American Horror Story (2011– )

These days when the genre of horror is brought up most people think of the latest slasher bloodfest like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" or the latest attempt at trying to scare us with some lame movie like "The Ring". It might be a problem with the time constraints of a 90 minute or 2 hour movie, it's hard to completely capture the audience and slowly twist the perceptions.

Another thing forgotten in recent horror movies is the fact of NOT explaining everything within 5 minutes of it happening, it's more entertaining and spooky to speculate why someone sees something or what actually happened in a particular scene. People forget that in some of the best horror pictures like "Psycho" the real horror came from the suspense and the wondering of what was going to happen and that the violence was secondary.

The dialogue between characters is actually impressive especially in a couple scenes that you will be able to easily pick out. Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk who also created Nip/Tuck and Glee (odd combo) seem to be able to excel in almost any genre and especially now in horror. It's rare to writers like this who aren't afraid to jump around from genre to genre fearlessly.

It's hard to describe many aspects of this show without giving away to much so I must refrain from describing the plot as it appears so far.

The day after I viewed the pilot episode I was shocked to see all the negative feelings towards the content of the show. So let's be VERY clear this show is classified MA which stands for "Mature Audiences" which should be taken the same as and "R" rating for films, so if you don't want you or your kids to see it that's fine but don't get all pissy about a show you decided to watch that was marketed as a "psycho-sexual horror". Yes there is scenes of semi explicit sexual acts and scenes of disturbing violence but it's a horror story so images like that are to be expected.

It's refreshing to find a show that is different and does not follow traditional formula's TV horror shows. I plan to watch every week and enjoy the series fully, since it is honestly very rare to see a show do better in it's genre then most recent films.

American Horror Story arrived a couple weeks ago on the great FX network that also houses two of my favorite shows: "Sons of Anarchy" and "Justified".