American Horror Story season 6 will fillet you and eat you alive.
This American Horror Story review contains spoilers
American Horror Story Season 6 Episode 8
Season 6 is turning into a sort of horror Hunger Gamesthat makes running around an arena where you could get stabbed at any second by an arrow, knife or wasp with hallucinogenic venom into a carnival game. Spend thirty seconds in this labyrinth of terror and you’d rather volunteer as tribute.
TV cannibalism can destroy any semblance of an appetite you have left. This is coming from someone with a strong stomach for gore—I was one of those unnatural kids who never got a nightmare from a horror movie, and it takes a lot for me to even flinch in a haunted house—but the Polks really put my innards on a roller coaster (and I don’t get sick from roller coasters either). Squirrels roasted over a bonfire are apparently not enough for these monsters. Just the suggestions of seasoning and eating human flesh like beef jerky are enough to make you not want to touch any meat of questionable origin ever again. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more deranged, some necrophile teen starts coming on to you and tries to film the whole thing on his camera phone. Anyone who gets a pickled ear, a pack of drugstore mentho-lyptus drops and a jar of blackstrap molasses for Christmas has issues.
This is when Necro Kid unearths the legend about Piggy Man, that ghoulish hybrid of man and swine with a knife that can slice anyone into bacon and a squeal that must register an unearthly decibel count. It’s surprising no one wears earplugs with the level of paranormal noise pollution. High on oxytocin, he blabbers the story of one Kinkaid Polk who put on a dead pig’s head like a Halloween mask and could never take it off.
Besides people literally eating people with a dash of salt, what amazes me about this episode is how easy murder is when it’s your life or Cannibal Mama’s dinner. Forces these characters (except one) probably couldn’t imagine taking over them under normal circumstances suddenly have them pulverizing skulls and turning brains into floor pizza. Not that anyone is exactly sorry for the corpses. This is what you get when you have an affair with a thousand-years-dead ghost or you try to fillet your source of protein while it’s still alive. Whatever unleashed the homicidal urges in former yoga instructor Shelby proved she wasn’t exactly so zen in last week’s episode. Murderous intent is raging, and desperate attempts to escape a hillbilly garage of horrors end in a frenzied onslaught of carnage. It’s the more gruesome version of Hansel and Gretel’s oven-happy witch your childhood book of fairy tales didn’t tell you about.
The only thing worse than murdering people who would have had your eyeballs as an hors d’ouvre is suddenly remembering that you left that smartphone you were supposed to film reality TV footage on—the one with all the evidence for a life sentence—is still in the garage where you dropped it next to a splatter of blood and brains.
While we’re still having a lively discussion about butchery, whatever happened to the Butcher? Not Mary Agnes. Mary Agnes is as dead as the character she became obsessed enough with to storm L.A. with a hatchet. I mean the real Butcher, the fire-licked silhouette of a wild-haired woman wielding an axe bigger than any prop the psychotic Mary Agnes could have stolen from the set, the real ghost of Tomasyn White who gathers a torch-wielding mob and consecrates the land with murder every Blood Moon. There was hardly even a flash of her in the tongues of flame that threatened to send the house crackling to ashes the horde of undead claimed their next victims. Has she really disappeared? I have trouble believing such a vengeful spirit would go down without someone’s head rolling and someone else tied up and roasted on a spit. So long as the moon hangs threatening and sanguine in that ruthless sky, she’ll materialize.
Half the “reality show cast” is dead and there are still so many unanswered questions hanging in the chill October air, not least of which is the mystery uninvited houseguest who went undercover as Piggy Man just not to get slaughtered. Let’s just hope it’s the end of the human barbeque.