American Horror Story, FX

Since Boxing Day, FX has been showing repeats of the latest American hit TV show, American Horror Story. As an antidote to all the festive joy that has been beamed into our living rooms over the past few weeks, I decided to play Scrooge this Christmas by watching the first two episodes the show.

Penned by Glee’s Ryan Murphy, the bare bones of the story sounds very much like your clichéd horror film. The Harmon family, Ben, Vivian and daughter Violet relocate to an old mansion, which inhabits some not so friendly ghosts. However, AHS quickly and effectively asserts itself as more than just another run-of-the-mill haunted house tale and doesn’t shy away from big scares either. Gleeks would be positively shitting themselves.

The plot evenly distributes between big scares and character development but also achieves to maintain an eerie and on edge atmosphere. You never quite know when the next big scare will appear. In this house, things don’t just go bump in the night, they go bump whenever it damn well pleases.

The characters and their fragile emotional states (Ben has recently had an affair whilst Vivian was coping with a miscarriage) sets the tone for the family who are already in a vulnerable position, making the house and its supernatural inhabitants seem the even more malevolent and unforgiving.

Not to say that the show isn’t entirely original. There are some definite nods toward Hammer House of Horror and there is a heavy smattering of Hitchcockian suspense tactics. You can tell that Murphy knows his horror just as much as he knows his way around a show tune.

Murphy has also created a horror icon of his own in the form of the twisted and disturbing Rubber Man of whom has a wholly unsettling and dark encounter with Vivian in the first episode. Jessica Lange, however, looks set to be the true monster of the series as Constance, the family’s bolshy and mostly unwelcome next-door neighbour.

The Oscar winning actress’s return to the small screen is completely on base, with Lange revelling in the role of the cold, calculating former matron of the house. Now past the half way mark of the series, her character looks set to one of the shows most controversial as she meddles with the Harmon’s lives for her own benefit.

American Horror Story is one of those rare shows that has seemingly come out of nowhere and blown everything else on television out of the water. Perfectly cast and on many occasions, genuinely scary, the intriguing plot of this début series makes AHS easily one of the best shows of 2011.