TV Review: American Horror Story: AHS 1984 (2019). Choose your bunk and settle in for some campy genre fun

Image courtesy of  20th Television

Tv Review: American Horror Story: AHS 1984 (2019) by Ben Jeffries (23/9/2019)

Season 9 Episode 1 - Camp Redwood (18/9/2019)

48 minutes

Horror, Comedy, Drama

First run Wednesday’s at 10 on FX, then streaming on Amazon Prime.

With it’s ninth season, American Horror Story seems hell bent on having some summer-camp slasher fun.

In the summer of 1984, five friends escape Los Angeles to work as counselors at Camp Redwood. As they adjust to their new jobs, they quickly learn that the only thing scarier than campfire tales is the past coming to haunt you. The ninth season premiere of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s anthology horror series, American Horror Story, promises a season of goofy, gory, genre high jinks.

Previous seasons of American Horror Story carried subtitles dedicated to their particular horror niche, subtitles like Coven or Apocalypse, and the show has always taken it’s chosen sub-genres fairly seriously. The latest season, titled AHS 1984, sees the show shaking up that formula as it pokes adoring fun at vintage slasher movies in a DayGlo throwback to the hey days of the 80’s summer-camp slasher flick. From a sequence where the characters literally wink at the camera during an aerobics class filled with high cut, leopard print, thong leotards and furry leg warmers set to the sounds of Frank Stallone’s Far From Over, to the film grained practical effects shots of wet, red, ultra violent horror kills, the series places tongue firmly in cheek as it leans hard into period references and genre tropes.

It’s impressive just how many nods to 80’s slasher flicks AHS 1984 crams into it’s first episode. Neon clothing, heavy drug use, horny co-eds, a haunted summer camp, raincoat wearing murderers, Charles Keating, a synth heavy soundtrack, wet gore, campfire ghost stories, big hair, and hair metal are all represented. There’s the gas station attendant (Don Swayze) who warns the van-load of coeds to turn around or they’ll all die. A screaming girl is chased through the woods at night. We’re skinny dipping, drinking in the camp cabins after dark, and covering up hitting hitchhikers with cars. Everything about the story has a familiar shape to it, down to the makeup of the group of young camp counselors at the centre of the story.

American Horror Story veteran Emma Roberts plays Brooke Thompson, who seems to be the obvious “final girl” of the show; the decent, kind, innocent girl who survives the entire horrific ordeal by dint of her inherent virtue. Roberts is well cast in the role, but the first episode is doing a lot of narrative table setting so there’s not a lot of room yet for her to really own the character beyond some shy glances at attractive boys and some stereotypical scream queen scenes.

 Billie Lourd is already a lot of fun as Brooke’s new friend Montana, the thoroughly insouciant bleach blond aerobics fanatic who likes to party. Cody Fern is equally expansive as the self important failing actor Xavier, who seems set to be the groups “coward” type. DeRon Horton plays Ray, a hospital orderly who’s always ready to party, and the muscular failed Olympic hopeful Chet fills out the “jock’ slot on the roster, played by Gus Kenworthy.

Left to right: DeRon Horton, Emma Roberts, Cody Fern
Billie Lourd, and Gus Kenworthy
Image courtesy of 20th Television

It may not be reaching for the same levels of  absurdity or abstraction as a comedy like Wet Hot American Summer, but there’s a quality of self aware parody to the writing of AHS 1984 as it rifles through the rolodex of 80’s horror tropes, making jokes at it's own expense. The camp chef, Birdie (Tara Karsian), explains how much she loves the fresh air up in the mountains while she draws heavily on the cigarette between her lips. The clothes are all deliberately garish, combining eye popping layers of patterned prints and neon colour. Montana recognises another camp counselor (Mathew Morrison) from a rare bootleg VHS of a Jane Fonda workout video. Camp Redwood’s owner, the pious Margaret Booth (Leslie Grossman), laments the decadence of the era as she lists off signs of social decay: “womens underwear that shows the buttocks, pornography in your own home, Van Halen.” Every little element of the show is exaggerated or heightened, tweaked to a 2019 level of irony.

The jokes even extend to the way AHS 1984 approaches the idiosyncrasy of the slasher genre as a medium. Scenes end with hard cuts, chopping off the pop soundtrack mid-verse in a subtle wink at the often unsophisticated production of the genre. The set up for Brooke deciding to go out of town with four people she met the day before is almost non-existent. One minute she’s home alone in LA and a creep is breaking into her apartment, and the next she’s in a van on the way to the woods, hoping to get out of the city for a few weeks. AHS 1984 uses the thin reasoning behind the set up of a typical slasher movie to it’s advantage: by emulating that style the show gets to ensconce itself further in the genre while at the same time making a kind of meta joke about the format, and propeling it’s own narrative at an accelerated pace. There’s a loving parody to the humour of the show as it pokes fun at the peculiar trappings of the genre while at the same time taking the core conceit seriously.

AHS 1984 is clearly made in the image of classics like Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp, where tension and unease are only half of the story. The other major ingredient to a traditional slasher is a high body count of creative and gory kills. This first episode is doing a lot work establishing the setting for the season to come and doesn’t have a lot of room for splashy violence, but it still finds room to work in a few nasty cuts. The episode opens with a prologue set at Camp Redwood in the year 1970, and immediately establishes itself as a gory, wet, slasher. As gouts of watery red blood pour across the screen, heads are stabbed, ears are removed, and bodies are piled up in a dark cabin. The gruesome visuals appear to be achieved through mostly practical effects, with a grainy visual texture smeared over the top to complete the vintage look. It’s not extreme violence by modern standards, but it’s appropriate to the setting and tone of the show and right away sets a genuinely unsettling baseline of graphic intent that seems certain to escalate as the season unfolds.

Respecting the origins of the genre give creators/writers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk (Pose, Scream Queens, Glee) room to play with it’s conventions. Where most horror movies only have one murderer, by the end of this episode there are already two different serial killers hunting the co-eds. The first is the so called Night Stalker (Zach Villa), a Satan worshiping serial killer from L.A. whom Brooke fights off when he invades her apartment. Bloodied and bruised by Brooke’s determined efforts to defend herself, the leather jacketed killer flees the scene, promising to hunt Brooke down and make her pay. It’s his promise that motivates a reluctant Brooke to take her new friends up on their offer to join them working for the summer at a camp in the woods.

John Carroll Lynch plays serial killer Mr Jingles
Image courtesy of 20th Television

Once they reach Camp Redwood, the group learns that the establishment has been closed for 14 years following the events of the prologue, which the owner Margaret describes as “the worst summer camp massacre in history”, in a fun nod to the prolific nature of the genre. The deranged killer was the camp janitor, nicknamed “Mr Jingles” (John Carroll Lynch) by the campers, and he’s been imprisoned in a psychiatric facility ever since. But as the camp begins to make preparations for reopening, it’s not long before we learn that Mr Jingles has escaped his cell and is once again roaming the woods around Camp Redwood.

Director Bradley Buecker (9-1-1, Scream Queens) and cinematographer Gavin Kelly (Wu-Tang: An American Saga, 9-1-1) give the episode a cinematic aesthetic that features plenty of wide, sweeping, establishing shots and smooth steadicam work during scenes. They reinforce the 80’s feel with a judicious application of film grain and careful choices of colour grade and lighting, going with a natural looking light for daytime or sulfur yellow and neon blue for night scenes. The result is an authentic 80’s feel, but with a level of polish that only the biggest budget slashers of the decade could have hoped to achieve.

While the show is clearly rooted in the cliche’s of the genre, the cast are all well positioned to take their stereotypical characters in oblique and interesting directions, and the writing seems eager to play with the conventions of the form. Practical effects add to the charm of the homage, and the carefully constructed visual language is at once familiar and easily digestible. With it’s obvious love of the sub-genre and a tongue in cheek approach to the material, AHS 1984 seems set to be a fun season of campy summer-camp carnage.

7.5/10

AHS 1984 Stars: Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd, Leslie Grossman, Cody Fern, Gus Kenworthy, DeRon Horton, Angelica Ross, Mathew Morrison, Zach Villa, John Carroll Lynch, Don Swayze, Tara Karsian

Created by: Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk

Written by: Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk

Directed by: Bradley Buecker

a Production from: Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision, Ryan Murphy Productions, 20th Century Fox Television

Distributed by: 20th Television