As per the usual (if anything in the world of Ryan Murphy’s horror anthology series American Horror Story can be called “usual”) Halloween season is upon us and brings with it this first episode of the latest AHS iteration: Hotel. The premiere combs together a variety of influences in a bubbling cauldron of sex, blood and insanity, and leaving us yearning for and expecting more. It’s a curious effect of this show, and modern media culture in general, that we can watch young women kidnapped and tortured, a man raped by a drill-bit dildo, a couple seduced into a foursome and ritualistically killed mid-coitus by vampires (of a sort), etc etc, and still imagine people complaining that the show has lost some of it’s power to terrorize an audience or has gone downhill. Though AHS has plenty of dark humor, it is clear to those who understand both humor and horror (even if some insist the most clearly messed-up scenes were intended as humor) to know when they are juxtaposed for effect or exist as their own entity throughout the episode, something that has always made it entertaining. Variety is what makes AHS so much fun: it’s a wild, untamed beast; a no-rules, free-associative ride through the famous settings of the horror genre. I think everyone comes to this show (creators and audience) because we want to let go and see where it takes us. If you’re not comfortable with that, get your blanky and a bowl of popcorn, and partner to soothe you while you watch.
The title sequence, which is always my favorite part of each series, draws a pretty clear picture of the tenor of this season, with the ten commandments in neon flashing between the avant-garde grotesquerie (deformed human figures crawling in and out of torn mattresses, bejeweled talons, peephole views, blood dripping down walls from a woman’s hands, blood smears being scrubbed out of the carpet, etc). We see instant echoes of many of these images in the first episode, so I wonder if this sequence will grow in effect as the season wears on, like all the others have so far. Since so many of the abstract images find a story-based source right away, I do wonder… But it’s too early to make such predictions, so I will reserve judgment until later in the season.
Speaking of judgment, those ten commandments will obviously play a significant role, (more clues than previous title sequences have led us to expect); as we see deaths and violence based on them throughout the premiere. The presence of Lady Gaga herself is in a way a figure of idolatry whose fans test the commandment about worshiping graven images or false idols. Is the hotel purgatory or is it hell? Despite the line from the Eagles song, we know this is not heaven, except maybe it is for a demon? Los Angeles is the City of Angels, and its the decadence, wonderment, greed, mayhem, indifference, the vapidness and excess of the Hollywood life, the making and breaking of dreams, the unreality spread out across miles and miles, the centrifugal force that draws people from all over the world to see it in person and spits them out more mentally and emotionally gooified than before.
The creators of the show state that much of the season will be a depiction, from all angles, on addiction. Addiction to drugs, alcohol, fame, power, sadness, etc, will all come into play. But beyond the obvious drug addicts, what are the other characters addicted to…
Like the previous seasons, this one hunkers down in yet another aesthetically distinct cornerstone setting in horror, that operates as timewarp and an overlap of the worlds on both sides of the veil. Lodgers, strangers crossing paths in a hotel, offering themselves up blindly to the transient nature of these institutions, are a long-standing element of the genre. Suffice it to say, that if we learn anything significant in this episode it’s that the Hotel Cortez is the timewarp vortex of Los Angeles sin, and it’s center is in Room 64, where something awful once occurred at 2:25. We get shades of The Shining, H.H. Holmes’ “castle,” 2001, of other famous hotels with famously decadent and inebriated/crazy guests (Chelsea Hotel in NYC, the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, etc) and the ever present undercurrent of the dead and undead coexisting on the same indeterminate plane of existence, somewhere between life and death.
We are always privy to a new set of victims in every episode, and this premiere provides several. We have the Swedish tourists who open the show. They are the first to enter the fabulous art-deco masterpiece that is the “Hotel Cortez.” (Side note-this looks like a majorly expensive series of sets!) The eery, hazy emptiness amidst the vivid woodwork and Bauhaus stylings sets just the right tone as the girls are bullied into keeping their reservation at this creepy place by the surly receptionist (Kathy Bates) who hates when you ring the bell twice.
Of course, they have already learned the hotel’s advertising mislead them, when the cab driver tells them they are 10 miles from Universal Studios, when the ads said the Cortez was close to all the attractions. Welcome to unreality of Hollywood, the show is telling us, where people will tell you anything to get what they want without a trace of guilt for lying to your face. And it appears something in this hotel wants these two girls to stay. Other non-amenities of this hotel: no wi-fi, a cellular dead zone, strange moans and cries from the other rooms, and a mysterious smell in the room. Oh and the creepy boy and girl twins, and the hallways that literally and figuratively run into each other and effortlessly get you lost in their labyrinthine network. When the girls follow the stench to a screeching, sore-riddled bat-boy (I exaggerate, but that’s what came to mind) living inside in the mattress, they are moved to Room 64, which is the only room left in the sold-out hotel, because the hotel “never” rents it out. The radio starts playing ragtime jazz at 2:25, waking one of the girls from her nap to find the blonde twins from the hall gnawing on her friend.
Then we cut to another violent scene in another part of town: a man and woman, married to different people, in a tryst gone wrong: their hands have been nailed to the bed’s headboard. Targeted by a moralistic killer, the woman is dead (via spear through the heart) but the man, now missing his eyes and tongue, and we learn also filled with male impotency drugs then lubed with superglue so he is stuck inside his deceased paramour, lives on in agony as the police size up the scene. The detective on this case (Wes Bentley) is clearly a variation on a theme by Hannibal crossed with a bevy of other similar detective characters from procedurals. He nails the psychology of the murder in a cold and clinical manner (it boils down to “Thou shalt not commit adultery”) before we witness his devotion to his daughter, reading to her via FaceTime when he’s stuck late at the station. He is then called by someone claiming credit for the murder investigated that morning who tells him he will do it again, and that he’s in Room 64 at the Hotel Cortez.
The next resident of that room shows up, a club kid (Max Greenfield from The New Girl) whose wardrobe clearly spells looking for a place to shoot up and chill for the next 12 hours. Well, he gets… you guessed it, Room 64. “Hypodermic Sally” (Sarah Paulson) a modern day Chelsea girl/punk disaster in a leopard print coat and ratty bob appears out of nowhere and claims this one as hers.
In the most talked about scene in the premiere, he is in turn anally penetrated (almost) to death after he gets his fix, by a strange gaunt beast of a man who looks like a walking prophylactic with the afore-mentioned drill-bit dildo. Bentley arrives to follow up on the disturbing phone call leading him here, and it’s a chase as to whether he will catch some of the horrible action, yet walks into a seemingly empty room. We get our first glimpse of “Liz Taylor” a drag-ish gender fluid bellboy showing Bentley to the room (Dennis O’Hare, showing off the moves he learned from Alaska Thunderfuck of RuPaul’s Drag Race in a long, low angle tracking shot of his flowing glittery cape).
Liz tells him he can see that he’s lost something, and is frozen in time, “can’t go forward, can’t go back.” While our detective passes out on the bed, Greenfield’s heroine addict has sputtered back to life. Flash cut to Bentley waking to the radio playing the same old music, to a familiar blond toddler peering at him, at 2:25. The blurred lines are already sliding back and forth in time and consciousness for everyone here.
Bentley’s character isn’t dealing with deadly anal rape, but his marriage (to a frazzled, frumpy and not having it anymore doctor who does house calls for the wealthy, played by Chloe Sevigny) has hit a rough spot since the kidnapping of their son. He gets a desperate message from his wife, and goes to the address in the message, where he finds instead the moralistic murderer has disemboweled two men. Fearing for his family’s safety, he leaves his daughter and wife at the end of the episode (to wifey’s relief, since she just sees their missing son in him), and somehow winds up back at the Cortez, renting…Room 64.
And of course our first vision of Gaga merits special attention. Gone is the Grande Dame of AHS, Angela Lansb- I mean Jessica Lange. The new queen enters to the strains of She Wants Revenge’s “Tear You Apart” playing over her preparation for an evening out with her beautiful partner/plaything (Matt Bomer). Their arrival, at movie night in the Hollywood Forever cemetery, elicits a series of cuts and rack focus that align Gaga with the projections of Murnau’s Nosferatu behind her while she and Bomer seduce a hot young couple next to them. Naturally, what lead to a hot foursome in the Cortez penthouse quickly turns into a bloodbath when the pair uses the razor points on the index fingers of their bedazzled gloves to slice open the throats of their lovers, and start lapping up their meal.
Gaga luxuriates in this environment, since the atmosphere at times has many of the qualities of her media image, visually and in construction, as if Ryan Murphy has been feeding on the lifeblood of her music videos in conjunction with haunted hotel lore.
Those Swedish tourists haven’t gone anywhere, except into body-shaped cages as Kathy Bates is feeding them a mixture of high protein shakes made of meats and livers through a tube forced down their throats. This is all to cleanse their bodies of the feel-good drugs they’ve enjoyed, that bitter the taste of their blood. Bates’ story is that she is Bomer’s mother, who tried to stop him from hooking up with Hypodermic Sally years before.
She followed them to this hotel but was too late to prevent her junkie son’s death by overdose, and in anger she kills the remorseless Sally by pushing her out the high-rise window. Gaga appears out of nowhere with Bomer’s corpse waxing rhapsodic about his magnificent jawline, and voila… they are all still here, walking and talking when they should be dead-leaving Bates an obsessive D.A.R.E. mom railing against the drug-users of the world. Which means her life at the Cortez is a miserable one indeed.
Cheyenne Jackson has joined the proceedings, escorted by his real estate agent through the property he has just purchased from the previous unseen owner. He’s a fashion impresario who has come to L.A. seeking the artistic energy that gentrification and idiocracy have sapped out of NYC (and quickly happening to San Francisco now). His son sees the walking prophylactic rapist man briefly through a glass door when he wanders off by himself. But then Gaga takes him to a secret room all decked out in white, with molded screens playing old NES games and fancy jars with spigots releasing multi-colored candies. Lo and behold, the detective’s kidnapped son is among this rabble of Village of the Damned blondes in school uniforms and jumpers. Clearly Gaga’s vampire woman is also collecting children.
As with Asylum being the aftermath of Freak Show, it would seem that there is a connection between the first season of this series and this latest one. The afore-mentioned rapist is a distorted figure wrapped in white rubber/latex, similar in style to the black rubber-clad murderer of the first season. The realtor who sells the hotel, is the very same who sold the murder house in the first season. We know this season’s story, unlike the order of the Asylum (season 2)/Freak Show (season 4) connection, is chronologically later than the first. The realtor mentions that though it’s sunny out, it’s gray really because she had put down her dog that day when she introduces her client to his new property. That’s a line that seems to fit the character of the quirky dialogue and banter in Murphy series (sharing too much personal information in an alarmingly direct/awkwardly mundane fashion) but still stuck out as significant. As the interweb also noticed, this is a definite reference to the dog she adopted once the family was killed in the murder house in Season 1.
To cap it all off, there are the customary touches of Carnival of Souls, underlined by the use of clunky old tune “Hotel California” that we always knew was going to be featured here. “You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave” the song intones, as Bentley arrives to move in, a man frozen in time found a hotel to match his mental state.
A little on the nose, but the song is a clear inspiration, along with the story of Elisa Lam at the Cecil Hotel, who stepped out of a janky elevator and was never seen alive again, and never would have been found at all had the filtered remnants her decomposing corpse not tainted the color, taste, and texture of the water the guests were drinking and showering in, from the tank the murderer stuffed her in. I’d say that Ryan Murphy has created frights here that at least rival that hard-to-top horror, which is no small feat.
Other mysteries begun that we hope will find half-fruition later on:
There’s a preview of Greenfield’s junkie arriving in the hospital-what will he tell the doctors and how will this affect the plot?
When does Bentley’s detective hope to do here (and when will he find out his kidnapped son is not a hallucination but hidden in the hotel that he now resides in)?
Why do Gaga and her Bomer boytoy need to feed off of others, but can still go out in the daytime?
What is Liz Taylor’s story and how did she come to reside/work at the hotel?
What happened at 2:25, and on what date, in Room 64?
And what is the connection with the real estate agent? Will we see anymore of her, or why she keeps selling haunted properties with rubber-wrapped fetishistic murderers?
Normally I’d be reviewing this with my partner in TV reviewing crime Margaux, but we’ll team up next week and through the rest of the season. So I flew solo in the Horror Hotel this first week. Alone is a bad thing to be in AHS territory!
http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/american-horror-story/episodes
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