A family of three move to Los Angles to escape from their haunted past in Boston. The mother, Vinien Harmon (Connie Britton) recently gave birth to a still born child and her husband and sociologist, Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott) had an affair with one of his students to deal with the grief. The three of them move to get away from a traumatic life, just to enter into one that’s even more horrifying than they could have ever imagined.
This was Fox’s most anticipated show of 2011, for as original as it claimed to be, it had all the cliché’s possible expected in a horror show. It begins with two adolescent boys vandalizing an old abandoned mansion. (The typical setting for a scary movie) With their baseball bats, they work their way down t the basement, (at this point I suppose they wanted the audience to rhetorically scream, “Don’t go in there!”) Once they were deep in the austere room, they were only able to see because of their flashlights. They stumble upon a plethora of animal parts (including a baby’s head) inside jars full of formaldehyde. It that’s not inevitable enough, the split second after one of the boys is convicted by what I think was his sparkly functional consciousness to leave, an impalpable entity slaughters them both. They become one of the many jaded spirits attached to this paranormally irate house. Another cliché out of many in this show was the visual effects. Erratic editing, a massive myriad of antique pictures of infants in a slideshow form at the beginning credits, screeching violins cued during dramatic moments, and a full countenance tattoo of a skeleton one of the psychopathic characters. All if these components intended to by frightening, but since all of them have been so over used, they were rather unsuccessful.
To make up for its hackneyed effects, the writers threw in the kind of plot one would see on ABC. So along with the effects so exaggerating, that it’s almost humorous, they throw the melodramatic emotions that come with a dysfunctional family into the equation. I didn’t know whether to laugh until I cried or change the channel.
I also found it strange that considering the excess of twists and turns in the plot, and the farcical and bombastic dialect, the show was lacking one important element, a protagonist. Every storyline has to have at least one person to root for. In this show, you have a choice of a erotic, basket case of a therapist , who has no room to talk about healthy minds (Ben Harmon), a cynical, moody, and straight-up strange adolescent who picks up smoking and séances (Violet Harmon), a woman who appears to be an old domestic engineer but can shape shift into a young seductress when she’s around men, a widower who obeyed “the voices” in his head and burned his whole family alive and now has brain cancer, a southern belle (I don’t know what she’s doing in Los Angles) who has an incredibly shady past and says things like “don’t make me kill you again”, and who seems to be the main character, a woman who lets her emotions make the decisions for her, but she actually has some potential (Viven Harmon).
The writers’, (Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk) most recent written strict was Glee. I’m not sure what convinced them to transition from a show where every emotions is expressed through song to a “whole new genre of horror” and I’m not sure if their new show is going to make it on the air much longer either. I can tell that the plot is very intricately thought out, so it might become really interesting and fast paced as the show gives us more detail. Then again, the whole show might also be just like its pilot, hard to follow, and at time wacky. The first impression means a lot but I’m willing to give American Horror Story the benefit of the doubt.
My rating: 6 out of 10
