American Horror Story Season 6: Roanoke Chapter 4 Review

This American Horror Story review contains some spoilers.

American Horror Story season 6 is now in full splatter mode. The gore that was lurking somewhere in those fog-shrouded woods and cobwebby halls will seize you by the shoulders out of nowhere and hold a rusty knife to your throat. It’s a graphic bloodbath that oozes all over your screen in the raw and sadistically compelling way only American Horror Story can pull off. Beware if you turn green easily: most of this episode cannot be unseen. 

Man-pigs are everywhere, or at least one that’s been terrorizing the house for centuries. It keeps playing mind games with you, because you want to rip off its mask only to realize there is no Party City this far out in nowhere-hell. Flashbacks show that the thing disrupted one unfortunate family’s TV dinner in the middle of some flowers-and-bell-bottoms variety show back in the 70s. You can guess what happened to them. That guttural snort which sounds something like Gollum mated with a wild boar and caught bronchitis is the least of the nightmare fodder in this episode. Trust me.

Now we actually know where antler-Gaga materiaized from. She was a halfway sane English girl who was among the very first settlers of this ridiculously haunted area, and apparently a druidess who practiced magic by moonlight until she was arrested for witchcraft and sentenced to burn at the stake. Except she had a knife. A brigade of dead security guards later, the whole thing was blamed on the natives and Gaga walked off in a bloodstained shift with antlers on her head. She now walks the woods as some hybrid of primordial gods and the New World. The significance of the antlers is still a mystery. The Scythians used them as a magical charm to transmogrify themselves and their horses into deer, their spirit animal, except we’re a long way from ancient Scythia. 

Remember the guy in that staticky basement video, just another oddity on the long list of things Matt doesn’t believe until they’re literally breathing down a pig snout into his face or brandishing an axe at him? His name is Elias and knows things. Like where Priscilla likes to hang out. Meaning, that’s probably where Flora is (and you know it’s in those woods). I can’t decide whether Elias is just he owner of the house trying to make money off something not just dying, but dead, or a schadenfreude junkie who gets some sick pleasure watching new tenants have mental breakdowns over pig-men and poltergeists before the Butcher’s axe silences their screams. Either way, the search for Flora is a warning that if a whole herd of ghosts is out cavorting in broad daylight, something is definitely off. Then you find out this whole thing has to do with during the Dying Grass Moon cycle in October. When the veil between the living and the dead dissolves from the first quarter moon to the full blood moon, ghosts get homicidal.

Speaking of homicide, let’s talk human sacrifice over a nice hot cup of tea. If you thought Kathy Bates couldn’t possibly get more evil than Season 3, she just did. Tomasyn White is beyond the shadow of a doubt even more evil than Coven’s puppet mistress Madame LaLaurie, who kept a dungeon for her slaves under her mansion and rouged her cheeks with their blood as a youth potion. Madame LaLaurie is all powder and perfume next to this ripper from hell. I thought things like disembowelment and drawing and quartering were so 13^th century until the Butcher showed up. Her vitriol stems from the colonists being ungrateful for a once-barren land that suddenly flourished, even if the condition for a plentiful harvest was one human sacrifice every October full moon. This is what you get when you hand your soul over to an incorporeal being with antlers.’

Bitterness of a centuries-dead phantom aside, there seems to be a lot dependent on the blood of innocents (and in the case of those murderous nurses, sometimes the guilty) for these ghosts to survive, and they will murder anyone who tries to actually live on itm CROATOAN is ancient blood magic carved into unsupecting trees.Cricket’s cryptic message about here being some way to reverse the curse still echoes in my skull. The question is, how do you bleed the vengeance from a malevolent spirit?

I’m sure Ryan Murphy has already found a way.