American Horror Story.
I've been watching American horror story. It may be a little bit addictive.
It really is a rather interesting thing that has been done. Each series is it's own capsule story taking on the different stories of the horror genre..
The first series was "Haunted House", catelogues the interweaving stories of all of the people to live and die in the "murder house". How they react after death, and how they react to the people living in the house. Due to the quality of the cast and the script, they manage to get across the key aspects of the American ghost story and they do so in a quite elegant manner. It's a cliche, fully realised and laid out. It reminds me that it is a cliche because it works.
The second series is Asylum. I hadn't realised that the second series was going to be totally seperate from the first. It came as a surprise, but it really works. The second surprise was that they used the bulk of the same cast. It shows that they are actually showcasing the key stories and aspects of the genre, and the cast seem to be quite dedicated to it. The themes in the story run through the asylum and the inmates, why the inmates are there, the nuns who run the place, and obviously the deranged serial killers. There were peices of the second series where I considered turning it off because it was extremely uncomfortable. That is of course the reason for the cliche, of course. It also deals with the cliches of demonic possession and alien abduction, which as a humanities student brings me to the point.
The first series deals with family, love and the things we can't leave behind, the second deals with loss of control. I am interested to see what the themes of the other series will turn out to be, and this may spawn a longer post.
The third series is "Coven", which I am greatly looking forward to. The fourth is "Freakshow".
I like horror, I know a lot of people don't, but when it is done well it deals with the fears which underlay the human condition and by writing them large it shows how to deal with them. There are some things in the horror genre which I would say edge close to torture porn (the Saw movies are a prime example). This is because of the terrible urge to one up what went before, I think. Audiences are less easily shocked than they were in previous years, and the emphasis goes on cheap thrills, because horror can be so nuanced and difficult to do well without those shocks. I hated the "Scary Movie" franchise with a passion. The Scream movies were a beautiful treatment of what the cliches of the serial killer genre are, and the fact that so few people understood this, and therefore found the "Scary movie" franchise funny made me very sad indeed. There has become something wrong with the horror genre of late. There are beautiful ghost stories (I'm thinking of Wilkie Collins), there are wonderful gothic novels, there are some amazing (and amazingly bad) horror films and series. The reason horror so rarely translates to TV rather than movies is because horror is hard. This series in its beautiful deconstruction of the genre gives me some hope that all of the macabre has not been lost to idiots who want to see blood. (There is blood. But it's blood with a point.)
There are a lot of people who I know who probably shouldn't ever watch this because it goes to a very very dark place.
It really is a rather interesting thing that has been done. Each series is it's own capsule story taking on the different stories of the horror genre..
The first series was "Haunted House", catelogues the interweaving stories of all of the people to live and die in the "murder house". How they react after death, and how they react to the people living in the house. Due to the quality of the cast and the script, they manage to get across the key aspects of the American ghost story and they do so in a quite elegant manner. It's a cliche, fully realised and laid out. It reminds me that it is a cliche because it works.
The second series is Asylum. I hadn't realised that the second series was going to be totally seperate from the first. It came as a surprise, but it really works. The second surprise was that they used the bulk of the same cast. It shows that they are actually showcasing the key stories and aspects of the genre, and the cast seem to be quite dedicated to it. The themes in the story run through the asylum and the inmates, why the inmates are there, the nuns who run the place, and obviously the deranged serial killers. There were peices of the second series where I considered turning it off because it was extremely uncomfortable. That is of course the reason for the cliche, of course. It also deals with the cliches of demonic possession and alien abduction, which as a humanities student brings me to the point.
The first series deals with family, love and the things we can't leave behind, the second deals with loss of control. I am interested to see what the themes of the other series will turn out to be, and this may spawn a longer post.
The third series is "Coven", which I am greatly looking forward to. The fourth is "Freakshow".
I like horror, I know a lot of people don't, but when it is done well it deals with the fears which underlay the human condition and by writing them large it shows how to deal with them. There are some things in the horror genre which I would say edge close to torture porn (the Saw movies are a prime example). This is because of the terrible urge to one up what went before, I think. Audiences are less easily shocked than they were in previous years, and the emphasis goes on cheap thrills, because horror can be so nuanced and difficult to do well without those shocks. I hated the "Scary Movie" franchise with a passion. The Scream movies were a beautiful treatment of what the cliches of the serial killer genre are, and the fact that so few people understood this, and therefore found the "Scary movie" franchise funny made me very sad indeed. There has become something wrong with the horror genre of late. There are beautiful ghost stories (I'm thinking of Wilkie Collins), there are wonderful gothic novels, there are some amazing (and amazingly bad) horror films and series. The reason horror so rarely translates to TV rather than movies is because horror is hard. This series in its beautiful deconstruction of the genre gives me some hope that all of the macabre has not been lost to idiots who want to see blood. (There is blood. But it's blood with a point.)
There are a lot of people who I know who probably shouldn't ever watch this because it goes to a very very dark place.