REVIEW: American Horror Story, Season One (Falchuk and Murphy, 2011)

NOTE: This is the fifth part of a month-long extended multi-part look at various horror (/sci-fi/fantasy) series.  The schedule's been adjusted to:

08/06: The 13 Best X-Files Episodes

08/13: The 8 Best Masters of Horror Episodes

08/23: The 11 Best Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episodes

09/12: The 9 Best Angel Episodes

09/24: Review: American Horror Story
??/??: The Twilight Zone

---

It may be impossible to talk about American Horror Story: Murder House without listing isolated moments, because that's so often all the show is.  A bunch of moments - outrageous, disgusting, and/or racy - nailed together into a ramshackle structure that's impressive not because it's beautiful, but because it stubbornly refuses to fall apart.  These moments include a scene when Connie Britton eats raw brains, and another when Dylan McDermott sobs and masturbates, his naked ass in full view, which seems to be saying, "Yep, I'm an ass - deal with it, America."

The plotty plot of American Horror Story's first season (retroactively subtitled Murder House) starts out as a tale about a House Next Door, a Victorian manse smack in the middle of Hollywood.  Its sick history of depraved inhabitants doesn't deter the Harmon family (the aforementioned actors and Taissa Farmiga) from keeping the house.  Dylan McDermott's Ben sees the new digs as an opportunity to save a marriage beyond salvation.  His wife and daughter are patient.  The ghosts waste no time.

The story here gleefully plunders not only from horror fiction like The Shining and The Haunting, but real-world tragedies like Columbine, the Black Dahlia, and, inevitably, the "lost" colony of Roanoke.  Why?  Because it's really fun to say "Croatoan."  Oh, and along with those real-world tragedies, the story takes a late-season left turn into the religious district of horror-town, propping up an unborn baby not just as demonic but possibly antichrist-y.

Because, hey, sometimes brain-eating matrons, tearjerking husbands, chained attic monsters, rubber-suited rapists, half-burnt sleazeballs, ghostly adulterers, shape-shifting sex spirits, undead gay couples, traffic accidents, home invasions, mad doctors, school shootings, abortions, pig-men, fist-fights, murders, and suicides just aren't enough. Sometimes you need to get people's attention.

If the craftsmen behind this show were interested in building and sustaining dread, American Horror Story's first season might've been a cross-genre victory similar to The Cabin in the Woods, but the show's so manic that the implications never get time to fester in the crevices of the viewer's imagination.  It's not just that American Horror Story is over-stuffed; the show is over-produced.  Every statement by an actor gets.  Its.  Own.  Shot.  Shaky cameras can't even hold steady during banal conversations.  The show is so full of incident that villainess Constance (Jessica Lange) must remind us later in the season that, yes, her daughter died earlier in the season, mostly so that the creators can excuse themselves for never mentioning it again.  "See, we didn't forget - we just don't care!"

This ludicrous speed is almost certainly the point, as the show functions more as camp than straight drama.  Along with the cornball style, the series features the more historical form of camp: deliberate flamboyance with a homosexual or effeminate angle.  Interior decorating couple Zachary Quinto and Teddy Sears arrive early on and re-appear often.  Along with providing the show its infamous rubber-fetish-suit image, Quinto indulges his snarky role as aspiring queen of the castle.  When Constance dismisses his homosexuality as an abomination, he responds, "So's that hairdo, but I figure that's your business."

It's that camp quality that saves American Horror Story, which mostly refuses to play its drama with anything resembling discipline (a notable exception is a haunting school shooting).  Some of the actors here know exactly what this material is and embrace it.  Along with Quinto and Lange, who doesn't chew scenes so much as dislocate her jaw and swallow them whole, Kate Mara plays her adulteress role with the right mix of pluck and pragmatism.  The main family must play fulcrum here instead of lever, but Taissa Farmiga resonates as a spirited teenager who loves her parents more than she would like to admit.

There's a valiant effort in the final episodes to connect all the dots, but that effort undermines what gives this series (or at least this season) its identity.  It isn't that American Horror Story hangs together.  It's that nobody here cares that it doesn't.  That doesn't liberate the series or excuse its most tawdry excesses, but it allows for a unique identity that's appealing in its goofy recklessness. Given that the series continues with archetypal titles like Asylum and the upcoming Coven, and, like Murder House, can we dispense with this "story" nonsense and just call it American Horror Tropes?

RATING: B-