What’s better than a good old fashioned American horror story? If you’re me, just about everything. Horror isn’t a genre I dabble in all too often, I don’t want to spend ninety odd minutes watching unpleasant things in a wilful attempt to be scared, it’s irrational. I live by myself, I’m scared enough as it is, it only takes the fridge to spontaneously come to life at 1am to get me going.
Despite this I still felt compelled to watch American Horror Story which seems to have garnered quite a reputation for itself judging by the internet and my twitter feed. Hey, I could like it, I didn’t think I’d like guacamole and I did. So with this newfound optimism I set out to watch the pilot episode of American Horror Story.
The first thing that became apparent about American Horror Story was that it was created by the folks who gave us Glee, which should have been enough to turn it off there and then, but persevered I did. It doesn’t take long to realise that you’re basically watching The Amityville Horror in a serial format, it’s a haunted house where weird stuff happens and some idiots move in because they’re idiots.
Idiots are a hallmark of the horror genre but this is a series, we’re going to have to live with these dickheads for a long time, at least make one of them likeable. I think they want us to like the daughter what with her “brash and quirky” dialogue but I can’t like any girl who wears a trilby. The husband cheated on his wife and instead of getting a divorce they move into a creepy looking house where she spends all of her time hating him. We know he’s a bad guy for cheating and that she’s even more of a dick for staying with him and stating that she doesn’t let her family drink out of plastic bottles.
It feels as if the idiocy of this protagonist family is quite tongue in cheek and they’re supposed to be dicks but it could also be that they’re just accidentally that way, it’s impossible to tell. As a drama American Horror Story is boring, the family are going through some incredibly mundane problems and are incredibly mundane themselves, so the show is reliant on the horror side of things to be interesting.
The house does indeed look very creepy which only further amplifies the family’s stupidity because who would move into that house, let alone let the defining factor be the knowledge that the last owners were murdered? But hey, that’s horror for you. There are many moments intent on frightening you throughout this pilot episode but it feels somewhat like a ghost train, plenty of frights but without any narrative or context, and by the end of the credits I was still not sure what the show was about.
Having been made by the creators of Glee there are inevitably a few parallels between the two shows. American Horror Story could be considered as the anti-Glee - for every sparkly smile and song in Glee there’s a weird and ghastly fright in American Horror Story - if it wasn’t so much like Glee. The biggest flaw of Glee is its insistence on cramming as many musical numbers as possible without any regard for context and the same can be said for American Horror Story’s “weird bits“. There’s no reason for finding a gimp suit in the house just as there’s no reason to break out into song every five minutes.
American Horror Story might be saturated with mystery and weirdness but it comes in such regular and expected beats that it’s rarely shocking or exciting. It’s greatly disjointed and incongruous while its characters are tedious and two dimensional. It’s unclear whether American Horror Story is supposed to be a parody on the horror genre or just camp twisted razzle dazzle. For a true American horror story you’re better off watching the Kardashians.
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