Manny Camacho reviews the premiere episode of American Horror Story: Freak Show…
Last night American Horror Story: Freak Show opened to a 6.1 Million viewership, its highest season premiere for the series. It also opened with a 3.1 rating per viewer in the 18-49 share category. Prompting for a very promising return for the highly popular horror series.
Jessica Lange is devilishly delicious in the role of provocateur as the ringmaster of this freaky carnival. She plays Elsa Mars, a woman who would be described as bohemian for her time period. Loose and liberal, avant garde and eloquently seductive. A ruthless master manipulator with deeply guarded secrets that unravel as the episode progresses. If you haven’t been following the series. American Horror Story is an anthology series that evolves each season with a completely new set of narratives, characters and locations. Re-utilizing the bulk of the cast from its previous year. The first season focused a haunted house as it’s premise, the second an Insane Asylum; the third a coven of witches and now a carnival freak show in the 1950’s.
American Horror Story: Coven was easily the anthologies most eerily scary with an amazing feel for the macabre and the gloom of storied voodoo mixed with the fabled (historically) unclean evil of the Salem witch trials. However, this…this content takes the creep-factor up multiple notches. From the mysteriously anesthetic 1950’s prologue to the lurid morbidity of the hauntingly grotesque dark clown killing and kidnapping folks from the small hamlet of Jupiter, Florida without any qualms about his surroundings.
It’s hard to describe the shear terrific; and I don’t mean “It’s great!” ‘terrific’ –I mean the original meaning of the word. Removed from the misnomer that is the modern colloquialism. I mean terrific and astoundingly horrid visages that dance on the edge of a new wrinkle emerging on the surface of your brain. Connecting to older thoughts both awesome and foul, to new ones of great taboo and careless abandon. Yet your mind, the deeper it goes into this episode, continues to peer into a visage of psychotic madness, yet somehow returns to a point of sheer joy and comedy. You marvel at the dark moments even while an orgy attended by ‘these’, ‘they’ who anointed by nature in their disfigurement are marvelously disgusting to witness in such acts. a purview that cannot ever be unseen. But again your mind wanders and persists into your darker nature while your eyes remain fixed. Like an old cross country runner in full stride past his prime, nearing a heart attack, feeling a failure in the muscles; a burning in the lungs, halting any ability for air to flow. Feeling like death will takeover if the running doesn’t stop; then suddenly euphoria, dopamine floods the brains and courses down into every organ –every muscle, and the running continues. A runners high emerges.
This in (revealing detail) is what this series will sap out of your bodily functions…emotionally. Like a tap plunged into your spine, mining every drop of juice you can produce. It will incite an illicit response. Some that may cause you to reflect on said responses and dirty thoughts.
At the very least for fans of great horror, with a dash of culture, from a dying era of a bygone world will enjoy this series thoroughly. These are the feelings I underwent while watching this premiere. I will confess, I am inordinately in love with this series and admit my possible bias. However that love is justified. The writing is crisp, the pace is comfortably and recognizably frenetic with an ominous character killing people unabashedly without remorse or concern for the real world. This character seems to loom over our carny players like a freshly soiled breeze rustling through a pig farm. Is he one of them? Does he want to harm or protect them?
Evan Peters continues to amaze as Jimmy Darling, a character somewhat reminiscent of Tim Burton’s Penguin from the 90’s Batman films. A young ladies man with flippers with a very provocative moonlighting gig attending to bored and nearly forgotten housewives. Kathy Bates returns as a southern speaking bearded lady who is the MC of this circus from hell. Among the main cast of characters in this oddity of humanities is Sarah Paulson who plays the Siamese sisters, Bette Tattler and Dot Tattler. A young pair of women fully conjoined with one body and two heads, a midst several organs. A seemingly overly sheltered set of women that sought to free themselves of their overburdening mother and possibly of each other. Which leads us to the events that conspired to connect them to Elsa Mars and her carnival of the strange.
Frances Conroy returns as new character Gloria Mott with newcomers to the anthology Michael Chiklis, playing an iconic strongman, Wendell “Dell” Tolito (who we’ll see further into the season) and Jyoti Amge, playing Ma Petite; She is both the smallest woman in the world in the series and in reality. Angela Bassett returns to play new character Desiree Dupree, the three breasted woman with series local Denis O’Hare playing Stanley among many other amazing actors new & native to the anthology.
The series has high production values with 20th Century Fox at the helm. Extreme attention to detail for the period has been given with great care. The look of the players, the speech of the time and accuracy of a dying and macabre carnival backdrop is all present with harrowing makeup for all involved. You have to be nearly clairvoyant to decipher good from evil in this series before either reveals itself to be one or the other. Forcing yourself not to allow personal sensibilities to prematurely judge what you are seeing. But that’s part of the point of this show. While the ending sequences of this premiere opens up the floodgates to the possibilities that no one is inherently either. It tries to convey the choice for either side isn’t skin deep or found on the surface; but an ability to be all consuming in your depths of madness or in your struggles to find the light as almost randomly necessary.
Aside from everything said, Jessica Lange can drudge on in her monologues, however potent in their delivery. Kathy Bates has an accent that seems to be bipolar and Evan Peters seems to be directed into transitive madness. I think the 50’s era angst he is displaying works well with a sort of “greaser” mentality, sans the greasy hair product, but it can be a tad much as is apparent near the end of the episode. This may either be foreshadowing that the character loses himself in his psychotic behavior (down the road) or will progressively be losing his grip on reality. All of which is good, it just needs to occur naturally. Otherwise it falls in line with the sort of awkward writing and execution seen in the old serial murder flick, Natural Born Killers. All with a show that continues to creep me out with every rendition of its opening sequences. While Coven’s opening sequence I still argue was a masterpiece of sight and sound; which sent chills deep in your bones. It was reminiscent of the same feeling one got watching the old Tales From the Darkside opening sequence. American Horror Story: Freak Show has again brought to life an eerie pictorial that can send chills down anyone’s spine for its sheer realism. Tapping properly on the most primal nerve in human nature. Fear of the unknown. I give it a 4.5 out of 5.
Manny Camacho is a Miami, Florida based award winning writer and independent film producer whose current novel, I Think? No, I’m Sure…God Hates Me, is currently sold out of its first printing but will be available again on Amazon soon.
