Did the once-smart American Horror Story become a bloody gay mess?
In 1984 Brian De Palma co-wrote and directed Body Double, an erotic, voyeuristic thriller that’s best remembered for one gruesome scene in which a young woman (Deborah Shelton) gets drilled to death in her Hollywood Hills home. The movie sparked outrage from critics, especially women, who dubbed the flick “Dressed to Drill” after De Palma’s earlier work Dressed to Kill.
It’s a terrifying piece of filmmaking, in an otherwise rather tame movie, because the murder scene is set up slowly, the audience also fearing for Shelton’s life as the unsuspecting woman wanders around her house in a slinky nightdress while one man is running down the street to save her and another is preparing the electric drill that will bring about her demise.
Watch it again and you’ll see something unexpected; namely, very little except suggestion. De Palma, like Alfred Hitchcock before him, understood that, in horror, the unseen is often far more frightening than the real thing.
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The creators behind American Horror Story: Hotel should go back and do their homework. Scratch that: They should be given an F and expelled from Scary School. Openly gay Ryan Murphy and openly straight Brad Falchuk, the masterminds behind Nip/Tuck, Glee, and this year’s Scream Queens, along with all five seasons of AHS, have, with Hotel, created the worst piece of schlock shock since someone decided a remake of Black Christmas made sense.
There are so many problems with Hotel it’s hard to know where to begin (the clunky backstory plots, the waste of talent, Gaga), but the most glaring offense is the soft-core gay porn violence that’s creepy for all the wrong reasons. By the time episode two hit, we witnessed a man in the hotel get f**ked to death by a mummy-type creature with a spear dildo drill. The actor was a hunk, naturally, and before he took death up the a**, the camera gave us a shot of his naked butt, sexy and taut. As he gets pounded, we see the action through a mirror, looking like pretty much any hardcore bondage scene, minus the murder.
It wasn’t scary, it wasn’t suspenseful, it wasn’t erotic, it certainly wasn’t “Undressed to Drill”; it was like watching the two creators get off on death and f**king, as intensely as cable television will allow. These days, that means pretty much everything you see on the big screen.
But they didn’t stop there. Almost each episode since featured sexy men getting murdered, most of whom are shown naked (usually from behind, sometimes bent over), with no build-up or suspense or, you know, horror. The preferred form of murder? Throats slit, repeatedly, over and over, too many to count on most episodes, always with blood-spurting, Monty Python-style, so technically proficient it looks as if the creators purchased a state-of-the-art neck-blood-squirt machine and got carried away like two little boys in Willy Wonka’s Killing Factory.
Murphy and Falchuk have a penchant for casting openly gay actors and gay icons (Yay!) and among this season’s male eye candy are out actors Cheyenne Jackson and Matt Bomer, neither of whom can seem to keep their clothes on, and straight hot guy Finn Wittrock, also fabric-deprived.
They also gave us, once again, the wonderful out actor Denis O’Hare, who shines as Liz Taylor, the transgender bartender/sage at the Hotel Cortez. But even her plot was ruined when the writers threw in an After School Special about the difference between “gay” and “transgender”. She identifies as the latter. With writing that comes across like Sesame Street for horror fans, O’Hare explains to Kathy Bates, who must be kicking herself for taking on such a silly role, that he simply knew at a young age he wanted to be a she.
Great, until the next time we see her and she’s in love with a man. Every year the AHS writing gets even more unhinged, so it’s no real surprise that they switch plotlines like the actors switch roles, but that kind of disregard to detail is an affront to writers, not to mention a blow to anyone trying to understand that wearing a dress doesn’t automatically mean you’re attracted to guys. Oh, never fear (literally), because the two go off to brutally murder some residents right after the lecture scene ends. Hotel‘s script mantra is, “When in doubt, kill.” (On a side note, Cheyenne Jackson’s character starts off as gay, and later, bisexual.)
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On paper, the idea of turning the tables on sexy gay women getting murdered makes perfect sense. But Hotel lacks even the basic tenets of suspense: build-up, eerie score, the unseen presence, the lingering camera like a person watching. Instead, Hotel is like someone threw up every horror movie ever made and started filming the mess. In addition to camera angles gone amuck, the series gives us vampires, dead serial killers, living serial killers, ghosts who torture for fun, monster babies, blood-sucking schoolchildren and a setting that mimics The Shining on Ecstasy.
The more gruesome torture scenes, proffered up by Even Peters as the Dead Resident of the Hotel, are practically snuff films, more likely to induce nausea than anything else. It doesn’t help that Peters’ role this year is an embarrassing take on Orson Welles, or someone from that era, and he’s too immature of an actor to pull it off. Wes Bentley, as the detective, mumbles almost incoherently through most of his violence- and sex-laden scenes, and Chloe Sevigny has such a stupid role as the caring-wife-turned-vampire-Mom that, if you’d never seen her act before, you’d think she was the worst actor alive then dead.
Then there’s Lady Gaga, who’s not a terrible actor, just an uninteresting one. She pretty much has one emotion, fatigued boredom, a fatal mistake because she’s the character who pulls everything together. Gaga’s Countess is irresistible to virtually every other character on the show, gay, straight, male, female, dead, alive, and it doesn’t work. She has neither the acting chops nor the conventional beauty for it to succeed. By the time Angela Bassett shows up as another obsessed, jilted lover, you’re rolling your eyes at the absurdity, only stopping long enough to wonder “Why didn’t they give her the part?” This would have been the role Jessica Lange knocked out of the park, and she gets the most kudos this year for having the good sense to sit it out.
Murphy and Falchuk forgot something else De Palma, Hitchcock and great horror directors in between have understood: Vulnerable women in jeopardy are generally more terrifying to witness than men in the same position. The heels, the legs, the weaker physicality. Janet Leigh’s Psycho shower sequence is one of countless examples, and even the opening sequence in Jaws never would have worked so perfectly had the skinny-dipping first victim been the man at the beach barbecue.
Some find that notion sexist and outdated, and, as one of the most successful out gay men in television, Murphy could have turned this season’s gay voyeurism into something revolutionary, as the writer/director Alain Guiraudie beautifully accomplished in the 2013 erotic gay thriller Stranger by the Lake. Watching Hotel, though, you don’t get the feeling the creators care about scaring us into oblivion, with men or women. They’re too obsessed with getting off on this monster of their own creation.
Photo: Promotional image https://makeupmag.com/
Originally published at HuffingtonPost.com.
Hold the phone, I have questions. 1) Which season of AHS did you find “brilliant”? I’ve watched it since the start, and I’m struggling to see how the state of the series has either risen or fallen dramatically, from any perspective. It’s shed some weirdness since season 2 I suppose. Shoehorning former-Nazis, Satan, mad doctors, Nurse Ratchet, Jason, Aliens, and shambling aberrations all into one labyrinthine storyline was actually an accomplishment, in an eye-rolling way. 2) In what world is Hotel so much more graphic than the others? Asylum kicked things into high gear with a lovely tableau of amputation,… Read more »
You are spot on. This would have to be the worst season of a promising series. I stopped watching after two episodes for all the reasons you outline. Tedious and nauseating couldn’t begin to describe this unmitigated mess. De Palma has been referenced quite a bit in this series (esp the start of season 2) but it seems to me the creators of AHS haven’t learned his lessons. And you are absolutely right: Stranger by the Lake is an astounding work. By far the best film I saw in 2015. In horror and erotica, suggestion is everything.