I wanted to start watching this show for, literally, eleven years. Why did it take me so long? My wife and I used to watch almost everything together since we met: Six Feet Under, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Fargo, Game of Thrones, and many, many countless other shows with bleak and cynical messages. American Horror Story was always constantly on the backburner for no other reason than…there’s just so much out there to watch. She realized about two or three years ago (after having kids) that she can’t really stomach grim, grisly, violent, negative, and stark subject matter anymore. At least not at this point in her life. Especially when it comes to dangerous individuals with chaotic mental issues, the death or harm of children, and macabre subject matter of all kinds. And this show has all three in spades!

So, finally, after over a decade of having this show in the back of my mind, I watched it alone. There are a few close contenders, but I can firmly say that I loved Season 1 of American Horror Story more than any other season of a show I’ve watched in the last few years. And even though it’s often pretty over the top… yeah, my wife was better off. There’s some pretty disturbing shit going on here.

The Premise

The Harmon family is moving to a new house! Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott) is a psychiatrist who fucked a woman who wasn’t his wife and he spends the whole season trying to atone for it. Vivien Harmon (Connie Britton) is the wifey victim of said affair who also had a recent miscarriage that didn’t help much with respect to mental health. Violet Harmon (Taissa Farmiga) is the sad-sack teenage daughter who spends lot of energy moping and crying. Here’s the catch: the new house is a Murder House!

Set yourself on fire, you doomed sack of meat. This is the Murder House!

It really doesn’t take them that long to figure out some serious shit is going on in the house, namely ghosts and people-who-may-be-ghosts but no one really finds that out until later. Ben does his work at home until he can get an office established, so many of his patients are just ghosts bound to the house, including his most troubling patient Tate (Even Peters). Tate spends the majority of the season making moves on Violet, which she is mind-boggling receptible to for a long while even though he finds it very difficult to avoid coming off as a complete fucking creep.

In real Breaking Bad fashion, the family can’t catch a break! And it’s pretty bad! Constant new stressors rear their ugly heads: money problems, Ben’s affair partner showing up to the house pregnant, a home invasion by serial killer enthusiasts, Vivien’s complications with her new pregnancy, an unidentified individual in a rubber BDSM suit terrorizin’ and rapin’, and many other insane and unpredictable circumstances.

Along the way, alive people with past connections to the house like Constance Langdon (Jessica Lange) and burny-faced Larry Harvey (Denis O’Hare) expend their energy manipulating the Harmons for their own selfish agendas. Constance believes that no matter who resides in the house, she is still Head Honcho! Mostly because half her family died there and she is still interested in keeping that line of communication open. Larry, being madly in love with Constance and, therefore, a complete lapdog, he tries to do what he can to get the house back for her. Much of this entails being a complete dickhead to Ben, which is funny.

The backstory of the house’s mystical, magical, ghostly powers begins in 1922 with its original owners: Charles Montgomery (Matt Ross), an ether-addled surgeon, and his wife Nora (Lily Rabe), an emotionally abusive socialite. There was some strife. Abortions were performed. Babies were murdered. It’s all pretty grim.

Anyway, eventually, the entire Harmon family dies one-by-one and are eternally bound to the house. The moral of the story (at least their story, which I found the most captivating as the biggest “victims” of the season even if they were the three worst characters) is that you can’t get any of your shit together until you’re dead. Then you lighten up a little bit. That’s good to know.

There are other characters. Other stuff happens too. Watch it yourself.

Oh yeah, and there’s an antichrist.

Little Damien’s gonna getcha. Don’t you know? This is the Murder House!

My Half-Baked Thoughts

Any random American Horror Story fan will give you a different season as their favorite, but I’ve seen Murder House near the top of many lists. I thought it was worth the 11-year wait, but it took me a few episodes to get a sense for what was actually going on. I was in my wary stage where I didn’t entirely trust the haphazard storytelling in the beginning, and I definitely didn’t connect with any of the characters for a while, but as the worldbuilding and plot threads started coming together it was obvious that I wasn’t going to end up being PISSED OFF and ANGRY and INCONSOLABLE.

This isn’t time to be giddy, Constance. This is the Murder House!

Here were the big two turning points for me:

1) The Westfield High massacre.
During the “Halloween” two-parter — the only day that the ghosts can leave the house and roam free to, like, go to Dairy Queen — Tate and Violet hang out at the beach during their little date. Violet doesn’t know Tate’s dead yet, but when five mangled and bleeding teenagers (good costumes guys, heh heh) show up to start harassing them, she starts suspecting something is a little off with her new beau.

This is the first moment of the season where I started to connect with Tate’s complexity as a character and stopped writing him off as a one-dimensional edgelord. The teens are revealed to be victims of Tate’s school shooting in 1994 and they’re all really pissed off at him. This is the first time I really noticed how he uses amnesia as an excuse to avoid confronting the horrible shit he did. Instead of, you know, actually having ghost-onset forgetfulness. You start to have mixed feelings about Tate going forward…

Which makes the opening scene of “Piggy Piggy” even more powerful. Almost as soon as the sympathy with Tate starts nudging you gently, a cold open flashes back to the horrendous mass murder. Shown in full. It’s the most suspenseful and chilling scene in the season, and it was my first real gut-wrenching “oh fuck” moment. The acting was brilliant. It was hard to watch.

2) Violet died four episodes ago.
This was the MAJOR moment. Leading up to the reveal of the corpse, as Tate was slowly taking (ghost-) Violet through the crawlspace, was admittedly a very predictable two minutes. We all knew what was coming. The writers knew when they were writing it that we were going to know what was coming! I know that the writers knew, while they were writing it, that that we were all going to know what was coming!

But it wasn’t about the reveal for me, it was the confirmation and the ensuing emotional aftermath.

Bug-infested corpses abound, my friends, for this is the Murder House!

The swirling, surreal panic that was overwhelming Violet from the moment she attempted to leave the property (only to suddenly reenter the house, over and over again), to the moment she was presented with her own decaying body was viscerally heartbreaking. Taissa Farmiga’s realistic, gasping cries just hit me, man. I can’t remember the last time I had felt this sorry for a TV character. Jesse Pinkman? Wile E. Coyote? Kevin after he spills all his chili?

Then you learn that Violet actually died four episodes earlier during her pill-popping suicide attempt. The only real clue was that Tate started acting differently toward her, almost out of pity. Not leaving the house? Not going to school? Not eating? Typical depression symptoms from the already-depressed teenager. I certainly didn’t notice.

Going forward from this moment, Violet’s arc becomes compelling to me because the ghost daughter needs to somehow get her parents out of the house without dishing out the super, terrible, awful, bad news. And then the thought of becoming eternally, ETERNALLY, stuck with Tate Langdon in a shitty ghost house quickly becomes an undesirable fate! The kid is weird.

Most of the end is surprisingly touching. Once Vivian dies she is reunited with her daughter. Ben contemplates suicide, but his family talks him into leaving the house with his new baby (and it almost happens, but he gets killed on his way out). And they all make it work anyway. The ghosts (the nicer ones, at least) all band together to scare the bejesus out of the new owners of the house on the first night, and they plan on doing the same to any new owners so that no one ever again is subjected to the same fate. They even have a Christmas! It’s all very bittersweet.

Disfigured faces and charred ghost wives? Did someone say MUUUUURDER HOUSE?!?!?!

Worth the Watch?

Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes. The nonlinear storytelling, the characterization, the range of emotions. I loved watching this, and I’m certain that a re-watch would give me a new perspective. Plus, I’d catch some of the stuff I missed the first time around.

I read that, while this may be an anthology series, there are threads of continuity throughout all of the seasons. Many of the same actors pop in to play new characters. That’s exciting! Oh wait, you already knew that? Because the show is already 11 years old? Well la dee da, Mr./Ms. “I-WATCH-TV-AS-IT-AIRS”. Go eat a candy-coated butt.