The obvious thing to do with a murder house…

American Horror Story is into its tenth season. It has blown hot and cold over the course of its run after an initial season that is generally regarded to have blown people’s socks off.

This spin-off is supposedly a series of shorter stories within the larger show, although it’s not clear at this stage if there’ll be a unifying theme to bring them together.

This first episode is clearly not meant to stand alone, so I’ll say now that I’m expecting a second (at least) to follow up on the events occurring in this season’s opener.

We open with a family driving up to a large house (familiar to long time watchers of the show). The house is huge, the family is White and, although discussion of the subject is completely avoided, one has the immediate assumption these people are also really well off.

In that sense it’s American only in that it’s about a very small slice of American people and perhaps about the aspiration of what those people want. It’s a particular delivery of the American dream – white, wealthy and liberal. It’s an odd opening because it jars so much, especially when you can see shows like Them or The Underground Railroad which have tackled issues that are deeply horrific in ways that left everyone I know unnerved, full of dread and horrified.

In other words, the genre feels like it’s moved on and the establishing shot of this show comes across as old fashioned and, dare I say it, anachronistic.

It’s not long before we discover some key facts: the owners ‘don’t believe in ghosts’, they know it’s a murder house and plan to use those facts to establish a horror house vibe, do the house up and sell it on for a profit – again, the American dream. At least for a certain set of people.

And here’s an interesting point – the family are so convinced they’re safe that they see this only in terms of a money making opportunity. I was discussing this with someone in terms of the kinds of people who feel so assured about their lives they literally cannot feel fear because they have nothing to fear – they’re secure, safe and privileged. An aspiration for us all to be sure. Yet you could make the point that the oppressed see horror from a very different point of view and you could argue that only the utterly self-assured or the very desperate would consider buying a house with this one’s history.

For newbies to the show there’s no explanation of what happened beyond a couple of throwaway lines and this is where it all starts to really fall apart.

The daughter makes no sense. The house makes no sense and truly I say to you the parents are literally the worst ‘well meaning’ parents in the history of television.

One minute the daughter is talking about not having to change schools and then the next we’re in a class situation where no one seems to know anyone else let alone her. It’s like they all walked in off the street and were told ‘this is your new school’ and with typical teenage brio shrugged their shoulders and sat down. The dialogue is lost in the moment with no reflection on what’s just been said, no follow up and, freakishly, people appear to forget others exist the moment they exit their line of sight.

Here’s an example – the daughter finds a PVC suit and puts it on and, looking in the mirror, freaks herself out. She throws the suit away. Then it reappears in her wardrobe and instead of asking her parents if they’d put it there (which feels pretty unlikely) she just puts it on again and prances around the house in it. No reflection on what’s happened, no questions, no actual human behaviour on screen.

Another example is that, out of the blue, we discover the parents have been monitoring her internet use because she’s into extreme BDSM. This hard ninety degree left turn half way through the episode isn’t foreshadowed, it’s not discussed and is presented as if it’s a school play on how to talk about kink (and fail).

They insist she talks to a counsellor. Hilariously the counsellor comes to their house (hmmm) and then the parents talk for an hour instead of the daughter for whom the session was organised (bigger hmmm) and the counsellor says nothing to them about their absurd behaviour (I mean, did they just look out the window and ask whoever was passing to come in?).

The counsellor is a PoC and they’re doing the emotional labour of getting these White people to open up and talk to each other. As soon as she starts to make some progress the daughter kills her.

The first person to die is, once again, a PoC. Disposable even as, and perhaps because, she was doing White people’s emotional labour for them. It’s grim and I find this deeply retrograde. If I was watching this for pleasure it would be enough to have me switch it off and not come back – PoC are not here to die as part of White characters’ plot arcs and shows which think this OK can moulder unwatched as far as I’m concerned.

To make matters worse I can only assume the parents are able to only hear what’s happening within three feet of them because the counsellor is killed literally fifteen feet away and no one comes out to see what the noise is.

In a truly baffling scene the parents find the PVC suit covered in blood (having not raised even the most cursory question about why the counsellor never came back from the restroom…) they theorise it must be covered in blood because it’s their daughter’s period…seriously. I don’t really know where to start deconstructing this because it’s so ham fisted, so disastrously bad that I was left wondering if it was a satire, pushing the envelope on just how dumb and stupid these tropes can be.

There’s also a strange attitude to sex running throughout this show. The mild message that teenage girls thinking about sex is transgressive. The idea that someone in a PVC suit should be frightening. The sense that everyone is in this sterile relationship – that everyone’s hot but no one’s horny. It’s very strange for horror to shy away from such obvious focus on the body.

For me horror needs to feel believable. I don’t mean we need to see people eating and sleeping and moaning about taxes. I mean I want to believe in the characters, I want to understand and believe in their choices (even when they’re bad ones). This first episode makes the terrible mistake of not only not showing us why people are acting but then having them immediately forget their decisions moments after they’ve made them.

This show gets it wrong on so many levels. It presents a killer who has no apparent motivation for killing – not in a mysterious sense but in a bafflingly empty of emotion sense. It effectively presents people who look in a mirror and immediately forget what they look like. It gives none of the characters any depth at all and left me with the worst possible response to horror – indifference.

Verdict: I’m not sure where episode two is going to take us but on the evidence presented I don’t hold out much hope. This is some of the worst constructed and delivered television I’ve seen in some time.1/10

Stewart Hotston