Our American Horror Stories

In the spring of 1932, someone entered the second-story nursery of Charles Lindbergh's only child and took the boy. Little Charles Lindbergh, son of a national hero, the man who made the world's first transatlantic flight, was found six weeks later, and an immigrant was declared guilty of the whole affair, ending what newspapers called "the crime of the century." Because of this case, kidnapping was conditionally made a federal crime—all the federal kidnapping cases since, in which the kidnapped party was taken across state lines and/or the kidnapper communicated via the mail or other means some ransom demands or other types of threats, all those cases were treated the way they were because of the Lindbergh Law. 

Come the summer of '66, Richard Speck broke into a border's home and tortured and killed the eight nurses who stayed there. A ninth survived by hiding under a bed and later identified him by his "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo. Speck's death sentencing was caught up in the national furor over the death penalty—information came to light that hundreds of potential jurors in Speck's case were unconstitutionally excluded due to their stance on the death penalty. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction but overturned his death sentence—and only a year later, a moratorium was laid on the death penalty in the United States by the Supreme Court case Furman v Georgia. 

Sal Minneo was a small film icon with stage experience to prove his pedigree. Although he may never have fully outgrown his type from Rebel Without a Cause, his career was looking to take a healthy turn with a new play when he was found stabbed to death in an alley in Los Angeles. Though a man responsible for a string of robberies was convicted of the crime, there was some doubt that the crime was as simple as a mugging gone bad—after all, Minneo was a closeted gay star in a city rife with prostitution. In certain circles, his death contributed to a growing disquietude concerning the shadowy abuse of the American homosexual by bigoted individuals and by a society that allowed no refuge.

April 20, 1999 is a day that lives on in the minds of a generation as the date of the first major school shooting on American soil. Two teenagers planned an elaborate incursion on their high school involving timed explosives, pipebombs, semiautomatic weapons, and knives—their most horrific massacre took place in the library, and the details of that attack kept coming in the news for weeks. Since that day, Columbine has stood for perhaps the most American of homegrown terror attacks: disaffected or abused youth, unsupported in some ill-defined way, targeting a place meant to make young people safer and smarter. Even Newtown, with its terrible and indiscriminate slaughter of innocents, could not shatter America's complacency—that cherry had been popped more than a decade earlier, and the country had not yet recovered its sensitivity.  

If some or all of these sound familiar, it's probably because you've been alive since the 90's and you've learned a little about your country in that time. If neither of those qualifications sounds like you, but reading all that still gives you major déjà vu, that's because you've been watching American Horror Story.

American Horror Story has never hidden what it actually is. No, I'm not referring to this season's upcoming twist. It's right there in the title, what every season shares: "American Horror Story". Yes, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have spun some fun and sensational tales along the way, their designers have had a lot of fun, and their actors have been given the chance to engage in the time-honored tradition their art so lovingly but rarely affords: intraproduction character-swapping. But all along, The Murph has been pulling a fast one on us: by using our collective pop consciousness against us, all six seasons thus far have played with major American themes and problems, set like a cannibal's good china on quintessentially American chintz. 

It's quite a neat magic trick. 

You see, the beautiful thing about Horror, that black rainbow of a genre, the thing that pulls me to it eight times out of ten, is its ability to confront (more or less) safely the fears that keep us from moving forward in life. There are unhealthy ways to face fear: you can hide from it, or seek it out compulsively. There are realer ways to feel fear: terrible events can unfold before you; your life may be in jeopardy; you may lose what you hold dear or come close. All fiction can give you a refuge from the terrors of the world. Only Horror can inoculate you against blind fear.  

All great works of Horror hold at their core some dark heart of truth: awful truth, usually, and these days when we are insulated from the grips of a wrathful earth by society, often social truth. Look at Night of the Living Dead: a black man is terrorized by extremely white guys (it might even be said extremely old extremely white guys) for more than an hour. Or how about The Ring? All that chain mail you left in your spam folder is suddenly looking important enough to move back to the inbox... Shirley Jackson's tilted masterpiece The Haunting of Hill House teaches us the dangers of wanting to belong.

Kubrick's Shining may well be about mass genocide, setting a violent act in miniature against Native American wall treatments and piles of ownerless suitcases. Mr King himself worked magic in It while exploring what childhood fears translated to in an adult state of amnesia. Halloween first put us face-to-face with a concrete modern boogeyman, armed with a knife and no face or reason to kill. 

Still not convinced? You can zoom back to Dracula if you want.  This epistolary novel was written by an Irish theatre manager. The letters and journals are almost as immediate as the stage—if a little delayed, which somewhat dampens the events. And they describe every Irishman's terror, the Invader, coming not to Dublin but to the heart of Mother England. Dracula slips into England the way the Brits came to Ireland, elegantly and insidiously amassing an army to overthrow the existing rule of law there. Kind Mr Stoker allows the Brits their victory—but it took some international cooperation.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" after being imprisoned by a doctor and her own husband. Poe's tales of the macabre introduced murderous speakers in a conciliatory light, wrested straightrazors from the hands of orangutans, and allowed incest and a penchant for isolation to crumble the foundations of an old and storied house. William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth after a trusted but misborn advisor to the dead Queen Elizabeth, zealous and ambitious and absolute, somehow eked the name of scottish James VI from her dying lips as her trueborn successor. In an Early Renaissance England, there was true fear in the air: a longtime ruler who brought prosperity to the Isles was dead without an heir, and a Scot was on the throne for shadowy reasons. The Bard's play gave an ambitious but misborn advisor the chance to assume the throne through murder and witchcraft, and it assured the English public that another righteous Scot was there to cast him down.

Turn back the clock before polite society came to conquer the dust of natural panic, and you will find a treasure trove of Horror from the written to the oral and staged. Tales of beasts in the woods at night. Death denied and life perverted. Seagods calmed by blood. Human fears from the birth of our kind, star-naked out on the savannahs, hiding in the forest. Horror taught lessons. Don't travel alone. Respect your surroundings. Constant vigilence. Evil is real and it wants you.

Today we might find ourselves calling out to people in horror movies: Don't go in there! Out the front door, not up the steps! Why are you opening that box!? But really, we're calling out to ourselves. Why won't anyone help that black man with zombies after him? Why did she watch that video that killed her niece? Why didn't he listen to the townspeople and stay away from the Count's castle? We teach ourselves those lessons—or we try to. It's a vaccination against those same things happening in our lives. There are good reasons to help. Warnings to heed. Boxes not to open.  

Horror spikes our adrenaline and writes a memory. It may not teach a lesson, but it exposes a condition—one we might encounter, if we're unlucky. And in those brutal moments where we feel unsafe even in our own beds and armchairs, kept in thrall by book or screen, we are burned with indelible images and assaulted with sounds which will revisit us in nightmares. It's a gift. We will remember, and if a need arises, we will have a new idea of how to behave under trying circumstances.  

I find this preferable to actually being chased by a brainless mob. Don't you? 

Ryan Murphy and his crew seem to agree. American Horror Story may have changed settings and character lists every season, but we have had six straight years of American anxieties played out on the relative safety of the FX Network (or FXNow if you've gone and cut your cable). An endless parade of school shootings, homophobic murders, and kidnapped children; a veritable glut of shady celebrities, suspect diets, unreliable authority, and the interminable miseries of freedom. 

In the next few days, possibly weeks, I plan to hit each season of AHS in turn to investigate a little more fully how the season encapsulates some particularly prototypical American theme. In my last post, you might have caught a quick rundown, so here's another glimpse at what you might expect:

With Murder House, we will look into American home life, and its galley of haunts.

In Asylum, we will dredge through the evolution of the American belief system, from religion to medicine to politics to the free press. 

Come Coven, we might discuss entitlement and intergenerational friction (and to some smaller extent the American education system). 

By Freakshow, you'll know to expect a great discussion on American entertainment and celebrity obsession. 

Hotel we'll tackle as a model of the professional American's obsession and control over him or herself, and we could even touch on whether the "American dream" fits into the world AHS describes.

Last but not least, we will of course start to talk a little about Roanoke, and offer some preliminary stabs at a theme. Spoiler alert: this may seem like a cheap shot, but everything about the season so far has just screamed, "American TV!" It's so far parodied a SyFy reality show, brought in an FBI psychic, gave us important backstory from Dennis O'Hare's professor via a reenacted video journal playing on a television screen inside a reenactment of someone else's story at the house. Reality and TV are so far separated that some might argue they lie against separate poles of the whole thing. And to add a nice PoMo twist to it all, Ryan Murphy has us talking about the TV show as it exists in real life, theorizing and thinking about next season already, even as we watch and analyze the story inside this season and try to compare it across seasons in ways that might not be considered strictly healthy or absolutely sane. We'll talk about it more later, but if this season does what some have guessed at, and essentially writes the roadmap for the last four seasons in its last four episodes, it could be that AHS becomes a sort of platonic ideal for American social commentary and televisual writing. 

You'll forgive me if I spout on. Not only is that my default setting, but American Horror Story is a sort of dream come true for me.  I'm not involved with it in any way, and yet I can vicariously take a thrill in its (spotty) execution and (extremely lofty) ideas from across the country.

As a project, it is sheer heaven. A horror anthology with shared mythology, characters, and worldbuilding, character swapping between a corps of core actors, using Horror to its intended ends, using television to its intended ends, never shying away from the campy or goofy, never shying away from the ugly or beautiful—a show that will possibly get two seasons a year from here on out—a show that will at least try to produce a season "written by one person" (although I'll be pretty disappointed if that person is Lin Manuel Miranda or Stephen Karam)—a show that accepts and loves its own format—a show that seems tailor-made for those of us who read Harry Hardiner and Stephen King's Dark Tower and Brett Easton Ellis———

It's a heady culmination.  

So buckle in. It's almost Halloween, and it's almost Election Day, and American Horror Story and Pinkum Press won't let you forget about either.

Tooth and Torch

If nothing else, wicked bouts of writer's block have properly coincided with the beginnings of the fall—both in nature, and on television. Oak Mountain has been particularly brown, as has Cheaha, but it's still a change, and the air is starting to smell of dead leaves. Also, American Horror Story is back, and it's overlapping—coinciding—with one of my guiltiest and most tasteless of television pleasures: SyFy's Paranormal Witness.

Calling  Paranormal Witness "reality TV" is a little like calling the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel "some painting". Paranormal Witness is what is left of reality TV after you take away the trappings of youth and vanity and clear-cut personal conflicts: talking heads by unhappy families over reenactments of the worst trauma they ever endured together. Often they will describe objects moving from place to place. Electrical problems. Bad smells. Dark figures in the night. Sounds in the walls.

At first glance, it's a natural outgrowth of the "ghost hunters" phenomenon. After all, there is no need to rely on chance and staging to spook audiences in the night. These stories have already happened. There is no need to get scared: these people have already been scared. This way, there is no greenlit nightvision jitterbugging. A story can reliably build to a 57th-minute climax, and the graphics can be handled by a relatively sophisticated cable network. This is TV you can count on—not necessarily for scares of any kind, at least nothing in the ghosts and goblins department, but for an investigation of family drama of a particularly repulsive and enticing brand: that coincidence of belief, fear, stress, relationship, and environment that is so subtly tuned that it can be mistaken for spirits in the night. 

People, I'm saying this isn't a show about ghost stories. It's a series all about family tragedy, and it's as compelling as it is subjective. Okay, well, there may have been a poltergeist in that house—or the youngest child of a family with a working single mother might have been acting out for attention.  The new house may have had a speckled past, but it's just as likely the "prankster" husband took a darker turn further away from the city, or the workaholic mother found new ways to occupy her time and imagination. Nearly every episode contains at its core some kernel of familial discord, some little true glimmer in all the retellings—and the work to find that glimmer is just as much the reason to watch as the ghost stories and jump scares. 

Think about those stories you tell about your life. Do they ever capture accurately how that event took place? How the air tasted, why you wore that shirt, whether plums were in season and had you had one yet that year? Now think about how much more separated from reality a staged re-enactment would be, with added digital effects, by actors who don't know you, reading lines written by people who listened to a tape of your retelling? HHHHHHHHHAAAAAWP. Sorry, just had to gasp for breath. It's a meta minefield, and little sogo pomo David is having a field day. What is the truth? Whose truth? Which truth? Why truth? 

I'll admit that reading Harry Hardiner and particularly his Rosewire series majorly hooked me on winnowing out the "true" story from the cosmic game of telephone we call history (though technically Hardiner would suggest they were all true), so Paranormal Witness plays right into my sensibilities. Viewers get to choose their own level of involvement, to borrow a phrase. How much of the talking head do you believe? None of it, if you want—examine what human truths the writers plumbed, and how they found people to relive false events in front of a camera. A few observable details? Okay, then what in that mess of strange facts can you assemble into a coherent picture of a real person? Is there something... uncanny about the whole thing? Something unexplainable? Something all too obvious? And don't get me started on the reenactments: embellishing the embellished, FX'd over and acted earnestly, and lit appropriately. It's almost art. Someone should write it a love letter.

Enter this season of American Horror Story.  

It takes Paranormal Witness as what Harry Hardiner would have called its "wholecloth", supplanting the talking heads and the stories of human failure and the hideous reenactments of their hazier points. So far this season, we have seen a variation on the new house curse, the move to get away, the lost child, the troubled history, the lapsed addict, the home invasion, the backwards locals, the useless police, the videotaped research... Season Six of AHS so far has played out almost all the major motifs of Paranormal Witness, using its own format, and even reappropriating its bumper titles. And it adds its own tasty Ryan Murphy flair on top.

Look: like every season of AHS to date, Season Six already copes with a uniquely... well, a uniquely American horror story. This year, we're already occupied with plot points and character details which raise the gory specters of the prescription painkiller epidemic, police encounters ending in violence, random gang initiation, racial intolerance, and our very nation's own brutal and desperate settlement. Its reality format matches and undermines a national obsession that has escalated to the Presidential race.  After all—what, in this story "inspired by true events", can possibly be considered true?

Now, a lot of attention has been paid to what will tie the seasons of American Horror Story together this year. And yes, there have been a lot of interesting theories and details to occupy ourselves with, if we're so inclined. Are all previous seasons actually "reenactments" of "true events"? Does the Piggyman from this season have anything to do with the one that murdered Cam in Season One? Pregnancy problems and using all your savings to start over are back from that season too. How about Kathy Bateman playing another bloodthirsty immortal, this one from around the same time as the plantation house from Season Three went up? How did the rift first open up between Tituba and the houes of Salem? Didn't Ryan Murphy say Dandy Mott's origins would be explored this season? If Queenie ended up visiting L.A. last season, where have the other survivors of Miss Robichaud's Academy wound up? The ghost rules ended up getting rewritten as well, halfway across town from Murder House. 

It's a pop culture puzzle almost as endearing as Lost, and it's enough to make a fanboy giddy. There's even a theory tying the seasons of AHS to the circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno. Litpro David is all in a tizzy. What could the twist in episode 6 be? Cuba certainly got me asking. There are enough meta-directions it could take to drive a brother crazy. Are these the stories of dead people? Do the aliens of Season Two have a hankering for a very particular brand of reality show? Wait wait wait—is there a possible example of Explosionism playing out in front of us? There's good reason to wonder whether each of the first five episodes of Roanoke will be mortared versions of the first five seasons of AHS. A chance to write a future Explosionism post! What bliss. 

But, be still my heart—the far more interesting question this season is, what will American Horror Story say about us? 

Murder House looked inside the American home, and the horrors we imagine and hide there. Asylum dealt with the degredation of our press and the evolution of the American belief system. Coven told a Harry Potter generation that we are not a Wizard, Harry, and that adventures at Hogwarts sometimes involve the deaths of your friends, tacit racism, false lessons from faulty faculty, betrayal, and the terrors of mediocrity. Freakshow questioned celebrity and showbusiness and an enduring obsession with society's oddities. And the ghastly Hotel showed us a parade of professions that expose you to people on the worst days of their lives: policemen, physicians, hoteliers in a faded and shadowy location—tricks and dealers and runaways.

In Roanoke, Marcia Clarke is married to O.J. Simpson. 

Not only that—we have good reason to believe that after last year's sprawl from vampire measles to postmortem serial killer parties to Rudy Valentino, that this year the narrative will be a little tighter. There is some evidence to suggest that might even be one of the aims of this season: focus and redirection. (Harry Hardiner would love the apparent simplicity if this season ends up being one of his fractals...) There are fewer episodes planned for this season, and the format, while fascinating and internally consistent so far, has the capacity for... hyperextension. The creators have also described a 3-act structure to the season—a first, as far as I can see, to be described that way in advance. 

So what, in this tighter season, can we expect to see about a divided America, one afraid and distrustful of its police, one starting to live in fear of random attacks in our streets, one obsessed with security and the story of its own origins?  

There have been some serious doubters out there (I'm looking at you, Slate), but this season could be the smartest and most-focused look that AHS has taken at America so far—and it has an impressive, if gaudy, track record. Looking at the stories of our hard-scrabble forerunners in a new, animalistic light, passed through the apparent safety of dramatic reenactment: our modern opiate of choice. This third episode with Lady Gaga as the goddess of a dead land reminds me of a line from Rise about the Risen America that has always stuck with me: "This is ancient land, this is dead land, and we have only begun to colonize it." Harry Hardiner was right. And, a decade and a half after he checked out, American Horror Story is  putting together a season that would thrill him. Colonists and reality TV. If that's not America, I don't know what is.

It's exciting for all Harry Hunters to see a small nod to Mr Hardiner in episode 2: the unfinished (albeit spraypainted, not burned) word "MURDE" on the wall could end up being as integral to the plot as the Butcher in the woods. This should give "MESHARE" wonderers a happy diversion—even if "diversion" is exactly the right word, and "murder" is NOT what was meant to be on the wall after all.

In a continued toast to writer's block and the castoff slag of The Furnace, and in a hopefully not-premature tip of the hat to American Horror Story and its early-episode format, here is another disused chapter—this time from the first round of material from The Furnace, in a long chapter which imagines the unaired last episode of Rupert Smythe-Pryce's Stronger than Fiction reality show—the episode which cost the crew their lives, and that was to take them to Bookbright to recreate the success of his bestselling non-fiction novel Harry Hunters. 

Anyone else ready for next Wednesday night?