Welcome back, TrashDemons! Every year I lose more brain cells as I bang my head into my keyboard while trying to type up these AHS recaps, which makes it more likely every year that I’ll sign up to do it again. And so here we are. I don’t want to hear any nonsense about this looking like The Best Season EVAH because you know damn well Murphy’s going to screw it all up. As if I didn’t want to shoot myself in the face at minute one of this stupid, stupid, horrible….
Okay, let’s just get on with it.
“The Following story is inspired by true events.” Whatevs, Murphy.
So this year AHS is going to be different. Murphy has found a way to use twice his usual quantity of actors, and likely ten times the exposition. This season is set up like an ID Channel recreation. “Real people” tell the story of their haunted mansion, while “actors” recreate the scene. What is the point of this? There is no point, other than to give an excuse for all the extra exposition I’m going to have to recap. I need to switch to a cheaper brand of vodka to afford this season.
We open up with our first narrator, Shelby.
Shut up, Shelby
She says all their friends used to hate going out with her and her hubby because they were “so perfect”. Matt is her black hubby, giving his own separate interviews, so right off things don’t look very perfect. He’s in sales, and one day won a free yoga class. Shelby was the teacher, and the rest was history. They decided to move to L.A., “yoga capital of the world”, to start a family.
Matt is played by not-lookalike Cuba Gooding Jr in the reenactments because Cuba is Murphy’s new flavor of the week.
When Shelby turned up pregnant on the same day Matt was promoted to West Coast Sales Manager, they went out to celebrate. But as they walked down the street Matt got punched in the face and knocked out during some “gang initiation”. Matt has to have surgery and spends time in the hospital unconscious. When Shelby touches the unconscious Matt, he squeezes her hand because of their super intense connection (per Shelby), but then Shelby has a miscarriage right there by his side. I guess that “connection” didn’t reach all the way to her uterus. Matt has the sads as he tells this part of the story.
Since they were the victims of one single random act of violence, the city no longer felt safe, so they decided to uproot their entire lives and move to North Carolina, where their interracial marriage will make them targets on the daily. They not only move to North Carolina, but into a haunted old ramshackle house deep in the backwoods of the South. They were “City Folk in the woods, having fun,” because that always works out well in the movies.
The house they find was built in 1792, and has 3 bedrooms and a basement (because you can’t have a haunted house without a basement).
“It was in great shape,” says Shelby.
There is a bidding war between them and the Polk Brothers, the most inbred of the backwoods hillbillies (starring Chaz Bono as “Lot Polk”). The Polks bid $25,000 but Matt bids a winning $40,000. Shelby is totally turned on by this because that was their entire life savings and what better way to start a life on the opposite side of the country from your JOB than by emptying your bank account immediately?
Don’t ask me how Chaz & Bros came across $25,000
“I loved it and I loved him, and from the very first moment I felt… danger there.”
So Matt loved living in the country with the fresh air and local hillbillies, but Shelby missed the city and her yoga classes. They’re in bed one night, having some pretty tame sex for a Murphy production, when they hear some screeching outside. Matt goes to explore and finds a bunch of trash and ripped up metal trashcans with red paint or blood or some such nonsense.
Matt is pretty sure it was Chaz & Bros who did this, because of the whole Interracial Marriage in the South thing, but Shelby refuses to run again.
The next day Shelby is tired from lack of sleep when suddenly it starts hailing.
Hailing teeth, that is.
Matt rushes home to her and tries to explain that it wasn’t teeth, it was just ice, that he drove through it himself. He thinks living in the country is just making her a little cuckoo, NBD. He’s getting ready to leave on a work trip to obtain an account that is just two hours away. That’s a big improvement over the West Coast Sales Manager promotion that he left 2500 miles back. Shelby doesn’t mind because she always needs breaks from his smothering. Smothering that we haven’t seen one hint of, even with all the exposition and recreations, but… Okay, Murphy.
