American Horror Story–Episode 1

American Horror Story has all the elements of an awesome scary movie.

Except, instead of watching it for two hours and being scared to pee alone for about a week until it sort of gets buried in your mind under Teen Mom reruns…it’s on once a week for an hour.

Just enough to keep you in a constant state of scaredness.  Which is good if you’re me and have an irrational love/hate relationship with all things scary. But very bad if you’re my husband and have to be subjected to checking the attic for strangers clad in patent leather body suits at midnight.

It’s hard to get a good idea of what is going on without watching the show yourself.  With that being said, this is not a show for kids, or probably even teenagers.  FX is really pushing the boundaries as far as they can go with a non-premier movie channel cable show.  Bare boo-tays are shown (hellloooooo Dylan McDermott) and Ben’s (the husband/father) infidelity and the effect of it on his and his wife’s physical relationship is a focal point of the show.  So please be warned.

The show started off  in the 70′s with two red-headed twins sneaking into a creepy abandoned house.  Why ANYONE would enter an abandoned house is beyond me and helloooo where are their parents, but anyways, they decided NOT to heed the word of the creepy girl outside and entered anyways.  After running around and wreaking havoc and destruction, along with busting some jars of body parts preserved in formaldehyde, they were attacked and killed by what appeared to be a blurry baby doll ghost thingie.

It sounds humorous, but I promise you, it was not.  I had to set my pint of Cherry Garcia down so I could cover my face with a blanket.

Flash forward to present time.  As fate would have it, the family that this show is centered around is being shown around the same house by a Realtor.  Crazy, right?  Totally didn’t see that coming.  After ignoring the normal warning signs that a house is haunted  (super old…on the market for a long time….listed for way way less that what it is worth) the teenage daughter announces that they will take it.

Seriously, who let’s their teenage daughter pick the house they’re buying???  What a brat.

After several nonspecific conversations and numerous innuendos we find out that Ben is a therapist who cheated on his wife with a student of his after she gave birth to their stillborn child.  Their daughter KNOWS that her mom walked in on her dad and another woman, and is mentally not in a very good place.  Actually, all three of them are pretty much a hot mess.  Good thing they packed up and moved into a haunted house.  This will totally fix everything!!

Several things came to light that will play out in further episodes:

There is a creepy neighbor Constance (played by Jessica Lange) whose daughter is the same woman who was shown at the beginning of the show as a girl, warning the twins not the enter the house or they would die.

The family’s new maid looks old to Vivien (the mom) and Violet (the daughter) but like a hot young redhead to Ben.  Towards the end of the show, the creepy neighbor Constance made the comment, “Don’t make me kill you again” to the maid.  WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??  And in this day of DNA and CSI how the crap isn’t she in prison?  This will obviously need exploring.

A new patient of Ben’s named Tate has befriended Violet and during a fit of violence, appeared in flashes like a weird ghost demon monster person.  So….is he human or is he not?  Something’s up for sure.

Obviously, I will have to keep watching.  In the name of research.

I’ll post another re-cap next week if I’m still alive.  You know…because watching scary stuff makes ghosts come and get you.  That’s how it works, right?

If you’re interested in watching along, American Horror Story airs Wednesdays at 10 eastern on FX.