fit with the atmosphere of the show at all. The finale does do one good thing: Set the stage for a second season that will focus on a completely new haunted location with Jessica Lange – that was a pretty amazing nemesis in the first season – reprising her role as a younger version in the 1960s. (Peter Brown, Shock Til You Drop)