American Horror Story Freak Show is the fourth – and what’s shaping up to be the worst – installment of Ryan Murphy’s horror anthology.
Following a month of spine-chilling teasers, the sloppy pilot simply didn’t live up to the hype.
Season four focuses on one of the last freak shows in 1952 and its fight to remain in show business.
While conceptually brilliant, the execution of Murphy’s latest endeavor falls short.
The revelation prior to the premiere that Sarah Paulson would be playing conjoined twins Bette and Dot obviously meant she would have a second computer-generated head edited on to her shoulders. I didn’t realize, however, it meant she would have a second CGI head obviously edited on to her shoulders.
In one scene, Jessica Lange’s character touches Bette’s cheek, but since Bette was digitally added to the scene later, so was Lange’s hand – and it’s obvious.
The sloppy use of CGI throughout the episode took away the underlying horror of American Horror Story – it took away the imagination’s ability to create a true sense of horror by denying the audience the chance to think, “What if this was real?”
The awful editing (and horrible choices of background music set to ridiculous levels that drown out parts of the dialogue) wasn’t the only factor that kept the audience grounded in reality.
Lange, who won Emmy’s for two of her previous three American Horror Story roles, begins the episode by speaking in a German accent, however she spends the rest of the episode slipping in and out of it – sometimes mid-sentence.
Kathy Bates’s character also has an accent, which she struggles to maintain as well.
While it’s too early to tell whether this is intentional by both actresses or just an incredibly distracting accident, Murphy will undoubtedly spend, and waste, an episode on each of these characters’ backstory.
As it is, too many storylines are present within the first episode, and the only one worth perusing is that of Twisty the Clown – the most terrifying killer clown since Pennywise, and the only redeeming factor of this show.
