I skipped the entire second season of American Horror Story because, for some crazy reason, a show set entirely in a dreary, old-style insane asylum with torture and a serial killer named Bloody Face on the loose just didn’t appeal to me. However, I was willing to give this new season a try because of the truly incredible roster of talent they managed to wrangle up (Kathy Bates, Gabourey Sidibe, Emma Roberts, and Angela Bassett join the cast) and because a season about witches had to be at least a little more glamorous than a moldy nuthouse.
I thought the first season of AHS was genuinely scary, but it’s become clear that the show is now more interested in camp and throwing anything at the wall in hopes that it’ll stick. In just this premiere episode alone: a human voodoo doll (Sidibe), a “supreme” witch (Jessica Lange), draining the youth from a guy, a clairvoyant, a telepath who killed people with a falling light and a bus flip, a witch who kills guys by having sex with them, a roofie, a gang rape, Bates’ barbarically creative slave owner who indulges in dark magic and put a bull’s head on a slave to make him her “minotaur,” Basset’ Voodoo priestess, a hellish frat party, a witch burning, necromancy, a clever new credits sequence, the supreme witch’s desperate quest to remain alive, a demonstration of some powers, a boarding school for witches, a field trip for the school, some creepy masks, sending people flying across the room with the flick of a wrist, and I’m sure I’m leaving out a half-dozen other things.
It’s an overstuffed hour that’s short on genuine scares but there’s a nutso ingenuity to AHS creator Ryan Murphy setting up what is essentially a Young Adult book’s premise (at one point Jessica Lange even calls the witching school “Hogwarts”) in a batshit crazy, hard R fashion. Grade for premiere: B-