American Horror Story S10.01 — Lyme and meth
Spoilers below for American Horror Story S10.01 — Cape Fear
It has been just about 2 years since the mostly not in-canon season 9 of American Horror Story (1984), which was a pretty big surprise after all of the connections that came in Apocalypse. But, now Ryan Murphy is back with the long awaited Double Feature season, which will tell 2 stories (I’m not sure if they will be connected or not). The first story is titled The Red Tide and will last 6 episodes. Episode one covers a few important elements of the true American horror stories: Lyme disease, meth addiction, incompetent or dirty police, and, of course, vampires.
The episode begins with a family driving in a car, which is an AHS favorite way to begin an episode. The creepy daughter is counting roadkill while the parents (Finn Wittrock and a very pregnant Lily Rabe) look out longingly at their new home for 3 months. They are in Provincetown (P-Town) by Cape Cod so that Harry (Wittrock) can work on the pilot for his screenplay and Doris (Rabe) can redo the house they are renting so that she can kickstart her second career as a decorator. Their creepy daughter, Alma, is there to continue being homeschooled and practice her violin so she can eventually play in the NYC Philharmonic.
They are met at the house by Mare of Easttown…just kidding, but the woman who takes care of the house for the owners has the same hairstylist as Mare and the same accent. After she gives them the keys and some ground rules (“don’t imitate the Boston accent” and “keep a lot of booze in the house’), she departs. Harry heads to the market where he is introduced to “Tuberculosis Karen”, who I didn’t realize was played by Sarah Paulson until Dan told me at the end of the episode. Karen is a meth addict who yells at Harry to leave the town and is shooed out of the store by the owner, who happens to be the brother of “Mare.” It’s a small town.
Back at the house, Harry is struggling with his screenplay. Shocker. He yells at his daughter to stop playing her violin while he writes because when “he hears her playing, he gets too proud and can’t focus” which is some manipulative bullshit. CD (Creepy Daughter) and Doris take a walk to give Harry some alone time to write. On their very lovely walk through the graveyard, Doris tells Alma all about Lyme disease, which is by no means the first or last time, she brings it up. This episode should have been called American Horror Story: Lyme disease.
All of the sudden, they are chased home by a bald, pale man with sharp pointy teeth and seemingly no bones in his body. They make it home and the man bares his teeth at Harry before running off. When they talk to the police about this, the Chief (Adina Porter) is very dismissive. Harry brings up a family of 5 in a nearby town that had been murdered the year before (their throats cut), but she brushes it off. Police are never competent, but it seems like the Chief is keeping something from them. That night, Alma looks out her window and sees the same creepy Pale Person and 2 others gyrating. When she yells for her parents, they are gone.
Harry goes on a run the next morning and finds the bodies of the other two Pale People with their guts strewn about on the beach. Once again, the Chief and her partner are less than helpful. He doesn’t tell Doris about what he saw and instead tries to get her to go out with him. However, before they leave she gets sick and dizzy and she tells Harry to go on without her. If I were 8 months pregnant and sick in a house where there were weird ass people chasing me, I would not send my husband out for a drink without me, but hey, to each their own.
At the bar before dinner, Harry is accosted by Mickey, a prostitute played by Macauley Culkin. He rejects his advances and heads to his table, where he watches Evan Peters and Frances Conroy sing. When they finish, they buy him a drink and invite him to sit with them. Austin (Peters) and Belle (Conroy) are successful writers who winter in P-Town and return with books and plays that get them “BJs from the New York Times best-sellers list” year after year. While they chat, T-Karen returns and tries to take the leftover meat from the plates. She sees Harry with Austin and Belle and tells him to leave again and to “stay away from those blood suckers.” Ok, so obviously Austin and Belle are vampires. Cool.
This is confirmed basically immediately when we see Belle in bed with Mickey. She demands that he let her suck his blood and even though last time, it basically killed him, he agrees (because he has to). She pulls off her fake teeth to reveal her fangs but then doesn’t use them to bite him, so not sure the point of that, really. Later, Belle calls T-Karen and forces her to bring something to her house in 3 hours. Karen arrives with something we thought was a cat in a sac, but turns out it was a baby! Belle pays her in meth and we also find out that Belle protects Karen from the other Pale People. At this point, Dan told me Karen was Sarah Paulson and my mind exploded.
When Harry returns home from dinner, he is attacked by a Pale Person who immediately tries to bite his neck. Harry fights him off and kills him. The police come and take away the body (and clean up the mess, at least that was nice). He tells Doris that they will leave tomorrow and she seems upset that he forgets that she was supposed to do a job there, too. I like that they are giving this storyline to Doris because typically in these types of stories, the man always decides what the family does. Generally, the man is a struggling writer or whatever and decides it is worth it to stay in the house to finish their masterpiece. But, it was nice to see the woman character at least attempt to make this decision.
The next morning, CD says something creepy about the house actually being haunted now (because before she said it seemed like it would be haunted) and Harry gets a call from Austin while packing. Austin tells him that he has a cure for his writer’s block and Harry drives right over. They chat for a bit in Austin’s house and then Austin gives him these black pills. When Harry asks normal questions like “what are these?”, “what’s in these?”, and “what are the side effects?”, Austin answers all by saying “don’t know, don’t care, doesn’t matter.” Fame, fortune, and the ability to tell the most important story a cis het white man can tell are all that is important. Of course, because if you don’t become a vampire and murder the meth heads of this small town, how will people know about your mind-blowing cop procedural or whatever silly thing you are writing?
Harry says he doesn’t want them, but Austin puts the pills in Harry’s coat and sends him on his way. Before they leave the house for good, Harry gets a call from his agent (Leslie Grossman) who balks when he says they are leaving P-Town. She tells him bluntly, “fuck you, write this now” or your career will never recover. Pissed, Harry takes the pill and, of course, CD was behind him watching.
Some general thoughts from this first episode:
- I think the red lights on the houses are meant for people to know when vampires are going to feed or need to be fed. There was one on Belle’s house and then it turned off after she got the baby from Sarah Paulson.
- Seems like the cops are either vampires, being paid by vampires, or grossly incompetent.
- Most of Hollywood is in on this (I think the agent knows about it, for example).
- The daughter is 10000% going to take a pill so she can master the violin.
Originally published at http://lizziekreitman.wordpress.com on August 30, 2021.