American Horror Story is back to its best with ‘My Roanoke Nightmare’

American Horror Story had definitely lost its way with Freak Show and Hotel, meaning that the anonymously themed season six had a lot resting on its shoulders to bring the show back to its Murder House and Asylum glory days.

I think everyone involved with the show knew this so went all out to bring about positive changes. The marketing surrounding the new series teased several different ‘themes’ for the show leaving viewers in the dark, in fact almost everything about the show was shrouded in secrecy including the full cast-list.

So when episode one started and we got the cold open with no familiar title credits and no iconic music instead throwing us straight into a disorientating documentary style narration from Lily Rabe and Andrew Holland it was absolutely clear that this would be a season unlike any that had come before it.

At first I as left disappointed by the lack of opening titles and the weakness of the finally revealed theme. ‘My Roanoke Nightmare’ isn’t an instantly recognisable as ‘Hotel’ or ‘Asylum’ focusing on a true story that saw an entire island colony disappear and the popular myth of croatoan surfacing. However my reservations were quickly dissolved by what transpired to be a really tight, focussed true horror story unfolding before my eyes, even if there was the overused genre tool of ‘this is based off of real events’.

‘Hotel’ wasn’t a bad season but it was more like a television series containing an array of horrific character pastiches, hyper stylised sexual morbidity and basically the show just being weird for the sake of being weird rather than a coherent, arresting and compelling narrative which for some people was a little frustrating.

‘My Roanoke Nightmare’ was anything but frustrating, it seemed like a welcome return to form and whilst some of its elements seem reductive and done-before, it has scaled everything back focussing on a young couple fleeing the violence of the city to find themselves trapped by something (or somethings) violent in the forest. Don’t get me wrong there’s all sorts of typical balls-to-the-wall crazy American Horror Story things going on in the background but the focus is still with the couple.

The central pair are also swiftly joined by Angela Basset and Adina Porter’s Lee, who is Matt’s sister, a disgraced cop with an alcohol and pain killer addiction called in to protect and provide emotional support to Shelby whilst Matt is away for business. Some of the best scenes are the ones between Bassett and Paulson as the two characters have a lot of tension and differences.

We see their narration of events with the aforementioned Lily Rabe and Andre Holland who are playing the real Matt and Shelby whilst Sarah Paulson and Cuba Gooding Jr are re-enactment actors playing Matt and Shelby in ‘real-time re-enactments’ of the horrific events that they’re describing. It’s an intriguing set-up that already leaves a lot of questions unanswered like are we seeing what we think we’re seeing, probably not!

But more than that it allows us to really empathise with the characters in question, just like we did in Murder House with the family, we find ourselves caring about the couple as the spooky goings on ramp up around them. This connection with the characters, achieved by a slow-burn episode that plays its cards and horrific elements close to its chest, really help to make American Horror Story feel like a proper horror television show again, something it hasn’t felt like for a while.

Sure there’s still a pair of psychotic nurses, undulating earth that appears to be living, a scalped hillbilly, a monstrous pig-man, a strange man filming a documentary within a documentary played by the ever-awesome Denis O Hare, Kathy Bates and Wes Bentley in a pitchfork wielding group making human sacrifices, and a creepy child in episode 2 that tells everyone they’re all going to die and then disappears. But unlike other season none of this overwhelms the central narrative of the couple going through their ordeal, instead it builds on and adds to it.

But once again the fact there’s a lot bubbling under the surface doesn’t worry me because unlike Hotel that had so many plot threads seemingly hurtling away from each other rather than coming together, in an apparent attempt to ‘shock’ the viewers as much as possible. ‘My Roanoke Nightmare’ is all about tension, atmosphere and suspense so as the revelations get revealed and the horrors unveiled it’ll be all good providing the showrunners keep the focus on these things.

This toning back of usual Ryan Murphy madness also makes the pure horror elements really hit home. The skinned pig left on the doorstep, the entire house full of Blair-Witch style wicker-men, the ‘Ring’ style video showing the pig-man, the moving of the knife into the piece of meat, the rolling of the bottle down the corridor, the appearance of two nurses walking across the corridor, the raining of teeth from the sky and the jump-scare of the car accident and the scalped hillbilly are all efficiently shot and directed for maximum creepiness and decent scares.

It’s still early days but I genuinely believe that we may be looking at the best season of American Horror Story in quite some time. For the first time since Asylum I’m invested in the characters and I can’t wait to see what happens in the next episode. Dare I say it, American Horror Story is back to its horrific best.