AHS Roanoke: Chapter 2

When last week's AHS season premiere ended, we were left with a ton to think about and perhaps a ton to have nightmares about. Tonight we get some history behind the farmhouse, its previous owners, and its previous...we'll call it decor.  While we spend most of the evening keeping our fingers crossed that the Millers will finally get a clue, we also spend a fair amount of time seeing some seriously spooky shit. Here's where we are after Chapter 2.

At The Gates Of Hell 

We pick up right where we left off in Re-enactment Land as Shelby stands lost in the woods face to face with a dude who is missing his scalp. Behind him is a crazy ass looking woman with Joker-type grin on her face holding his scalp. Shelby runs through the forest as we hear the words of Kathy Bates (yay!) as "The Butcher," and this lady is getting ready to dole out some punishment. A "thief" with a pig head (mask?) is brought in tied to a wooden pole. She orders his ass into the fire and Shelby watches as he burns alive....or maybe not alive....who the hell are these people? The Butcher sees Shelby and yells to her followers: "Seize her!" Shelby somehow runs back to her car and passes out just in front of the headlights. Matt and Lee are there at that point and see her fall. 

The "real" Matt states in the interview that he and his sister took Shelby to the hospital where she told everyone about the human sacrifice in the woods. The police, of course, found nothing and Shelby was tested for drugs. She was clean but scared stupid. She was scared SO stupid, in fact, that she suddenly believed the scene in the woods was the hillbillies trying to scare them after all. Facepalm. Matt tells us they decided to stay in the house and the opening credits roll. 

I'll Stand My Ground
We shift gears to Lee getting visitation rights to spend time with her daughter. She arrives in the re-enactment scenes and looks leery of the house. Flora hops out of the car with her adorable backpack and joins her mom in this creepy haunted house that she has no business being in. At one point Lee finds Flora talking to "Priscilla," who by the way, Lee (and we the viewers) cannot see. Flora explains to her mom that Priscilla is tired of all the blood and mid-conversation, a vase breaks in the other room. A bonnet is next to it. Lee still shakes this off as Flora "acting out" as children of divorce often do. Facepalm 2.

That night the pig in distress sound is heard again (thought that guy was burned alive?) and Shelby isn't going to take it anymore, so she grabs a flashlight and heads outside. Matt follows her and they arrive at the scene of the human sacrifice. The pig head is posted on a burning massive wooden doll and the rest of the body is still in flames on the burning pole. They call the police and this time the evidence is still there. The cops say they will provide 24 hour protection until the culprits are found.

With this new found relationship between the Millers and the local police, Shelby and Matt think they should be able to rest easy now. Heh. Matt wakes in the middle of the night to the phone ringing. A woman's voice is on the other end, but the strange thing is - the phone isn't actually plugged in. Matt turns and sees an old woman lying in a bed with a nurse standing over her. "Margaret" looks like she's dying but she doesn't want to take her medicine. She tells bitchy nurse #1 that the medicine makes her sick as bitchy nurse #2 walks in past Matt. Bitchy nurse #2 notes that Margaret is back-talking and promptly shoots her in the head. WTF?!?!? Matt, I'd like to point out that none of these women resemble the hillbillies you SWEAR are trying to scare you away. And even if they were? This would be one elaborate prank for them to pull off. I'm pretty sure I've never heard "You might be a redneck" followed by "if you stage a gruesome murder in someone's dining room."

Lee wakes up to the sound of her brother outside pounding on the door of the cop car parked in the driveway. Matt is flailing and screaming "there's someone in the house!" The cop comes in to investigate but the murder scene Matt describes is nowhere to be found. Yeah. No kidding. Matt first thinks he may have been dreaming but then chalks all of this up to "maybe I suffered neurological damage when I was beat up in L.A." and I can't help but yell "dumbass!" at my TV.  I can't even bother to bring my palm to my face again.

Somehow Flora missed the commotion (sound sleeper?) and her visit with her mom is soon over. When Lee's ex, Mason, comes to pick her up, however, Lee tells him that Flora must be playing hide and seek. Oh jeez. Both of Flora's parents wind up on the top floor and hear Flora's voice coming from inside a small door in what I assume is a storage area. Flora tells them she was in the process of offering Priscilla her doll as a trade..."so she wouldn't kill us." That's all Mason needs to hear. He's the one damn person on this show in his right mind and he swiftly picks up his daughter and gets the hell out of there. He tells Lee that he will never bring her back to the house. Lee goes back inside and gets wasted.

I Won't Back Down
Matt puts his drunken sister to bed and hears Shelby's voice calling him downstairs. She is standing near the window and asks "do you see her?" Yup, there is definitely someone outside in the woods in broad daylight. They naturally go to investigate and find doors in the ground where she had been standing. There's a cellar there which had been someone's home at one time but has long been abandoned. Shelby and Matt find a video camera and watch the contents on the massive TV in their living room. I'm pretty sure they put more thought into the money they spent on that TV than they did when they bought the house. Anywho, the guy from the "I found you!" video is talking to us in this one and it's Denis O'Hare! He says there are forces in the house that do not let him sleep and so he lives in the cellar. His name is Dr. Elias Cunningham, he is an author, and he is speaking to us from October 1997.

Elias initially chose the house because he was writing a book on two sisters - nurses named Miranda and Bridget Jane. They had worked in an assisted living facility in Rochester and were suspects in the deaths of two residents. They fled in 1988 and opened an assisted living facility of their own in NC in, you guessed it, the $40,000 farm house. Miranda and Bridget Jane sought out elderly residents whose families were tired of them...who just needed somewhere to dump them until they died. Their other criteria? The first names of the residents they took in began with the letters M, U, R, D, and E. As they killed each person, they wrote the letters on the wall. For whatever reason though the ladies were not able to finish that last R. When the residents' families called the police because no one was answering the phone at the facility (too much to check on their family members themselves?), the sisters were long gone. The bodies of the victims were found and "MURDE" was written on the wall.

Matt pauses the tape. He remembers (from his neurological damage) that bitchy nurse #1 said "M is for Margaret" after Margaret was shot. He runs into the dining room, rips the wall paper and finds MURDE. Back to the tape...Elias believes the nurses were stopped by something more evil than they were. Something in the house. We then see him take his video camera with him in the house...and we see an unclear face in his camera before it shuts off. Just as the video fades, a meat cleaver lands in the door right behind Matt and Shelby.

There Ain't No Easy Way Out
Matt and Shelby finally decide they need to be rid of the house. They try to negotiate with the bank because obviously the bank did not disclose the history of the house at the auction. YOU GUYS DIDN'T DEMANDED TO KNOW ABOUT IT EITHER. The bank guy rightfully tells the Millers they agreed to buy the house "as is" and they are not getting their money back.

They watch the bank guy drive away...and see Lee driving up with Flora. This visit was not approved by Mason or the courts, so Lee is committing a felony here. "I just wanted to see her." Lee. Baby. Honey. Sweetheart. The last time your daughter was in this house she talked about someone murdering all of you. If you were going to kidnap her, couldn't you have taken her to a hotel or something? Flora heads off to do her homework while Matt, Shelby and Lee discuss the situation in another room. Mason calls and Shelby calms him down and convinces him not to go to the police. Well thank goodness for that.

Lee decides she needs to go say goodbye to Flora before Mason picks her up because she knows damn well it will be a loooooooong time before Mason lets her see her daughter again. There's one problem though - Flora is no longer in the living room doing her homework. They search every inch of the house and cannot find her so they begin searching the woods. They do not find Flora there either....but they do find her hoodie caught at the top of a tree.

The episode ends there and good God - it was creepier than the first. We now know bits of the most recent history of the house at least for the past 30 years or so. We don't know a damn thing about the sacrifice in the woods, who Kathy Bates is, why the dude who is not a hillbilly was walking around without a scalp, and what the deal is with the pig head. We also don't know who Priscilla is and why she's all chatty with Flora. Was that kid really taken or is she hiding somewhere? If the nurses were stopped by some evil in the house, why are they presenting themselves to the Millers now? How does all of this tie in to the colonial folks with the pitchforks and torches? And most importantly, where the hell is Lady Gaga? Here's hoping we get answers to some of these questions when we reach Chapter 3 next week, and here's hoping Chapter 3 won't give me the nightmares I expect after viewing Chapter 2!

AHS Season 6 Premiere: My Roanoke Nightmare

Welcome back! The masterminds behind American Horror Story have kept us guessing on the Season 6 theme right up until the premiere, and I'm excited to say they are tackling Roanoke with this new chapter. The Lost Colony, as it is known, is introduced to us in present day AND in documentary style. That's right - we have actors doing "reenactments" of other actors who are giving interviews for what seems to be a documentary. This is going to make blogging complicated, but I'm digging the new format. What does this premiere hour have in store for us? Here we go...

As Time Began To Blur

We begin with Lily Rabe and Andre Holland as Shelby and Matt Miller, a married couple in the midst of an interview regarding their time living in Roanoke. This looks like it could be an episode of Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel. As they tell their story, we cut away to Sarah Paulson and Juice Cuba Gooding Jr. as the actors "playing" Shelby and Matt in this documentary. Neat huh? 

In the interview Shelby tells us all about how perfect she and Matt were for each other from the get-go. She was a yoga instructor when they met, he took a class, and it was love at first sight. They settled in Los Angeles where they decided to start a family. When Shelby found out she was pregnant, she and her husband went out for a night on the town to celebrate. While walking down a very public street that evening, Matt was attacked and beat pretty badly by a group of gang initiates who ran and were never caught. Shelby stayed by his side in the hospital and willed him to wake from his coma with her loving touch. Unfortunately for Shelby...the stress of all of this caused her to miscarry.  

Going into the reenactment sequence now we see Shelby and Matt leaving Los Angeles behind to head to the east coast. Matt believes they will be safer moving close to where he grew up and where members of his family still live. They arrive in Roanoke and go for a picnic in the woods...how they chose that particular spot to picnic, I don't know. Maybe they pulled over on a whim? Maybe Matt's family lives in walking distance? Maybe this is the local picnic area that's not really a picnic area? Not sure. They just happen to stumble across an old farmhouse, built in 1792, that is up for auction. The Millers go into a bidding war between a group of guys that could have stumbled out of the saloon from Paint Your Wagon and win the house for a bargain price of $40,000. Wait. What? A giant farmhouse and many acres of surrounding land is worth that only amount? No one is alarmed by this? Nice job guys. You just traded gang violence for paranormal pandemonium. 

Across This New Divide

Matt feels right at home in their new (old) house though Shelby feels danger almost immediately. They decide to break in their bedroom though and while they are getting it on, an awful sound startles them from outside. It kind of sounds like a pig being squeezed. Matt throws on some pants (not sure that I've ever seen a 'reenactment' with nudity before) and heads outside. Their trash had been...well...trashed and a trash can is launched from the fog over Matt's head. He assumes there are some locals that do not approve of the Millers as an interracial couple. Yes Matt. The hillbillies destroyed your smallish trash can because you're black. Oy. 

The next round of weird shit comes when Shelby is hanging out in her dining room the following afternoon and hears what sounds like a whole mess of bugs outside the windows. What she finds instead are molars - it's raining teeth on her back porch. She's all kinds of shaky when Matt gets home from running errands and she takes him back to the teeth area... and there are none. Boy doesn't she feel silly. Turns out Matt is a traveling salesman and he needs to start traveling in order to pay for the renovations they will need. Shelby is cool about it though. She's felt a little smothered since they lost the baby and she's ready for some alone time...in the house where it rains teeth.  

Shelby cooks herself some alone time dinner and drinks some alone time wine. Even though there are strange noises throughout the house, she goes ahead and has an alone time dip in the hot tub...where a hand grabs her face and holds her under water. Shelby doesn't drown but she's scared out of her mind. Matt rushes home to find the police at his house, but they are not much help. Seems Shelby told them her attackers were wearing old costumes and carrying pitchforks and torches and the cops think she's nuts. 

Connect The Space Between

Matt has to get back on the road and he's worried about his wife and her pitchfork attackers and teeth storm. He sets up security cameras around the perimeter of the house and asks his sister, Lee, to stay with Shelby while he is gone. In the interview world Lee is played by Adina Porter, more famously known as Tara's crazy ass mama on True Blood. In the reenactment she is played by badass Angela Bassett. Lee has her own problems though. She's a former police officer...former because she had an addiction to painkillers that cost her a promising career, as well as her marriage and any potential custody of her daughter. Shelby and Lee don't really get along but they kind of need each other's company at the moment.  Lee asks Shelby to lay off the wine while she is still struggling with sobriety, so Lee is definitely surprised when she wakes up that night to a squealing pig sound and a bottle of wine just outside her bedroom door. She thinks Shelby is messing with her and they argue....

...Meanwhile Matt is hanging out in his hotel room and gets an alert on his phone from the app linked to the security cameras he installed. He sees a group of people with torches and weapons heading toward his house and flips out. He tries calling his wife and sister but they are too busy bitching at each other to answer their phones. They do hear the front door open though as well as noises in the basement. When the women reach the bottom floor they find a Blair Witch Project style video playing on a television. A man points his camera in the direction of the squealing pig sound and we briefly see a pig-like thing before the man says "I finally found you" and presumably dies. To add insult to injury, Lee and Shelby realize they are locked in the basement and they are hearing quite a commotion above them. When all is quiet, the ladies are able to open the door and they make their way upstairs to find stick dolls hanging everywhere. So not only are the pitchfork peeps creepy...they do arts and crafts as well. 

Matt has rushed home (again) and he still thinks the rednecks are just trying to scare them away. Shelby tells him the rednecks can have the house and gets in her car and drives away...because driving away in the middle of the night by yourself when people with torches and pitchforks have been roaming around is the smart choice. Shelby reaches for her cell phone when Matt calls her and drives right into a woman standing in the middle of the foggy road. This woman is in colonial garb and she stands up and walks into the forest. Shelby, currently being Stupid Shelby, follows her yelling "I need to get you to a hospital!" To Stupid Shelby's surprise (but no one else's) the road behind her disappears and she is lost in the woods. The episode ends with a terrified Stupid Shelby finding a tree filled with stick dolls...and a group of people with torches. Oh and then there's the guy missing the top part of his head! What?!?!?!

I was definitely sucked in by this episode and loooooved the whole actors playing actors thing. I have SO many questions after the first hour of Season 6 though. Do the hillbillies know exactly what is in the woods? Why did they want the house so bad? What the hell happened in the house to make it sell for only $40k? Why were the Millers not concerned with that? What's the deal with the pig face thing from the video? What do the stick dolls mean? How far away is the local craft store? Why is that dude missing part of his head? And WHY am I having a hard time moving past Cuba Gooding Jr. and Sarah Paulson as O.J. and Marcia Clark? Ryan Murphy is playing mind games with me by having these two play soul mates mere months after The People v. O.J. Simpson. Regardless, I can't wait to see what Chapter 2 holds next week. We're off to a great start!