The highly anticipated American Horror Story season 6 premiered on September 14. The theme of the season was kept under wraps in an attempt to hype up the season even more. Spoiler blogs were predicting the theme for months before the premiere, and some of the ones they came up with were the Roanoke colony and something similar to the famed Manson family cult.
The episode started out with a couple of disclaimers, saying that the events in the show were based on real events and there could be some potentially disturbing images. It finally showed the opening credits to reveal the season theme, which is The Roanoke Nightmare.
This season was set up a little differently than the rest. It started out with a “real life” testimony from the main characters, which was then acted out in a sort of dramatization way with different actors representing the same characters. It threw us for a little bit of a loop, but all in all it was pretty interesting.
The storyline is about a couple from Los Angeles. They were victims of an act of gang violence, putting the husband in the hospital and causing the wife to have a miscarriage. Stricken with grief, the couple decides to move across the country to a quaint little place in North Carolina. After watching the episode, App State senior Parisa Mehrzadeh says, “As a first time watcher, I am 100% afraid of coastal NC.”
The couple finds an old, beautiful house that was built in 1792, nestled back into the woods. The young couple beats out some rough locals in an auction for the house, and they feel like all of their dreams came true with this find. That is until some strange things start happening.
From the moment they move in, eery things start happening. The woman walks outside to find it raining teeth, they both hear weird noises in the night, and when the man goes outside to investigate, invisible beings start throwing trash toward him.
The man is a traveling pharmaceutical sales rep, and was on a sales call when his wife was home alone. She got in the hot tub to relax, but as soon as she got comfortable, a strange person walked up behind her and drowned her. Dead pigs showed up on their doorstep, and a mob of torch toting people surrounded the house looking for the new inhabitants. App State senior, Katie Taylor, recalled, “My roommate, Parisa, and I legitimately screamed at the top of our lungs when she got pushed underwater.”
The man’s sister comes to stay with the wife while he is away on business because of the scary things going on, and when the torch mob went after them, they were lured into the basement to try and escape. When they got there, an odd video was playing.
This episode was very different from the AHS norms, and most people have mixed feelings. Karli Pendergraft, a senior here at App State, decided, “I think it would be a lot more powerful without the narrations.” Sophomore Kevin Lynn felt that the different actors telling the testimony and acting in the dramatizations was not as appealing.
Narration and dramatizations aside, there were some really creepy parts in this episode.
Her Campus writer and App State senior, Carlin Kennedy revealed that she and her roommate, Darian, were afraid to part their separate ways into their own rooms for bed.
Overall, the consensus was an expectation of it to be scarier, but it was still pretty terrifying in some aspects. I heard many mixed reviews about this first episode, so it will be interesting to see how opinions change throughout the season.
Photo Sources:
http://www.bustle.com/articles/184074-american-horror-story-my-roanoke-n…
http://www.bustle.com/articles/184250-the-american-horror-story-season-6…