I have a bit of a habit of getting into big-name TV shows later than everyone else -- I'm recalling a girlfriend who more or less forcibly sat me down in front of Game of Thrones. There are a few reasons for this, the big one being that unlike most of us, I am more or less incapable of binge-watching.
But I eventually come around, and years after I should have, I finally watched season 1 of American Horror Story. And it shouldn't surprise me that I couldn't stand it.
I hated the way that every character was completely unlikable -- not in and of itself, a sin, but an unlikable character has to at least be interesting enough that the viewer cares about their fates, and the Harmon family at the center of the story (the smarmy shrink husband, the self-righteous wife who can't stop calling the cops) was so insufferable that I just wanted the ghosts of the house to off them as soon as possible. I hated the way that high production values were used to gloss over the limp plot and complete lack of emotional involvement. I hated the off-kilter psychological-thriller camera angles that have been tired ever since David Fincher deployed them back in the '90s (and, hot take, Se7en kinda sucked), and which were used to create a false and adolescent sense of the "disturbing" in lieu of actually building an environment of dread.
But most of all, I hated the writing. Because horror, moreso than any other genre, is dependent on good writing. And this flabby mess of a script completely failed to horrify.
To provide true horror, something has to get under the skin. And when everything seems recycled from other media -- the mysterious and sinister wealthy next-door neighbor, the brooding teen heartthrob with a dark past, the kid-ghosts pretty much copied whole cloth from The Shining -- all you get is pastiche. Sure, there's plenty of gore to go around, but there's nothing visceral about it, and it would be more at home in a second-year theater student's Halloween costume than in the grisly body horror of The Thing or Videodrome.
One could argue that this was not the goal of showrunner Ryan Murphy and his cohorts, and that he self-consciously wanted to allude to the whole history of horror cinema (after all, the show is called American Horror Story). But there are any number of films that both knowingly incorporate these sort of midnight-movie tropes, and, if they don't just turn them into comedy (Cabin in the Woods-style), manage to find ways to celebrate and elevate them. House of the Devil comes to mind as one recent example, which very deliberately apes the style of '80s teen horror, but at the same time manages to be genuinely creepy through slow development of atmospherics. And similarly, in Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro managed to transcend the cliches of Gothic horror and English country-house fiction through his signature visual style and elements of the truly weird.
But when season 1 of American Horror Story just throws these tropes at the audience, subplot upon subplot, ragged end after ragged end, with the hope that a few would stick, with no regard to world-building, none of them made an impact. And because this was television and not independent cinema, the showrunners couldn't just throw world-building out the window and do a full-on freakout, like was masterfully done in Midsommar.
Here's the rub, though. Even if Ryan Murphy and his attendant media machine have completely failed to establish any kind of investment in the characters, the writing, or the imagined world, he has still managed to create a product that received both a large viewership and a relatively positive critical response. How is this?
The answer lies in this very maximalism.
A TV show is not supposed to have a drum-tight and coherent storyline in the same way a classically narrative film should. It is supposed to keep viewers on the hook. Therefore, each episode had to be reduced to a series of easily digestible themes, with enough memorable moments that could generate buzz from episode to episode, that could keep the Netflix viewers in a state of televisual bulimia.
And American Horror Story did just that. It didn't matter that the plot was a mess, that the characters were unlikable. The images were sharp and memorable, the scenery was beautifully composed, pointlessly jarring events occurred to fulfill the requirement of novelty "unpredictability," the actors themselves were photogenic and their emotional touchstones were easily relatable, if skewed enough to be deemed "artistic" (Murphy can't resist dropping in an emotionally volatile twink...). That's enough to both ensure that enough prestige tropes are hit to ensure both critical plaudits and ROI for the show's financiers.
Now would be a good time to give credit to Ryan Murphy where credit is due -- he also played a major role in the development of the sister series, American Crime Story, where his over-the-top impulses served him well. The two seasons cover sensational tabloid cases -- those of O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan -- where the reality was, if anything, more maximalist and absurd and hyperreal than the shows themselves. If you're writing about O.J. threatening to off himself in Kim Kardashian's bedroom, you really are better served by going big.
But it just doesn't work for horror.
So what is good horror? That, I fear, would merit another essay. And for that, part 2 will be coming soon.
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