Redemption has never been so bloodcurdlingly terrifying in Season 6 of American Horror Story.
This American Horror Story review contains spoilers.
American Horror Story Season 6 Episode 5
Last week’s episode might have won the unofficial award for most intestines spilled in a single night, but even that goes ghostly pale in the face of what has just been seen that can’t be unseen. No words are needed when the only light you have is a candle flickering in those hallways to hell. The terror is palpable, and it pounds under your skin like the beating heart of a house that is very much alive—or undead.
Evan Peters is back. We all knew this would happen at some point, because American Horror Story just isn’t the same without his brooding antiheroes and psychotic villains.This time Peters materializes onto the scene as the ancestor of Season 4’s spoiled homicidal manchild Dandy Mott. It becomes glaringly obvious where the homicidal part comes from. Edward Philippe Mott is part Caligula, part Liberace and a hundred percent entitled rich snob.
Edward is a powdered wig and brocade coat away from being the 17th century incarnation of Dandy, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that if he wants a cavernous house as a personal museum for his art collection, he will get that house. Bloodthirsty ghosts that demand human sacrifice are apparently no big deal. At least he passes them off as no big deal until they suddenly are. Let’s just say that being sadistically drowned in a circus tank for freakshow revenge entertainment is a much more appealing death sentence than how Edward meets his demise.
Flash back to 2016. Imagine being trapped in a haunted house surrounded by a phantom mob with flaming torches as the blood moon looms ominously overhead. If this sounds like something out of Children of the Corn, even Stephen King can’t save you now. You look outside the window to see a ghost waving a butcher knife and demanding your blood as some sort of deranged version of holy water to consecrate her land. Your heart is mercilessly roaring in your ears by now.
You start whispering an escape plan only to find out your cars are about to be incinerated by torch. You turn one way to face an empty-eyed zombie girl who can contort herself and crawl at warp speed like some sort of human tarantula. Turn the other way and Pig Man is waiting. What you then realize is that, despite what Elias said about the Butcher’s victims being petrified of her, they are scared enough to be manipulated in her murderous schemes. When the ghost of Edward Mott says he can get you the hell out of there, you’re desperate enough to believe you’re talking to someone dead.
Why would a narcissistic sociopath like Mott, even as a ghost, actually want to (shock) help someone? He has enough skeletons in his closet—or literally, his cellar, where he locked all his servants until they literally became bones. For the one shred of grace his damned soul has left, Mott swears he will redeem himself in death by leading Matt, Shelby, and Flora out of the house through a creepy subterranean tunnel. He doesn’t redeem himself too much since the woods are as far as he will go.
Not all the dangers in those woods are dead. Remember the hillbillies? You will when they throw a burlap bag over your head and stuff you in the trunk of their pickup. Turns out those two feral things who were tearing away at raw flesh with their teeth and whose only understandable word was CROATOAN were their kids. Now they’re presumably still locked up in the police station, being bribed with chocolate to sound halfway human. The passing thought that being locked in a garage with cannibals can’t end well is an understatement. This might not be the opportune time to find out that they've also made a ghastly deal with the Butcher.
Just when it seemed like American Horror Story was destined for an early grave, the same person (yours truly) who went on a rant thinking it was a monstrous montage of horror movie ripoffs now had to sleep with the light on. As one chapter of Season 6 closes, there is a flash of panic that the all we get is five episodes when it isn’t even Halloween yet—until a cryptic preview post-end credits reveals Ryan Murphy isn’t quite done freaking us out yet.