American Horror Story – Cape Fear

By: Kelly Kearney

After a long two-year pandemic break, Ryan Murphy kept viewers up way past their normal bedtimes to scare the fangs off of “American Horror Story” fans with a chilling and cinematic Double Feature that made this homecoming well worth the wait. With the return of fan-favorite cast members and new Executive Producers, Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters, we head to Provincetown for a BITE of inspiration.

Winter in Provincetown

We begin on the road to Massachusetts with screenwriter Harry Gardener (Finn Wittrock), his pregnant wife Doris (Lily Rabe) and their prodigious daughter Alma (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). The family is heading to Provincetown for three months of solitude in the off season at friendly seaside town. Alma, who spends most of the long drive counting roadkill along the grey and desolate landscape, hits nine when her father slams on the breaks to avoid number ten, a deer, stretched out in the middle of the road. Ignoring Doris’ warning about Lyme disease, Harry gets out of the car to check if the deer is dead or just stunned and as he approaches he sees that the poor animal’s throat has been ripped out, by what he cannot tell. The bloody sight is enough for him to get back in the car and drive away, missing the action from his rearview window of something skittering across the street and dragging the wounded animal away. It’s a good sign that something sinister awaits the Gardeners, but since this is “AHS” there is no turning back now.

When the family arrives at their winter rental, we learn Doris won their three-month stay in an Instagram contest for home decorators. With hundreds of submissions her bland on blander palette stood out above the rest, leading them to this quirky beach town and it’s even quirkier house manager, Martha (Robin Weigert). The Massachusetts local greets the family with an overabundance of New England charm, a bit brash, a little nosey, rough around the edges but charming, nonetheless. As Martha fills the entry room with her booming accent and tips for the New York natives on how to stay safe during the colder months, she lets them in on a secret for living out the bleak P-town winters: stock up on booze and always keeping the windows tightly shut. Doris, unlike her husband, already feels inspired by Martha’s warm, if not a bit weird, welcoming. In the exchange with Martha we learn Alma is homeschooled so she can concentrate on her goal of becoming a first chair violinist for the New York Philharmonic before she hits eighteen years old. Harry, who has been struggling to find his writing mojo, plans to use the three-month getaway to hunker down and finish his screenplay. Unfortunately, his writer’s block is impenetrable and nothing seems to be getting in us out of that Hollywood head of his. He heads to the local market to stock up on supplies and maybe clear his foggy brain enough to get to work. If inspiration is what he was after in P-Town, he might have found in Mikey’s market when he runs into a volatile woman locals call “Tuberculosis Karen” (Sarah Paulson). And, as you can imagine, no manager or innocent shopper is safe from her four packs of rabid crazy. Harry instantly catches her phlegmy wrath when she screams at “Mr. Hollywood” to get out of town while he still can. Shaken, Harry asks Mikey (John Lacy), who happens to be Martha’s brother, what the heck is up with the homeless hacking honey-haired horror show and he explains that TB Karen is a harmless addict who probably isn’t contagious.

Back at the house Harry gets to work, if you can call it that when a writer just stares blankly at an empty screen while listening to his daughter absolutely slaughter her way through Paganini’s concerto. Alma is frustrated and in search of her own musical inspiration to conquer this piece. So, her mother takes her out for a walk to re-center her focus. As they stroll through the streets past the town’s graveyard, they notice a Pale Person (Spencer Novich) doing his best Voldemort impersonation and gyrating above a grave plot. Doris takes one look at this Nosferatu looking guy and starts running towards the house, with the Pale Person (this is the name we are going with Ryan Murphy?) in hot pursuit. They make it home just as the rabid attacker starts pounding on the doors and windows. Harry jumps to attention and runs to close the last remaining window as if he didn’t even listen to anything Martha said! They immediately call the police, but when the Sheriff Burleson (Adina Porter) arrives the threat is gone and she equates the entire interaction to another opioid addict looking for a fix. Again Doris mentions Lyme disease because with all of the dead animals on the road and now this “addict” who seemed to want to eat her and their daughter, it must be connected. The Sheriff puts their minds at ease and promises all three, “You have my word. You’re safe here.” But the glint in her eye says, “Run for your lives.” That night Alma is awakened by the sounds of a pack of Pale fails dancing an evil jig outside her bedroom window. She screams and the entire house is alerted to the dangerous gang of melanin deficient individuals lurking outside. It’s not long before the creeps vanish, but Harry decides to stay awake anyway and guard the house and his family.

Duets

The next morning Alma skips the chipper “good morning” wishes and wakes her sleeping father with a history lesson “in the army, they shoot you for falling asleep on guard duty.” What a wonderful and totally sociopathic thing to say! Harry, who must’ve forgotten about the hungry teethy guys at the door the night before, goes for a run on the beach and finds two dead bodies washed up on shore. When the Sheriff arrives she has some excuse about great white attacks, but Harry is smart enough to know sharks swim south for winter, something he and his family should have probably done because this town is emanating a deadly vibe. After that traumatizing discovery, he heads home to find Doris equally stressed and asks her for a dinner date at the local restaurant, with Martha, Miss Winter Boozehound, to watch Alma. The couple never makes it because Doris gets sick and chooses to stay home and let Harry blow off steam at the bar. She makes him promise to bring her back a steak because, for some reason, she has been craving red meat.

At the local watering hole Harry orders a drink and is immediately propositioned by barfly Mickey (Macaulay Culkin), who is looking to give the writer a good time, for the right price of course. Harry declines the offer just as the evening’s entertainment kicks off. It’s karaoke night and, in the history of “AHS” musical montages there has never been a scene as fantastic as these performers hitting the stage. Doing their best Dolly and Kenny impersonations, Austin Sommers (Evan Peters) and Sarah Cunningham AKA “Belle Noir” (Frances Conroy) bring down the house with their rendition of “Islands in the Stream.” Doing his best to avoid Mickey and the volatile hacking from Tuberculous Karen, Harry winds up joining the singing duo for a drink and he quickly learns they too are writers in town searching for inspiration. Austin is a decorated playwright and Sarah, an award-winning romance novelist. The two fill Harry in on what makes P-town’s off-season the place to be for artists and visionaries: it exudes inspiration. Their best work was written during the gloomy months beside the ocean. It is a hidden secret; they keep coming back to it like any artist to their muse would. TB Karen spoils their fun when she coughs up a threat to get away from the two bloodsuckers before it’s too late. Austin and Sarah give her an eye rolling response and mimic the town’s Sheriff by asking Harry to “trust me” when it comes to the town’s inspirational powers. From the sounds of things, Harry might not find his mojo until he lives through whatever horror gave TB Karen her rabid consumption because he keeps ignoring all the obvious red flags waving in front of his face. In fact, maybe TB Karen is the only one telling him the truth because when he gets home one of those hungry Pale’s is waiting to give him a hangover he will not soon forget. The beast attacks and Harry fights back as it attempts to rip is throat out. They tumble and crash though the bottom floor of the house until Harry bashes the killer’s head in. When the Sheriff arrives she, once again, shrugs this off as a one-time thing and blames the opioid epidemic taking over the region. At this point, Harry isn’t buying the excuse because the guy had fangs and was trying to eat him.

What’s for Dinner?

While Doris and Harry mull over leaving town for the safety of NYC, we get some insight on Bell Noir and her peculiar appetite. After we see her in bed with Mickey, offering him cash to drink from the tap (his wrist), she calls TB Karen to remind her to wrap up her dumpster dive because she is on dinner delivery duty. It’s immediately obvious TB Karen and Sarah have different ideas of what constitutes a meal when she all but begs the novelist to leave her out of it. The “it” being TB Karen snatching an infant out of a crib and handing it over to Sarah like an appetizer. As a human blood bag struggling to survive in a town with limited food while also avoiding the blood sucking inspiration hunters trying to jab their teeth into her like a straw in a Capri Sun, Karen is desperate for protection and Sarah is willing to provide that safety for the tasty price of one tender and juicy baby. The sounds of the crying infant in the burlap sack are not only horrifying but paint a gruesome picture of what these residents have to do to remain critically acclaimed artists. Harry is in over his head, but he is also drowning in his own writer’s block and something has to give. When Austin invites him over for a drink the next morning, he hands him the secret to uncorking his creativity and an end to his blockage. The opioid epidemic turned local dealers into street chemists and with a little of this, and a whole lot of that, a pill that guarantees success was born. Austin admits he doesn’t know what’s in the gel tab of dreams, but he is proof it works and now he is sharing that secret with Harry. At first Harry declines the offer, but by the end of the night he agrees to think about it and pockets the baggie and heads home.

Sitting in front of an empty screen, Harry’s writer’s block exceeds to the levels of unbearable. With his agent on his back to finish the manuscript, he pops Austin’s pill just as Alma, who is struggling to find her own musical muse, watches on from the other room. We don’t have to wait long to find out what happens next because episode two picks up right where we left off.