Easter Survival Series – American Horror Story: Asylum

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I’ve always found Easter Break to be something of a misfit holiday. Summer is a time for friends, festivals and for some, two weeks of drinking tequila out of someone else’s navel just off the coast of mainland Spain. Or if you have two surnames, smoking something illegal on a beach in Goa. Christmas on the other hand, is a time for family, and is short enough that by the time you’ve gotten around to seeing the ever dwindling list of people you’ve deigned to bother keeping in touch with it’s virtually time to come back to Uni.

Easter is the awkward third sibling, unsure of what it wants to be; too long to be treated as just a bit of respite from Uni and not long enough for you to really bother doing anything halfway important back home. As a result you tend to spend the period watching stuff on your laptop until 5am. So with that in mind, I’m going to lead the charge in what will hopefully be series of articles on how to keep hold of your sanity this holiday, which actually rather neatly brings me onto the subject of the review.

American Horror Story: Asylum really is a fucking weird show. I’m sorry if you were hoping for a more eloquent summary but seriously, that’s all I’ve got. It’s so dramatically and patently out of its own mind that it transcends the narrow genre of “Horror” and becomes something else entirely. It’s almost like a piece of surrealist art, one of the darker Dali’s perhaps, and like a Dali it’s probably jam packed with attempts at wry social commentary about the world around us, but no one really notices them because nobody much cares. It’s already equal parts grim and farcical in a way that makes it curious and for want of a better word, cool, without it having to be anything greater.

Just to give you a little picture of what Asylum is like, this a rundown of the last five minutes of the third episode: One of the main characters has been possessed by Satan, killed a patient with a pair of scissors and fed her to the collection of mutant experiments which live wild in the grounds of the sanatorium. There’s some exposition regarding the thoroughly weird side plot about aliens. Yes, actual aliens. Followed by the chief nun wandering the corridors drunk and gibbering to herself about a girl she killed in a hit and run accident 15 years ago whilst James Cromwell draws all over a marble statue of the Virgin Mary with lipstick and repeatedly calls it a whore.

Ah yes, James Cromwell’s character. Let’s take a minute to talk about him in a bit more detail. Cromwell plays a deranged former Nazi scientist performing Mengele style experiments on the inmates of the asylum, turning many of them into the aforementioned mutant zombie things he just lets loose in the woods. He’s also some kind of pervert. He’s preposterously, cartoonishly evil, in fact the only way you could make him more nefarious is he was also a cannibal with bat wings.

Oh by the way did I tell you who makes this? The two guys behind Glee. No seriously. I shit you not. You couldn’t make it up.

The weirdest thing about all this is it’s done in such a way as to make it almost slapstick. It’s a show which forces you to ask yourself a lot of searching questions, chief of which is “Why the hell am I watching this” and “Is it messed up that I actually like it”.

You might think given my earlier use of the word “cool” to describe the show before going into a diatribe about the shows seemingly ceaseless grim moments might mean the answer to that question is a resounding yes. You see, it shouldn’t be possible to enjoy watching a stream of what are essentially the most unsettling scenes from about 25 different horror films in a kind of mashup format unless you are indeed a deeply disturbed individual. But this is precisely the point; it’s so hyper stylized and utterly divorced from reality that it actually works. It’s exactly what the name suggests, a kind of homage to Horror as an abstract concept. It’s what i’d imagine Scary Movie would have come out like if it was directed by the combined forces of Baz Luhrmann and M. Night Shymalan, but in a good way.

You know all those horror crossover films like Freddy vs Jason and Alien vs Predator? Well Asylum is a bit like that, on a much larger scale. It’s basically the answer to the age old school lunch hall “who would win in a fight between…” debate for every single Horror archetype, like some sort of Fright Night Hunger Games set in a mental institution. The important thing to remember with this show is that even though it’s indisputably mad, the madness is part of the art, and beneath all of that it manages to be good on a technical level. It has a superb cast and a fantastic crop of rich, larger-than-life characters. The plot does exactly what it’s supposed to, which is leave you desperate to find out what happens next, weaving a vast web of mystery and subterfuge so that you finish every episode with more questions than you started, whilst answering just enough of your initial questions to keep you moving forward.

This is binge television, the sort of TV that you watch online and which stopped you getting to a single 9am all year. It’s best reserved for the holidays, which is ultimately what this series of articles are all about. Although maybe not if you’ve got a deadline looming. Because once you start with American Horror Story you just can’t stop. In the most twisted way possible it’s both strangely beautiful and intoxicating and your life would certainly be enriched for watching it, although, and I really do hope I made this clear earlier, it’s definitely not one for the faint of heart. Seriously.