American Horror Story on FX ~ What Are Your Thoughts ?

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What do you guys think about the highly anticipated series "American Horror Story" on FX ?
I've personally seen the first AHS, AHS: Asylum, AHS: Coven, and now currently watching AHS: Freak Show.
This show is amazing and it is written very well. I love how every season of AHS is something completely different and it never fails to bring something new to the table, or better yet, to push beyond the boundaries from the last season. This show has surprises around every corner !
Being a huge horror fan in general, this show greatly exceeds my expectations every season.
I don't think there is anything that I personally dislike about this show.
American Horror Story, overall, is quintessential in its own unique way.

~ Hilary ~

Too sexualized for my tastes, but I've found the stories interesting enough to watch for the most part.

I do agree with you to a certain extent. There is some sexual content, but I believe that's it's cleverly used throughout the show to help support stories/back stories of certain characters.

I absolutely love horror, both as fiction and as TV and movie entertainment (I also mostly write horror fiction). So far, American Horror Story: Freak Show has been wonderfully twisted and creepy. I can definitely see influence from Todd Browning's Freaks, which had employed actual sideshow freaks as the American Horror story does this time around.
Incidentally, the real Lobster Boy, who was the inspiration for the character on the show, had bragged he could use his claw like hand to sexually satisfy women.
So far, my favorite character is the insane clown.

My favourite previous season was Asylum, so a similar tone of a kind of unsettling group is pretty good. I saw the first episode of Freakshow, and by now I quite enjoy seeing returning cast putting on different characters. The clown is super unsettling, which is great.

That clown is so scary everytime I see him I want to scream, "AAAAHHH! NNNOOO!" like Beavis from Beavis & Butthead.

I've been binge-watching this recently and I've now seen all four series. I love it!

I can understand the criticism that the plots are all over the place and characters rarely have satisfying arcs. It's also true that most of the series fell apart by the end (Season 2 lasted the course perhaps the best IMHO).

I just love the completely bonkers energy of the thing though. I love not knowing what they are going to come up with next. I even love the singing bits!

The characters are outsiders and we're meant to root for them and I've always had a soft spot for that. It looks great too.

I've just finished watching Coven which seems to be pretty unpopular with fans but I sat through it with a huge idiot grin on my face. It's like Ken Russell doing Buffy. Yes, it made heavy use of one of my least favourite tropes (bringing characters from the dead) and there were lots of bits where I was thinking "hang on, they're witches, why don' they ...". I'm going to forgive it though just for being so delightfully mad.

The idea of setting season 5 in a hotel doesn't sound terribly exciting (how long can you riff off "The Shining"?) but I hope that they run riot with it.

Lady GaGa is actually joining the cast for season 5.

I've watched it through Freak Show, and I find it interesting how they are able to use characters and archetypes to make the audience feel uncomfortable. It isn't 100% original, but I like how they've repackage things. I really liked that the character Pepper was brought back in Freak Show as a prequel to Asylum. I really found her story one of the saddest. It's almost heartbreaking.

I watched the first three seasons. After Coven, I had no intention of continuing the series. I HATE that they explain absolutely nothing. I want to throw things at my TV. IF IT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING, WHY ARE YOU BRINGING IT UP?!?!? Asylum did a fair amount of that, and Coven just piled more on. The first season at least attempted to make sense of certain things. I loved the rule that if you die on the property, you stay there. That was cool, and it was also cool how the neighbor lady knew that rule somehow.
My other problem with the series is how effing depressing it all is. No one gets a happy ending, and bad things happen to... well.... everyone. Because sh*t happens. Everyone who lives in this universe should just kill themselves and save us all the trouble of trying to wade through the BS.
If Freakshow resolves either of those issues to any degree, I may watch it. As of now, no thanks. I can get my horror fix from other sources without upping my antidepressant medication.

PS - I do like Gaga, so I may YouTube the parts she's in from Hotel. If it's anything like Stevie Nicks' involvement in Coven, she'll appear just long enough to make a music video and then disappear again.

I may be wrong, but I got the impression that GaGa was replacing Jessica Lang, thus giving her a much larger role than Stevie Nicks had had.
And actually, Freakshow was my favorite season of American Horror Story, and thus I encourage everyone to watch it.

Have you seen the movie 1408? It is a horror movie based on a Steven King book set in a hotel room, I think that there is room to do quite a bit for an entire hotel.


It does not explain itself? I think that it usually does a fair amount by using the setting to explain itself to build up the lore rather than having characters come out and explain it. The horror it usually revels in is that of the unknown, things are a mystery until episodes later, and follows the rule that monsters are always less scary if you see them in their entirety, although some of the ones that do get revealed, actually move from being some mystical force to a person that is scary in its own right. Like the history behind the killer from modern day in Asylum. And if it feels like each season is not making sense by not playing by the rules of the previous season, well that might be your problem, each season plays by its own rules, Asylum and Freakshow are the only two with proof that they are connected.

In general I see American Horror story working on classic horror tropes where all sorts of horrifying truths exist behind the veil of society, and understanding them can be difficult for humans, and escape to a normal "happy" life is an illusion in many aspects.

I'm not looking for connectivity between seasons. I enjoy the fact that each season is different. It's like the original intention of the Halloween series.

I should also mention that I often don't get subtlety, so there may be things in there that I missed entirely.

But I also don't go for 'horror for horror's sake.' I want a reason for things. It's not interesting if it's just there to be scary. Mrs. Voorhees and later, Jason himself, killed camp counselors to avenge Jason's death by negligence. Freddy Krueger killed kids to torture the people who burned him to death (and because he was a sadistic pedophile rapist). Michael Myers killed babysitters because he apparently couldn't handle the sight of his sister's vag (and then to prove to Jamie Lee Curtis that she could never escape his grasp). I enjoy those because they have reasons behind them. WTF was up with the aliens in Asylum? Or the Jamaican devil guy in Coven? Or the effed-up kid-goblin thing in the basement in the first season? There was never any attempt (that I saw) to explain any of those things. They just seemed like someone said, "Oh, you know what might be creepy?" and then wrote it in.
I did enjoy the whole Bloody Face story line, stupid name aside. And the devil-possessed nun, although that didn't have enough explanation either, beyond just the whole 'the devil loves violating innocence' thing. I liked the various witch-powers and the search for the Supreme, but none of it gave any of the witches enough of a reason to stay with the coven. They'd have been far better off alone. If nothing else, they'd have lived longer. Jessica Lange looked completely bored. It was no wonder she left, she had nothing interesting to do and her affair with the serial-killer guy was a yawn and a half.



I hope you're right. If you are, I'll give it a try. But it still has high hurdles to vault.
I don't have cable, so it's a moot point anyway until the next seasons come to Netflix or Hulu. They only have up to Coven.

Well I think that the aliens were meant to be creepy because they were not something easily understandable by people, worked into all sorts of classic tales of aliens. Some of the characters seemed to think that they were not bad, and they altered the children for some reason, and that they were far from being human to give a reveal probably exempts them from a proper explanation. They kind of blurred the line of science and magic fantasy, between sanity and insanity, which was a pretty major theme.

The devil in Coven, Papa Legba, he wanted souls, he granted gift of immortality but just to get them provide him with more souls. He was pretty much the embodiment of the major theme of the cost to other people in the search of selfish power.

And the kid goblin thing, he was pretty much Frankenstein's monster, an abomination from a madman trying to control death by creating life, which really was the spark of the compounding curse of the house, the theme of the entire season.

Ok, I'll give you Papa Legba. I didn't get any of that stuff when I watched it, but that's probably not the fault of the show. It just seemed senseless to me.

So, was the goblin thing supposed to have been created by the doctor to be a child for his wife? Is that something I missed or just forgot about, or was it implied?

Their child had actually died, so he brought it back to life - -with horrendous results.
Incidentally, the late actor who played the goblin kid was the same as who played the circus freak, Meep, in Freak Show.