American Horror Story

So last night me and two of my husbands were sitting around, kind of hungry at two in the morning, and I said I wanted to watch some horror. We looked through Netflix and didn't find much of anything, and eventually settled on something called American Horror Story. It had a promising summary, something about the depths of evil or whatever.

Hoo boy, was it a mistake.

Let's get something straight: American Horror Story is hilarious. I'm not even sure how to begin summarizing what a clusterfuck it was, and by 'it' I mean the first episode. There was more. It was episodic. More than one episode of this nonsense was produced and aired and watched by people who had a choice over what to do with their time.

To begin with, when I first saw the picture in the list, I honest to God thought it was Twin Peaks. A pale woman in a black negligee arches against a red background in some kind of interpretative ballet as a black rubber bondage suit does a handstand over her in mid-air. I'm not sure who is afraid of kinky sex and ballet, but it seems like a niche audience to start with.

The show itself was just.. bizarre. It focused on this family of a mother, a father and a teenage daughter, and seemed to be predicated upon the idea that Southerners are spooky, as are unpopular kids who shop at Hot Topic and Irish people. There was an old Irish housekeeper who was apparently a ghost and/or the Black Widow from Avengers (?) and whose name was literally Moira O'Hara. Then there was an elegant Southern woman who keeps letting her Down's syndrome daughter get into other people's houses, presumably because she knows it's haunted, although why she'd let her disabled kid go in there I can't figure out. Elegant Southern woman ("prouhd Vahginyan") gives the mother a box of sage "to get rid of the bad juju", hisses ominous threats at Moira O'Hara O'Grady O'Leary such as "don't make me kill you again", and steals some of the silverware during her very first scene.

The main driving force of the plot seemed to be the extremely hot father's desire to ever get laid. His only moderately hot wife had a miscarriage a year beforehand, and instead of going near her husband she bought a yappy dog and basically refused to touch her husband ever again. Then she got angry when he cheated on her and refused to touch him even more. In order to save their relationship they move into a haunted house on the other side of the country, and then the father is assailed by various hot women, and the show is interspersed with scenes of him jerking off and then crying because he is so sexually frustrated.

Also there's something about a fire that occurred in the house (although it seems fine now) and the father being stalked by the arsonist, and also hearing voices telling him to set fire to things and/or himself, as is demonstrated by him striking matches and staring at them longingly, or turning on all the burners and slowly putting his hand near them, in a kind of trancelike state. The mother may or may not have had sex with the house while believing it to be her husband wearing a rubber bondage suit and refusing to talk, and there's also some kind of possibly homophobic subplot about gay people living in the house and killing each other and also more bondage?

Aside from the adults, there's also the subplot with the daughter who is named Violet (and thank goodness they didn't go with their second choice of name, Sunshine, because she is in such a permanently terrible mood ha ha teenagers). She is assaulted by unfriendly black hotties who try to make her eat a cigarette butt because she smokes and one of their grandfathers died of lung cancer or something. She then befriends another social outcast who is seeing her psychiatrist father because he fantasizes about killing everyone in the school. He subjects one of the unfriendly black hotties to some kind of demon assault. He sits in a chair in the basement, wearing a shirt that reads "normal people scare me" or something that only fourteen year olds still think is cool. The lights flash on and off and a demon rolls around on top of the hottie and scratches her face.

This is terrifying stuff, you guys.