Hey guys sorry I’m late. Day 9 will be posted this afternoon. To make it up to you, here is my American Horror Story post. I’m dedicating an entire post to the show American Horror Story, not because it’s my favorite show, but because it’s a horror show and people love it. I’d do one for Walking Dead too (SUNDAY!), but there would be way too much to write about there. SO basically what I’m doing today is sort of an overview of how I feel about the series, and my reactions to the first episode of the new season.
I just watched the first episode of the new season, Hotel, on Thursday. Now, I have seen every episode up until this point on AHS, and now the new season is on so here I am doing my 31 Days of Horror so I might as well watch it, and at least write about the pilot. I’m not going to be doing this week-to-week, I’m just writing about the pilot, and how I think the season is going to turn out, so quick rundown of AHS, my opinions on it, etc.
I’m not in love with this show as a whole. It’s just a lot of it is just. Very try-hard. I think Ryan Murphy is trying too hard to shock me, and that’s just my opinion of every season. One thing I love is the imagery, every season has great visuals. While I think the cinematography itself is getting a little stale (it rarely changes from season-to-season), it’s still good. I’m just not that impressed with it so much anymore because it’s the exact camerawork we’ve seen every season with the exception of Coven. Coven had some really nice framing and some great, sometimes minimalist set design that I really liked.
Anyway, first I’m going to talk about season 1. Season 1 is the best season and I haven’t met many who disagree that watch the show. Season 1 has the best story, it’s the creepiest, and it has the best visual presentation and characters. It’s a good mystery and it hasn’t really been touched by any subsequent season in terms of quality. Season 1 is the best.
Season 2, Asylum, is my least favorite because Asylum took “trying too hard” to a whole new level. There was just too much arbitrary subplot in Asylum also. Just all over the place. I felt like they were telling 90 different tiny stories that either encapsulated just one episode or the whole season. In my opinion, if they would have just taken one big narrative and fleshed it out, it would have been better. The story of Sister Jude was kind of interesting, but Asylum just didn’t grab me. It had some good visuals, it was creepy-looking, but those things didn’t scare me. If anything they just made me sigh and think that a little more subtlety would scare people a lot more. But for some, I guess, all they need is a scary image to be scared. Which is fine, I just wasn’t particularly impressed with Asylum.
Season 3, Coven, is kind of the consensus least favorite from what I can tell on the internet, but Coven was great, I really liked it. The thing I liked the most about Coven was that, sure there were some subplots that kind of went nowhere, but overall there was one real narrative pathway, and that was trying to figure out who this big witch queen or whatever I don’t remember. The next main witch. And the war between the Witch-witches and the Voodoo Priestess-witches. Which sort of by extension was the white witches vs. the black witches. Kathy Bates was great in her first season because she was totally disgusting and she plays that well. It was also basically X-Men. The witches just all had powers, learned how to use them, and fought against the Voodoo witches who were kind of like the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and it was basically X-Men and I love X-Men.
And then Freakshow is the first season I watched week-to-week, and maybe that hurt it in my eyes. I enjoy the show more when I can watch a few episodes at a time. So watching week-to-week, I was not drawn in. Now I liked this season more than Asylum, and it was visually really cool. I love the idea of a Freakshow and I even remember thinking before that it would be cool if they did a season at a carnival. So that’s probably why I was disappointed. There were too many subplots, there were too many single or double episode stories just over and over and the carnies vs the townies was boring and the only things I really liked were Twisty, Dandy, and the Edward Mordrake appearances. I really liked Twisty because he was a cool, scary, psycho clown and he abducted kids and tried to entertain them but he kept them in a cage in a weird hell in the woods. And I liked Dandy because he was just this ludicrously over-the-top rich white boy and all he wanted to do was murder people and Finn Wittrock was great. The Tupperware Party Massacre was one of my favorite parts in the whole series. But overall, the season was kind of lackluster.
Also I HATED the anachronistic music and all those terrible concert scenes. I won’t say it RUINED David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?,” for me, but boy oh boy did it try.
And now Hotel episode 1! I like the direction it’s going in. It has more of a unique idea (in my opinion) than any of the other seasons besides the first. I kind of like where it’s going and I don’t hate Lady Gaga in it yet (and I’m not a Gaga fan. At all). There’s a part in the episode where she and Matt Bomer invite a couple in for a foursome and then they just tear into them and drink their blood and it was great. I didn’t expect that. I knew there would be something but I didn’t expect that. The whole scene with the German girls or Swedish girls, with them and the thing in the bed in the intro, that was pretty cool. It’s definitely still really try-hard. It suffers from the same problem as every single other season. It’s shock for shock’s sake and there’s little meaning behind it. But I had low expectations for this season, and I will admit that, so going in I was a little biased against it, but after waching I’m definitely going to watch the next episode. I may not do the whole season, who knows.
So, my opinion of AHS Hotel is, if you liked any of the first four seasons, this one looks like it might be worth my time and yours. We’ll see in subsequent episodes. I might mention them later, but I’m not going to do reviews of every episode throughout October because then I’d be stopping after episode 3, so I’m just talking about it here now. Next thursday I might mention the previous night’s episode and my opinions.
Until then, that was my American Horror Story retrospective. Remember to tell your friends, relatives, children, pets, roommates, previous and future sexual partners, teachers, and favorite authors about my blog. If you have any violent disagreements with me about my opinions of American Horror Story, feel free to comment on here, my Twitter, my Facebook, wherever. Please, don’t keep your hate-filled rants to yourselves!
Ok, later
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