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[#Horror #reTweet] American Horror Story: Freak Show (2014)
American Horror Story: Freak Show (2014)
By anythinghorror
When it was first announced, many horror fans scoffed at the idea of Ryan Murphy, the creator of POPULAR, NIP/TUCK and GLEE, now trying his hand at bringing forth a horror series. But AMERICAN HORROR STORY proved to be a success with both the audience and the critics, garnering many awards and nominations over the years. The format Murphy devised – each season a self-contained miniseries, with the ensemble cast playing different characters each time to keep their interest fresh and their performances strong – was both novel and successful.
I’ve watched the first three seasons with mixed reactions: the first, subtitled Murder House and set suitably enough inside a haunted California house, was intriguing; the second, Asylum, cranked it up to 11, with possessed nuns, aliens, Nazi doctors and a murderous Santa Claus; but the third, Coven, seemed to throw a little too much into the mix, with witches, voodoo, and so many characters coming back from the dead they could have been Marvel superheroes.
Seems inviting enough…
Still, my expectations were high for the fourth season, formerly subtitled Circus but then changed to Freak Show. Because that wouldn’t be provocative or anything in this politically correct age, now would it? Freak shows, like slavery, rotary phones and Judd Nelson, seem a product of a bygone age and it’s best not to try and remind people that they once existed. Could this backfire on Murphy and the show?
We open on Florida, 1952, and a happy-looking milkman in a crisp clean white uniform drives up to an isolated house, notices the milk still sitting outside on the front porch, and goes inside to investigate. He finds a bloodied body of an old woman in the dining room, and hears noises upstairs. He goes to investigate, wielding a rolling pin – yeah, Milky, that’ll work – and finds someone in a wardrobe…
Happy to be there? She’s beside herself! (Thank you, I’ll be here all week)
We never see more than that someone’s shoe on one of her feet as she’s rushed on a gurney into an operating room – from which a nurse emerges immediately after and vomits into a garbage pail. We then see a doctor describing his patient – or patients: “Three kidneys… four lungs… two hearts…”
Then we met Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange, a long way from sitting in a giant ape hand for Dino De Laurentiis) as she sneaks in to visit the patient- okay, I mean patients: conjoined twins Bettie and Dot Tattler (Sarah Paulson). The charming Germanic Elsa quickly wins over the starry-eyed, impulsive Bettie with talk of show business at Elsa’s Circus of Curiosities, and the suspicious, pragmatic Dot with the realisation that with their appearance they will almost certainly be blamed for the death of their mother – and probably the others that have been occurring in the county of late.
Ladies and Gentlemen: Meet Twisty. If you weren’t scared of clowns before…
We get to see one of these, as a nice young white couple out in the Everglades about to get Down and Dirty are interrupted by… a clown. A clown with the scariest face imaginable, even by clown standards. This, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages, is Twisty (John Carroll Lynch), and he could well be the greatest boogeyman ever seen on TV. Really. He could make Pennywise crap himself. The wordless performance, punctuated by some of the most graphic scenes on American television, instantly burned itself into my retinas.
And wisely, Murphy (who directed this, as well as co-wrote it with his partner Brad Falchuk), does not dwell on Twisty too long, returning to the other characters at Elsa’s freak show, including Jimmy Darling (Evan Peters), a handsome young man with extra-long syndactyl fingers, who makes some extra money with the local ladies by, um, letting his fingers do the walking, as it were, and who becomes militant about protecting his own kind from the hatred and bigotry of the normal people. There’s also Jimmy’s mother Ethel (Kathy Bates), a bearded lady who is fiercely protective of Elsa’ efforts to keep the show running, and… yeah, we got some real people who would, in an earlier time, would be considered “freaks”.
I’d still sooner have them as neighbours than Jehovah’s Witnesses…
It’s not a new concept – Tod Browning did it in FREAKS over seventy years ago, and the arguments back then about whether or not he was exploiting the people he professed to support remains valid today. And FREAKS, along with cult classics CARNIVAL OF SOULS and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, gets invoked here in very unsubtle fashion, along with a dozen other overt and covert filmic references (the background music is from Hitchcock’s bag, the visual tricks vintage DePalma). Murphy ramps everything up to 11, and with good effect. The FX used for Paulson’s heads is phenomenal.
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And unlike past premieres, where it felt like they were throwing just about everything at the audience, this opening episode, “Monsters Among Us”, takes its time, and is all the better for it. It’s still an AMERICAN HORROR STORY episode, so expect over the top direction, sex, gore, and anachronisms – although this might also be the first season of the show without any supernatural elements. And we’ve yet to see any of the other expected actors and characters, including Angela Bassett and Michael Chiklis.
But they can wait. I’m still bowled over by Twisty the Clown.
AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW is broadcast Wednesday nights in America on FX, and premiers in the UK on Tuesday 21 October. The trailer is below.
Deggsy’s Summary:
Director: Ryan Murphy
Plot: 5 out of 5 stars
Gore: 4 out of 10 skulls
Zombie Mayhem: 0 out of 5 brains
Reviewed by Deggsy. ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
Filed under: Deggsy’s Corner, New Horror Releases, New Posting, TV Horror Review
October 13, 2014 at 07:55PM
via AnythingHorror Central http://ift.tt/11oyxNq