The Factors To Executing Good Horror
In order to avoid writing nine full-length articles reviewing every season of American Horror Story, I realized I could hit two birds with one stone: I can review the worst seasons while explaining why they were bad, and how Ryan Murphy failed to deliver a season with well-balanced scares and storylines.
But what makes “good horror”? Of course, the answer is completely relative; some people may be averse to horror-comedy, some may coin it as the most compelling presentation of a scary movie. Some people prefer gory, sickening special effects, some enjoy the unnerving buildup of psychological horror. Truly, it all depends on personal preference. Fans of Saw, for example, may argue that It Follows isn’t even a horror movie.
The relativity of horror makes it difficult to review because it’s impossible to be unbiased. However, it is easier for me to give a score out of ten to horror like American Horror Story because most of my critiques have nothing to do with the “horror” aspect — it has to do with the plot. Or, more realistically, the lack thereof.
So here are my top three least-favorite seasons and why. I will be numbering them 7–9 to appeal to where they will sit on a future list of my favorite to least-favorite seasons.
7) Apocalypse
I was actually excited to watch Apocalypse — one of the most universally well-liked characters is heavily featured in the season and many fans enjoyed Apocalypse a lot. I was not one of them.
There were certain aspects I liked: I loved that many of the episodes felt like a continuation of season three, Coven, which is one of my favorite seasons. Coven is a crowd favorite because of the relatively clean plot, engaging concept, and great characters, almost all of whom came back and made an appearance. There were some appealing elements from Coven that Apocalypse built off of, such as clarifying that there is a male equivalent to witch covens — though the warlocks are far less powerful than their female counterparts.
Perhaps you should know this about me before I continue: I hate time travel. Almost everything involving time travel, I hate. I think it’s stupid and confusing. I would have liked Apocalypse a lot more if they hadn’t brought time travel into the last episode. Because with time travel, I often find myself struggling to connect the dots — what changed because of the time travel? What stayed the same? What happened to characters X, Y, Z who died in the past timeline? Are they alive now? It feels like every cool thing that happened in the season was just completely undone, and that watching the season was worthless because almost every event became invalid after a short time-travel sequence that essentially undid the entire plot.
I hated that the season worked backward. It started with the end of the world — cool. But after three episodes in the “present” timeline, the season went back and explained everything from the beginning, before the apocalypse. Why didn’t they just start at the beginning…? I will never understand.
I thought the villain was compelling: the season tried to center itself around the antichrist attempting to destroy the world, and Michael Langdon, the antichrist, was undeniably an interesting character. We learn that Michael, born in the “murder house” (which is a portal to Hell, basically), is the human reincarnation of the antichrist. What was troubling, however, was that I didn’t find Michael scary at all. In fact, he was really stupid. He was just some 20-something blond guy and in my opinion, Cody Fern was too handsome to fear. He has one of those cute cherub faces; he’s not really an intimidating guy. Sure, he had cool powers and could kill people and did a couple of “evil” things, but most of the time he spent onscreen was asking other people what they think he should do. And then they don’t even explain how this 20-year-old got ahold of a ton of nuclear weapons. And, even WORSE, the climax of the show wasn’t a cool fight between the world’s most elite coven of witches and the antichrist, but a two-minute scene where one of the witches goes back in time and hits the antichrist with a car in order to kill him. And that’s it. That’s how they defeat the antichrist. The scene is absolutely hilarious, and I’m not sure if it’s meant to be funny.
Usually, American Horror Story wraps up the seasons nicely and doesn’t dwell too much on setting up other seasons, but for some reason, they decided to show a sequence in which another antichrist is born in the timeline where Michael dies before fulfilling his destiny. I am praying to the universe that they don’t try to continue the antichrist plot. I’m over it.
What was so majorly disappointing was that I think the season had potential. There were many scenes and plotlines that I really enjoyed. There were just so many misguided writing choices that made the plot feel like a joke — like how Michael got the idea to start the apocalypse from the CEOs of a sex-doll company. Yeah.
The only other detail I liked was the episode where the audience was taken back to the murder house, a callback to the first (and most iconic) season. Though, now that I think about it, it’s not promising that the best aspects of the season were the parts where I could pretend I was still watching Murder House or Coven. The writers had to borrow characters and plotlines that the audience actually liked in order to make a compelling season, which definitely speaks to the quality of Apocalypse: without the witches and the “return to murder house” episode, Apocalypse is just a big bag of nothing.
8) Roanoke
Roanoke is dead last for a lot of people, which I understand, but the reason it isn’t for me is that, in my opinion, it was legitimately scary. Which is why I placed it at spot #8.
I started watching American Horror Story because I wanted to watch something scary. I kept watching it because even though the plot can be messy, usually the seasons feature interesting characters or a cool setting. I can overlook messy plots sometimes. With Roanoke, my problem isn’t that the plot was messy, it’s that it was stupid.
The name suggests that it’s going to be a period season, like how Asylum took place in the 60s or 1984 in the 80s. That could have been really interesting — the writers had never attempted anything like that, and if they were going to bring in supernatural elements to explain the true unsolved mystery of the Roanoke colony, that would have been compelling. But they didn’t: in fact, the only way the Roanoke colony was involved was that they were ghosts and haunted a random mansion. They never explained what “Croatoan” meant or why the ghosts are so obsessed with the so-called “blood moon.” It just felt like the plotlines that could have been interesting were left behind.
Instead of making it a period piece, the format was a reality show. It utilized jump scares and anticipation to give the viewer a similar experience to the characters — though because the audience got to see what the reality-show cameras saw, I often felt that I knew more than the characters did and if they would just turn around their lives might be saved.
This leads me to my one piece of praise for Roanoke: it was scary. For sure the scariest season. It was all about making the audience feel unsafe. The characters are trapped in a house that is trying to kill them. Later, the fear comes from scenes of sickening torture — the scariness depended on the actors’ abilities to act afraid, in this season more than any other. The audience knows that all but one character dies: we anticipate each character’s failure to survive — we just don’t know when their deaths will happen. It’s frightening because every character we root for faces a gruesome end.
It certainly was the most gruesome season: characters are skinned, disemboweled, stabbed with poles, and burned at the stake, their teeth are ripped out, limbs were torn off… The reality show format seems to humanize the characters even more because the plot insists that these are “real people” rather than characters. Seeing kills from the point of view of a phone camera that fell to the ground makes it feel raw and real. The unique perspectives do add a sickening sense of reality.
However much I appreciated the season being scary, that’s all it was: scary. And other than the constant nerves I felt watching the show knowing that the ending wasn’t going to be pleasant, the show was boring and predictable. The format didn’t allow me to get to know any of the characters, which made me care less when they died. Since the Roanoke colony ghosts didn’t make sense, I didn’t find them very threatening. The only time I wanted to pay attention was when I was afraid. When I wasn’t actively scared, I was bored. It wasn’t a good combination.
It was also predictable — it followed a similar format to parts of Murder House, where characters can’t afford to move out of their haunted house and one of the spouses realizes that something weird is going on and the other insists that everything is fine, blah, blah, blah. Been there, done that.
The plot was so lacking that I literally have nothing else to say — my description (a reality show where characters explore the house and are threatened by a ghost colony) is literally all there is to the plot.
Congrats, Ryan Murphy, for finally scaring me in an American Horror Story season — but when it compromises a decent plot and memorable characters, it’s not worth it. The concept was there, but it was a miss.
9) Freakshow
Speaking of a big bag of nothing, Freakshow is last on my list. This is going to be controversial. A lot of fans really like Freakshow. For some reason, it just wasn’t for me.
The season follows a woman who runs a “freakshow” in the 1950s and the season attempts to call out society for treating people with physical disabilities differently than “normal” people. But really, it wasn’t that deep and any attempt at a message was fairly lost in the insanity of the show. The plot was so lame that the only memorable elements were the villains: first, a creepy clown character who promptly dies after a few episodes. Secondly, a childish, spoilt murderer named Dandy Mott played by Finn Wittrock. Otherwise, I hated every single character. They were all boring and annoying and I wanted the villains to win. At least they were interesting.
There was barely a plot and it clearly wasn’t memorable because I immediately forgot everything that happened. I think it involved some random guy trying to kill members of the freakshow in order to profit off of their physical deformities by selling their bodies to science organizations. It just felt like many, many episodes where literally nothing happened, and it wasn’t scary in the slightest.
Some people appreciated the season because the concept was there — I just couldn’t see it. Perhaps this is one of those situations where my decision is biased simply because it wasn’t for me. No hate to anyone who enjoyed Freakshow, but in my opinion, it isn’t worth the rewatch.
I really wish the writers would be a little more thorough with these seasons. I think a lot of my issues with Apocalypse, Roanoke, and Freakshow would be solved if they had tied up a few plotholes, abandoned some of the dumb storylines, and focused on the big picture. My main problem with every season of American Horror Story is that some of the plotlines simply don’t need to exist. The writers clearly have a hard time balancing everything. Less is more, I want to tell them, and if they perfect a concept, there’s no need to add in six more plotlines that don’t need to be there. Roanoke would have been a great set in the 1580s, but they decided to mix that with a reality show, and it just became too messy. Apocalypse could have been cool if they had made the timeline more linear and abandoned the time travel aspect. Freakshow is a lost cause.
At least Ryan Murphy still has time to perfect the plot of the next season. Season 10 just started filming. I suppose we’ll see if he takes my advice. Ryan, if you’re reading this, less is more. Oh, and bring back Jessica Lange. I miss when she was a series regular.
