American Horror Story: Roanoke‘s style of storytelling convolutes a plot with unique character motives and terrifying moments.
The documentary format consistently takes away from suspenseful moments the show builds up, and the mid-season shift away from this style is more confusing than it is profound.
This season’s first several episodes are a documentary that exists within the show. This documentary includes a dramatic reenactment of the character’s experiences and interviews with the same characters.
Where the show goes off the rails is its latter half, when it has the actual characters and the reenactment actors involved in a murderous, sex-filled rampage at the scene of the documentary.
There are several illogical elements of the show, such as the release of Kathy Bates’ character from her mental hospital, despite being guilty of murder, and the group’s decision to return to the same house where they nearly lost their lives. The police behave with little regard for the situation, but this is to be expected in any horror story.
Throughout its previous five seasons, AHS has done many things well while making up rules of the occult as it goes — a difficult feat to accomplish.
Whenever a story enters the realm of the occult, the viewers simply have to follow along with what they’re shown. This inherent unpredictability takes away from any plot twists based in reality.
This has been a small issue in previous seasons because the viewer is never comfortable and is always expecting chaos, but the show’s chilling concepts and characters have far outweighed this issue. Season six, however, goes in the exact opposite direction because we know the characters survive at first.
When we get to the actual drama, involving real-time drama that could spell death for the characters at any moment, the story collapses into a nonsensical story of affairs and betrayals between actual characters and their actor look-alikes. The spectacles of having two characters the viewer has seen as the same person interacting takes away from the terror of the situation.
Even further, we end up with the majority of characters, who they spent the whole season developing, dying off, leaving us with minor characters that we feel little to no attachment to.
We feel scared in situations when we know the context of the character’s life, but if it’s someone that we know very little about, the drama is taken away, and that is exactly where this season fails.
These experimental elements of Roanoke‘s storytelling take away from the root of what the show is: a terrifyingly creative horror story. Killing off the characters we know too quickly takes away from that. Setting up the story as a documentary and then transitioning to a world the documentary was made in takes away from that (looking at you, The Office).
The bloody mess of a narrative that has been the final episodes is a fantastic example of why this show can scare us so effectively. Pushing the boundaries of human torment, both mentally and physically, has always been this show’s forte.
The human drama the writers tried to insert with a new form of storytelling falls flat on its face and takes away from what we liked about this show.
You don’t need to change, AHS. We love you just the way you are. So please don’t ever try this nonsense again.
