TV REVIEW: American Horror Story (2011)

FX Channel's new series, American Horror Story (from creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk) commences with the proverbial "crime in the past" (in 1978); one that looks very much like something out of the slasher film classic Prom Night (1980). 

And, of course, if you're a horror fan, that's a very good thing. 

As all genre admirers know, the crime in the past is the seed for terror in the present; a seed allowed to grow -- like an unnoticed weed -- until ready to blossom.

Here, in the series prologue, two nasty twin boys -- after being warned -- venture inside the basement of a classic Los Angeles Victorian, one built in 1920.  It's the home of one of the original "doctor to the stars," apparently, and the two boys meet a horrific, bloody end in one of the dark, subterranean rooms.

Cut to "Today," and this fully-restored home becomes the new residence of a 21st century American family, the Harmons. 

Having relocated from Boston, this family is dealing with some pretty serious turmoil. Mom, Vivien (Connie Britton) just had a traumatic miscarriage late in her pregnancy.  Worse, she recently discovered her psychiatrist husband, Ben (Dylan McDermott) engaged in a sexual liaison with a girl half his age.  Not surprisingly, Vivien and Ben's daughter, Violet (Taissa Farmiga) has little affection for either parent, and is very alienated.   Meanwhile, the Harmons' new next-door neighbor is the strange, faintly-sinister Constance (Jessica Lange), a Tennessee Williams heroine as if re-imagined through the lens of David Lynch.

Very soon, strange things begin happening in the Harmon's "happy" new home.  For one, their new maid, Moira, appears different...depending on who's doing the looking.  Vivien sees Moira as an older, matronly woman (Frances Conroy), while Ben sees her as a young seductress, an ongoing carnal temptation (Alexandra Breckinridge).   For another thing, the house seems to boast a personality and agenda all its own.  Fans of the haunted house genre will recall that most productions of this type (Burnt Offerings, Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, etc.,) feature a kind of "honeymoon" period where everything is good; before everything turns sour. 

Notably, there's no honeymoon period for the new homeowners in American Horror Story.  And yes, that says something about how fast our culture moves in 2011.  In today's real estate market, how many honeymoons are there, really?

In the first two episodes of American Horror Story, the Harmon family gets acquainted with its new home.  Upstairs in the attic is a kitted-up S&M den...left intact from the previous owner, right down  to some black creepy sex suit. 

Down in the basement is a kind of morgue or doctor's office, and in the first episode, one of Ben's patients, a school-shooter-in-the-making named Tate (Evan Peters) seems to unleash a demon down there.

In the second episode, "Home Invasion," a group of apparently drug-addled Mansonite cultists break into the Harmon home in hopes of reliving a famous murder that occurred there in 1968.  Delightfully, this episode opens with a violent prologue (another "crime in the past" transgression) that evokes not just that era of American history  (with clips of Laugh-In on the television), but the horror genre of that day too. 

Spcifically, the story of a psychologically-disturbed killer who breaks into the house and attacks two young nurses deliberately mirrors an  infamous (and suspenseful) Alfred Hitchcock Hour program from 1965 entitled "An Unlocked Window."  To cement the association to Hitchcock, this prologue actually re-purposes Psycho's soundtrack, making the connection to the Master inescapable.

Horror is notoriously difficult to do well on television.  David Lynch mastered it with Twin Peaks, and Chris Carter aced it with The X-Files and Millennium.  I suppose the trick is in how well you combine "terror" (an emotion  out of the ordinary) with a homogenized medium, one, essentially, for the masses.  

Because it airs on a cable station like The Walking Dead, An American Horror Story is able to showcase far  more disturbing imagery than a traditional series, such as Kolchak: the Night Stalker (1974), might.  But the talents behind this series, including vets Tim Minear and James Wong, seem to understand that the real key to vetting terror on television rests in creating raw, decorum-shattering imagery from words. 

Accordingly, the teleplays for American Horror Story are filled with words that reveal a raw, nasty, visceral edge. 

Vivien didn't just find her husband having sex with a young student; she found him "pile-driving" her. 

The Downs Syndrome girl who lives next door is described, disturbingly, by her own mother, Constance, as a "mongoloid." 

Here and in other instances, the caustic but descriptive words truly match the horrific visuals. And while censorious moral watch guards may complain about the overt lack of political correctness on display, the series is thus far living up ably to one of horror's most important ideals: to traumatize in both word and deed. 

Because in that very state of unsettled shock and discomfort we are vulnerable; able to be truly frightened.

Some of the stylish visual techniques in American Horror Story may seem off-putting to some too, a little bit like last decade's generally feeble PG-13 horrors. 

There's an awful lot of jump cuts and fracturing of space here, for instance, when suspense might be better generated through long takes.

But, considering this visual form from an opposite angle, the jittery, anxious composition of the program seems to work hand-in-glove with the show's theme. 

This is a series about an American horror story, after all, and one need only look at the national discourse to intuit that's exactly what we're living.  The economy's gone south, the political dialogue is mean and death-obsessed, with jokes about border fences electrocuting people, boasts about the application of the death penalty, and even applause for the uninsured dying.  When did we, as a people, become so mean?  And worse, so delighted in (and proud of...) our own meanness?

American Horror Story seems perfectly positioned to capitalize on this zeitgeist. 

The Harmon family is not about harmony, but the opposite: disharmony.  It is fractured (like the jump cuts themselves), lacking compassion, and unable to deal constructively with "the house" (America?), which seems to boast dirty laundry in every room and hidden skeletons inside every closet. 

Is American Horror Story hyperbolic in tone and form?  Absolutely, but one glance at the presidential debates will reveal the exact same quality in our "serious" discourse.  At worst, American Horror Story is guilty of reflecting back at us who we happen to be as a people at this particularly unpleasant juncture.  At best, it taps effectively into the culture to dramatize its macabre, twisted tale of  a house -- and a family -- that has taken a decidedly wrong turn.

Sexy and scary, violent and mean, American Horror Story is like Twin Peaks on steroids.  It's aggressively weird and authentically disturbing. 

I hope it lasts.

TV REVIEW: The Vampire Diaries:"Pilot" (2009)

"It's important to stay away from fads," one smoldering vampire brother, Damon (Ian Somerholder) warns his equally-smoldering, vampire sibling, Stefan (Paul Wesley), in the top-rated premiere of the CW's The Vampire Diaries.

That also happens to be good advice for the writers behind this fledgling series...

While allegedly based on several young adult novels by L.J. Smith (originally published in 1991 and 1992), this new TV initiative brazenly attempts to suck the teeny-bopper life-force right out of Twilight's beating, undead heart.

Let's see: we've got your ancient vampire male/troubled-teen-girl love affair here. We've got your bad vampire element in the small, parochial town of Mystic Falls, making things tough for nice, God-fearing, James-Dean-looking vamps. We've even got your mawkish sentimentality and high school tropes. Sound familiar?

Painfully earnest, agonizingly derivative, tortuously superficial, The Vampire Diaries, at least in the pilot episode, is literally Twi-Lite. It exists not because of some grassroots, urgent fan desire to see the nineties novels adapted for the small screen, but because romantic vampires are in vogue right now. Because, as Damon would say, there's a "fad." But let's take his advice and beware of that fad, okay?

Not to go off on a tangent here, but I should probably state for the record that I don't hate Twilight.

Yet -- I should also explain -- I don't hate Twilight in the same way that Robert De Niro didn't hate Juliette Lewis's character in Cape Fear (1991), if you catch my drift. That lack of animosity doesn't mean Twilight shouldn't be taught a few hard lessons (mainly in genre history...), you know?

I didn't judge the first Twilight movie to be particularly good, let alone original. Overall, I would generously rate it about a "C." I've seen worse, and I've seen better. Transformers was worse, by comparison. The Spirit was worse. Hell, the remake of Friday the 13th was worse. I am not at all despondent about a sequel to Twilight because I do believe the cast was promising; and that there was, undeniably, room for improvement. A good Twilight movie could still be made, theoretically.

Furthermore, I am genuinely delighted that the Twilight books are so wildly successful, and that a younger generation is reading them with avarice and devotion. Exposure to popular fiction like Twilight will inevitably lead these same teens to other books; other literature. Just as -- for many in my generation -- Star Wars (which some older fans also criticized as painfully derivative and juvenile...) led us to an appreciation of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke and other science-fiction authors. So if the Twilight franchise gets even one teenager hooked on the reading habit, I judge it a net positive. There's nothing wrong with appreciating romance novels for themselves, either, if that's your bag.

Frankly, I don't see a reason to look down my nose at Twilight fans any more than I would look down my nose at fans of Dark Shadows. Twilight is merely the latest version of an oft-told tale: the vampire/human soap opera (also dramatized in 1996's Fox TV series, Kindred: The Embraced). And apparently this tale speaks powerfully to the up-and-coming generation. I could speculate why. Teens today have lived their lives in the shadow of 9/11; of violence and terror and death as constant backdrop. The literary/celluloid vampire, Edward Cullen, also exists in a world of perpetual violence...but manages to go on, to deny the violence that is part-and-parcel of his nature...and seek happiness. Our society is also rapidly accepting gay marriage, assimilating millions of new immigrants, and coming to a new social compact about the role of government in our daily lives, in our health, in our economy. A (reformed) vampire -- the outside "foreigner" -- represents that alternative life-style, the unknown, peaceably integrating into the traditional American way of life.

I suppose older horror fans are upset over Twilight because now a lot of studio money is going into knock-off Twilight productions like The Vampire Diaries instead of more original ventures. Of course, it's highly debatable whether crappy teenage vampire movies are any worse, in toto, than crappy remakes of American and Japanese horror films (or 3-D horror films...). To those negatively obsessed with Bella's story, I can offer only this comfort: Twilight too shall pass.

Why? Because for a film, book series or TV series to really earn the (relative) immortality of a James Bond, Star Wars or even Harry Potter, it must speak, at least a little, to more than one generation at a time. I mean, I can see executives scoffing and making excuses for this new CW series, pointing out that some almost-forty year old guy like me isn't exactly the intended audience for The Vampire Diaries.

Perhaps that's true, but nor was I the intended audience for "teen" dramas such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2002), or Veronica Mars (2004-2007). Yet those programs were so continuously clever, so spectacularly well-written, so relentlessly intriguing...that I kept tuning in, week-after-week, year after year. It wasn't "what" Buffy or Veronica concerned so much as "how" the creators of those series approached their narratives. And, from my perspective that's what appears missing from Twilight and The Vampire Diaries. Some overarching perspective or world view that could take the interesting and resonant context behind these vampire productions and make them more meaningful, more powerful...more human.

It's hard (and no doubt, a little unfair....) to judge from just one episode, but The Vampire Diaries doesn't appear to be in the same class as either either of the aforementioned teen-oriented series from the WB/CW. This show is depressingly unoriginal in general, not just in the genre. We get Dawson's Creek-style soulful pop-music playing over angst-ridden voice-over entries in teenage journals (all the better to sell albums, my dear..). We get frankly explicit sex talk from cynical, too-grown-up teens...which is kind of unsavory. We also get genre cliches as old as Dracula himself. From the vampire who seeks a modern doppelganger of the woman he once loved and lost (see: Fright Night [1985]), to the mystical jewelry that prevents a vampire from burning up in sunlight (think Buffy's "Ring of Amara"), this material just seems depressingly familiar if you've been around the pop culture block more than once.

And, then, of course, we have the baffling fact that that hunky vampire, Stefan Salvatore, keeps returning to high school without explanation. Once around is enough for most folks, thank you very much. Does Stefan keep repeating just so he can show off his historical knowledge to arrogant school teachers? Why waste immortality on driver's-ed, sex-ed, algebra and final exams? I would hate to spend my eternal days trying to remember my locker combination, avoiding jocks, and making goo-goo eyes at stuck-up cheerleaders. The fact that Stefan chooses to repeat high school (rather than, say, college...) suggests to me that this vamp is developmentally arrested.

It isn't just what The Vampire Diaries inherits from other vampire dramas that makes it flat and lifeless. It's what it so clearly and blatantly lacks: a sense of humor and perspective about itself. Everything is played deadpan earnest here -- as though this is War and Peace dunked in the burning fires of puberty. A show that so greedily and parasitically feeds off the life-blood of older, superior productions (like Dark Shadows, Forever Knight, Kindred, Buffy, Twilight, etc.) should at least boast the decency to playfully acknowledge those genre roots. Something played in a lighter vein, if you'll excuse the pun.

In closing, I'll quote another axiom from The Vampire Diaries: "The bad things stay with you. They follow you."

Believe me, the one thing we don't need right now is a Twilight-Wannabe following us around.

November 2011 Update:  Well, I'm watching follow-up episodes of The Vampire Diaries' first season at this juncture, and I can say that -- starting at about episode five -- the show begins to improve notably. I'm still in the early days of the first year, but these follow-up episodes aren't nearly as dire as the pilot.  The show is showing a very humorous side (with Damon's reading of Twilight, for instance),  and I begin to understand why some people have become devotees of the program.  At some point, when I'm caught up with the first three seasons, I intend to write a new review, one that more accurately explores the strengths of the series, rather than the abundant weakness of the pilot.