Just after Halloween this year, I binge-watched the first season of American Horror Story, aka Murder House. I was in the mood for a good haunted house story, and I had heard great things from a variety of people about American Horror Story, so it seemed a good match. Unfortunately, American Horror Story really failed to deliver on either the promise of a good horror story or a good haunted house story. There were three things that I think overall worked against the show: the length, the lack of a coherent mystery, and a reason to suspend my disbelief.
The length of the show worked against it because it really lacked the content needed to fill its nine hour stretch (12 episodes of almost 45 minutes each). This manifested itself in some really throw away episodes (I’m looking at you Piggy Pig), but also many episodes seemed to linger a little longer than needed, creating an odd lack of suspense or urgency.
There were also a number of ideas that seemed to get reused, not to reinforce but to fill time (e.g. we didn’t need loose women around Dr. Ben Harmon to reinforce his illicit desire for a woman other than his wife). I’ll grant that it was not intended to be binge watched, but this ended up feeling more like fan service than theme reinforcement, which didn’t work for me.
A coherent mystery, to me, is essential to a good horror story. This idea is so pervasive, that even spoofs like Cabin in the Woods, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, and Scary Movie know that they need to have it to appropriately parody the genre. On the other hand, American Horror Story has elements that undermine the mystery by explaining things too early, too completely, and too smugly. Oftentimes it felt less like the revelation of a mystery and the writer pointing and saying, “see what I did there? Wasn’t it clever?” There were only a couple times in the show where I really said, “Yes!”, but more often than not the mystery fell flat because it was too heavily lampshaded or too cleanly resolved too early in the story.
In addition to not leaving much to the imagination, the mysteries also tended to lack much in the way of coherency. Things like the mystery of the black suit start out well, but lacked leading information (even misleading information) to let us wonder about it. On the other hand, with mysteries about the pregnancy or Violet’s truancy, we are occasionally given contradictory information and no way to sort through it – how did Vivian’s pregnancy advance three months in the same time period Violet was out of school for 16 days? These kinds of questions make the whole story less credible and make any mysteries less coherent as a result.
Finally, the show oftentimes made it difficult to actually suspend my disbelief in what was going on. This was usually due to the characters acting inconsistently in service to a plot rather than their stated interests. Further, the plot seemed more interested in borrowing from other works and stuffing them into its context than coming up with something that would actually fit. They had a Dr. Frankenstein and his monster analogue, for instance, that only existed to chop people up or scare people. Within the context of the universe, even, those characters was more complex, and the show certainly didn’t do any service to the thematic content that it borrowed.
Overall, I was pretty disappointed in the first season of American Horror Story. In the end, I wasn’t sure whether the writers were trying to be explicitly subversive of the genre, or failing to recognize the elements of the genre that give it purpose – in either case, the result failed to work for me. While it definitely has its supporters and is very popular, I would not recommend it.