In another one of my crazy hair-brained schemes to do some more writing, I've decided to try some recapping here.

Part of this was because, as I was watching American Horror Story, I realized that this was quite possibly the most over the top thing I have ever seen, and that I had far much to say about it without becoming the really boring guy who spends half an hour telling you about a tv show.  I already am that guy, but I do make an effort not to be.

So anyways...I started writing and plopped out 2000 words before I really knew what I had done.  This hasn't happened to me for awhile.
At this point I'm not sure if I'm going to keep doing this with American Horror Story or not, but I'll probably try since this ended up being just too much fun.

Quite obviously this has a spoiler alert.

Also it has a flow chart.

I do flow charts now.

Alright, so we open on an establishing shot of a creepy house in the 1970s.  It’s suitably old and creepy: boarded up, has one stain glass left.  There’s a creepy iron gate, vines running around the outside.  A wind chime made out of animal bones (this is the sort of thing I’d hoped Martha Stewart would start making after her stint in prison).  There’s a little girl with down syndrome looking up at the house, and right away we can see that the creators of Glee, self-appointed defenders of freaks and geeks everywhere are for some reason going to be playing the “people who look different are creepy” card.  To be fair, she is creepy, but that’s more due to the fact that she has an alarming tendency to tell people they’re going to die in said creepy house.

Two twin ginger boys come strolling down the path with baseball bats.  From the way they walk and are dressed, we can tell two things about them: a) that they think they are pretty bad ass and b) but not bad ass enough to have stopped wearing co-ordinated twin sweaters.  The call the girl a freak and make kissy faces at her.  She tells them they are going to die in the house.  This is her shtick, she does this a lot. Wait till you meet her mother.  The boys are unmoved.  “We got bats” says one.  Then, as they go walking into the house one also inexplicably declares “I HATE TREES”.  We get it, American Horror Story, you do not want us to feel sorry when the creepy ginger twins inevitably die. 

So they go tearing through the house, breaking shit, having a good ole’ time until they stumble upon some poor critter with its neck slashed, still in the process of dying.  “Awesome” Troy, the boy in the red striped sweater says, and I know I sure can’t wait for them to die.  Cue creepy door to the basement opening.  As every good horror character knows,  recently murdered animal + door swinging open = come on in!

They head down to the basement, which is suitably dark and creepy.  They are surprisingly non-plussed by the large collection of baby parts in jars.  Here’s a good idea kids: people who keep baby parts in jars are not people you want to encounter.  Finding baby parts in jars is what we call a “get out and call the cops” scenario.  But it’s too late, before we know it they are both attacked and killed by...I have no idea what, but in blurry shots it looks kinda like a cabbage patch kid.  So that’s what I’m going to call it: the Cabbage Patch Monster.

Move to present day, and Vivien (Friday Night Lights Mom) is at the doctor’s still dealing emotionally physically with the after effects of a miscarriage.  The doctor offers her magic pills.  She’s reluctant, she’s an “organic” lady.  But she still heads home with pills in hand.  When she gets there she hears strange noises and immediately calls the cops without checking to see if maybe her husband Ben is home.  He is. So is one of his students. They’re naked. Vivien stabs Ben.

CREDITS!  (I promise to try and be more brief with the rest of the episode)

So now Vivien and Ben and their daughter Violet are moving to Los Angeles for the requisite “fresh start” that always starts the haunted house movie (I will give the producers this: they are making a fairly solid homage to the classic horror films here).  They’re moving into creepy house from the intro!  “Great so we’re the Addams family now” Violet says, and yet she gets excited when they find out that the previous owners died in a murder suicide.  “We’ll take it!” she says.  And it’s as easy as that.

...

I feel like this kind of house really needs a thorough home inspection before purchase, but we’ll move on.

...

Vivien gets right to work at making the house a home by peeling off the wallpaper in her new music room to reveal the creepiest murals anyone has ever seen in a home.  Neat.   Then the girl with down syndrome from the teaser, now a middle aged woman (we discover her name is Adelaide), appears behind Vivien and announces, you guessed it “You’re going to die here”.  Charming girl.  She’s followed by her mother, Constance played by Jessica Lange, who is delightful.  Some of the finest chewing up of scenery I have ever seen, you can tell how much she savours it.  In the brief chat she has with Vivien she discusses the merits of “brown cartoon characters being all the same” (debating the merits of Dora the Explorer vs. Go Diego Go) and then after Adelaide goes home, confesses that had she known Adelaide would be a “Mongoloid” that she would have had an abortion.  If Connie Britton thought the parents from Friday Night Lights were awkward to talk to, she’s going to love Constance. 

Constance gives Vivien her some sage to burn and rid the house of “bad juju”.  You know, the kind that makes people paint crazy murals and commit murder suicides.  Vivien does in fact burn the sage, and in doing so discovers the attic, (you bought a house without looking in the attic!? Have you never watched Mike Holmes?).  In the attic she finds a full rubber gimp suit.  Hubby hears her scream and comes up.  They have a chuckle over the kinky stuff the previous owners must have been up to, Ben tries to translate this into getting intimate with his wife.  Ben tries the translate everything into getting intimate with his wife.  She is having none of it.  He throws the suit out.

Later, Vivien meets an old housekeeper with a crazy glass eye, Moira, played by Six Feet Under mom.  They have a talk about how Moira has always been the housekeeper at Creepy House.  She even cleaned up the mess made by her former employers.  One would think, after cleaning up a murder suicide scene, she would be interested in moving on to a new place of employment, or even retiring.  Not Moira, she wants to work for Vivien and Ben!  This doesn’t seem disconcerting at all.  Also Ben doesn’t see Six Feet Under mom when he looks at Moira, he sees a sexy young housekeeper wearing what is practically a French maid outfit.  He’s a little surprised that his wife would be comfortable hiring this sexy young thing, and tries to translate this into getting intimate with his wife.  Later he will walk in on Sexy Moira playing with herself, then she will try and dust his office.  Sexy Moira is very bad at dusting, as she spends more time running the feather duster over herself and removing her clothes than she does dusting the mantle.  Oh and Violet walks in and sees this, but from her perspective it’s Six Feet Under mom.  This is awkward for everyone.

Speaking of Ben, one of the selling points of the house for him was that it has an office, which he can practice his psychiatry out of while ‘staying close to the family’.  What a great idea! Let’s meet his first patient, Tate.

Tate has fantasies about painting his face like a skeleton and killing his classmates.  But just the ones he likes, to save them from the “horror show” that is the world.  He also seems to really not like his mother.  “Do you think I’m crazy?” he asks Ben.  “No, I think you’re creative” is what Ben responds with.  Of course he almost completely negates this by saying to Tate later that “I’ve treated psychotics before”. 

...

Let’s take a moment here to recap Ben’s brilliant plan to save his family:

1)      He’s going to move everyone from the East Coast to the West Coast, all but completely removing them from any friends or family, separating them from their social support network.

2)      He’s going to move them into a creepy house with a dark past.

3)      In an effort to stay closer to his family, he’s going to run his Psychiatry Practice out of the home.  A psychiatry practice where he treats psychotics.

Now, call me “creative” but I sort of feel like that last point is something that should have been covered in Psychiatry school.   It might not be a great idea to let the potentially dangerous mental patients know where you live, let alone treat them there in the presence of your family. 

Ben doesn’t seem to think this is an issue.  And next thing you know Tate is giving young Violet a lesson in cutting herself.  Swell.

If you couldn’t tell from Violet being sold on the house due to it being a murder scene, Violet has some issues.  Issues she expresses by walking in slow motion at school wearing a fedora and smoking.  There she runs into Mean Girl.  Mean Girl let a guy do coke off her nipples over the weekend but is really uptight about smoking.  Mean Girl doesn’t really subscribe the upper-order thinking skills.  Mean girl takes to beating Violet up.  Tate commiserates with her, as they discuss mopey singers.  Tate really likes Kurt Cobain, this coupled with the fact that he wore a green and black striped shirt which made me think of Kurt in the smells like teen spirit video, makes me wonder if Tate is a dead guy from the early 90’s.  Or he could be really into grunge.

Tate comes up with a plan to scare the shit out of Mean Girl.  Violet lures Mean girl down to the basement of the house with the promise of good Columbian drugs.  Mean Girl buys this.  She deserves pain and suffering, really.  When she gets down to the basement Tate is waiting.  Violet turns on a strobe light and Tate starts shouting and scaring Mean Girl.  Then things get really weird and suddenly the Cabbage Patch monster is there (under brighter lights he looks nothing like a Cabbage Patch kid, but i’m still committed to that name).  Everyone’s moving all over the room, Tate’s here, there, everywhere, and so is Cabbage Patch.  Mean girl gets slashed across the face.  Violet is all WTF and kicks Tate out, though Tate didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary.

Other weird things: Ben meets a man who is horribly disfigured by burns, who claims he lived in the house, heard voices telling him to burn his family alive and did just that.  The actor is Denis O’Hare, who played Russell Edgington on True Blood and is getting a specialist degree in playing people horribly disfigured by fire.

Elderly Moira finds Constance trying to steal jewellery.  They have a chat.  Constance says “Don’t make me kill you again.”

Ben and Vivien talk about the crazy wall murals. Ben tries to translate this into getting intimate.  They get into a really big fight where Viven talks in graphic graphic detail about her miscarriage.  Somehow this does translate into getting intimate.  Later in the bedroom, Vivien is getting ready for bed and in walks a guy in the rubber gimp suit.  Naturally she assumes this is her husband wanting to get kinky.  But he’s downstairs  naked and playing with the stove.  She has sex with whoever is in the rubber suit.

I want everyone to right now make a promise to their partner that, should they ever decide to engage in a fantasy involving a rubber suit that covers all identifying features, you should at least have some sort of signal to check and make sure it is, in fact, you in that suit and not god knows what.  Later on we find Vivien is pregnant.

DEMON BABY!

The End.

Having just gone through this makes me appreciate even more how ridiculous the advertising campaign for this, boldly declaring “From the Creators of Glee!” is.  It also gives me a new found appreciation for the subtlety of True Blood.

Fortunately, I am a big fan of ridiculousness

Another thought:  how much do these people not talk that none of this is coming to light?  How have we not had a “That Moira sure is an interesting young lady,” “by which you mean unnerving old lady?” “ No I mean young...wait a minute.” Conversation?  Or even a “how about that crazy glass eye” conversation? (Sexy Moira doesn’t have one).  I know if I met a woman with a creepy glass eye, I’d be pretty interested in talking about it.

Or how about a “hey remember when you put on that rubber suit?” conversation?

Or “hey mom, I saw dad in a compromising position with Six Feet Under mom”.

There’s a serious communication issue here, is what I’m trying to get at.