The second episode of "My Roanoke Nightmare" picks up right where the season premiere left off. We're offered a little bit more in the way of backstory on the season's super-creepy house, but left with many (if not more questions) about the menacing figures seen in the forest.
We're back in the woods – Shelby's screaming, as zombie-esque scalped people are staggering toward her. Kathy Bates is in the background, ominously intoning some kind of chant about being the queen of every hive and the shield for every head. She also mentions that she's the tree and the lightning that strikes it, which seems pertinent since that statement basically describes the "AHS" logo for this season. Shelby runs off into the forest, but instead of continuing all the way to her house and the somewhat vague safety of a locked door, stops after a few steps and turns to watch the bizarre ceremony in the clearing.
Which is, to be fair, pretty darn weird. It involves Bates punishing a "deserter" by nailing a pig tail to his body, and shoving the head of a dead pig onto his, all before burning him alive. Yikes. It's not clear if this scene is supposed to feel like an obvious callback to Bates' performance in "AHS: Coven" as the villainous Delphine LaLaurie, but it feels like it. (Remember when she made a "Minotaur" by shoving a bull's head on one of her slaves?) We also get our first blink-and-you'll-miss-it look at Lady Gaga this season, playing what appears to be Bates' weird forest priestess. Your guess is as good as mine, y'all. I have no idea.
Shelby, of course, gets spotted by Bates, and has to run for her life. She makes it to safety and tells the cops everything about the human sacrifice she saw. Of course they can't find any evidence, because we still have eight more episodes to go this season. For some inexplicable reason, this just makes Shelby extremely convinced that their hillbilly neighbors are to blame for everything, and have concocted a massive hoax to get them to leave. She's suddenly more determined than ever that they have to stay in their Nightmare House now. This is the kind of stupid that's usually rewarded in horror stories with imminent death, but we know already that won't happen here. It's a bit frustrating, actually.
See, the problem here is much the same as last week. Thanks to the pseudo-documentary framework, we know that Matt, Shelby and even Lee all survive whatever horror lurks in the house and the woods beyond it. No matter how many near-death experiences they face, or what kind of creepy entrails they find strung about in the woods, we already know that they're going to be OK. And honestly, that makes this part of the story a little bit boring. Sure the scares are interesting, and increasingly gross, but the impact that they have seems less and less worthwhile. We're vaguely curious about how "real-life" Shelby and Matt will explain what happened to their fictional selves, but there's not a lot of tension in this story at this point. As a viewer, you just have a lot of time to wonder how two people could repeatedly do such stupid things and still survive. It almost doesn't seem fair!
Speaking of things that are stupid, Lee decides that despite all the strange things going on around them, it's the perfect time for her daughter Flora to come visit. Flora settles right into the house, playing hide and seek, snacking and making a new imaginary friend named Priscilla. Lee tells herself that this is just something that kids of divorce often do, but it seems unlikely that average children have imaginary friends who talk quite this much about blood. Priscilla, according to Flora, wears old-timey clothes and a bonnet, and has promised "they're going to kill us all." Yikes! This is quite enough for her father to take her home extremely immediately, and though he's kind of rude about it, you can't really blame him. The threat of losing visitation with her daughter is enough to push Lee back to drinking, which would be a bad idea even if she weren't currently staying in a house where people see things on the regular while they're sober.
Meanwhile, Matt and Shelby have been having their own set of adventures. They discover a dead pig being roasted on an elaborate spit in the woods, and Matt wakes up to a phone call in the middle of the night – a creepy, crackling recording of a woman begging for help. He then sees visions of two nurses gleefully murdering a sick old lady, and writing on the walls in blood. He's terrified, and now also worried that he's suffering some kind of neurological problem on top of everything else.
Afterward, the Millers see a little girl dressed in period garb in the backyard, just standing around ominously. Worried that she's one of the hillbilly family, they head out to investigate and discover the trap door to a cellar where she was standing. Of course they climb down the ladder into it, because they are idiots. The cellar seems a bit like an end of the world-style apocalypse bunker, dirty and smelly and poorly lit. There's a video camera and another VHS tape, because it's 2016 and I guess the ghosts or whatever haven't realized that digital technology is a thing yet. Matt and Shelby retrieve the tape, and decide to watch it, and the episode finally kicks into high gear.
The tape is a confessional video from 1997 and stars Denis O'Hare as Dr. Elias Cunningham. (Worth noting: He is also definitely the man we saw screaming in last week's man/bear/big video creepfest.) Elias tried staying in the house, but it's been too much for him. He says there are malevolent forces there that won't let him sleep, that have shown him terrible things. So he's been hiding in the cellar instead.
Cunningham is an author who had come to North Carolina to research his latest book, a true crime story about two sisters who were serial-killing nurses who liked to work at assisted living facilities. The sisters – Bridget and Miranda – eventually came to Roanoke and bought a house that had been vacant for 15 years. They set up their own facility, and would only accept patients whose families didn't care what happened to them, and had specific letters in their names. They were murdering patients and trying to spell something in their blood on the wall of the house. They'd gotten as far as M-U-R-D-E when the cops were finally called, but the sisters had disappeared by the time they arrived.
This segment is riveting – by far the most interesting bit of the entire episode. Mostly because we, the audience, have already accepted the idea that something is scary and wrong about this house and now we want to know why. If the mystery of the season isn't who survives the "Roanoke Nightmare" – since apparently, almost everyone does – then it's about the secrets of this house and its history, and that's what we want to know about. This is the sort of creepy world/myth building that "AHS" excels at, and we're left wondering who – or what - exactly drove the tenants prior to the murderous nurses out.
However, Elias is convinced that the nurses didn't leave on their own, that something much more evil than they themselves "got them." He says the house was put up for sale again after this, but no matter how many coats of paint they put up the word they wrote would keep reappearing. Matt realizes then that the story is true, that he knows where this happened because he saw it in his vision with the scary nurses before. He starts ripping wallpaper down in another room and there it is, the faded blood letters. Still visible.
This is, finally, enough for Matt and Shelby, and they call the bank. They say they want their money back, they want their lives back, and they want to leave. The banker doesn't care, says it's their own fault for not doing their research. If they leave, they'll lose everything they have.
In the midst of all this, Lee has decided that it's a good time to kidnap her daughter Flora and bring her back to this nightmare fest. Why? Because she just "wanted to see her" or something. Sure, why not. Bring a child back to the place where she's repeatedly talking to invisible friends who are threatening to kill everyone. Sounds like excellent parenting.
And, of course, while Flora's doing her homework, the creepy period-dress ghost child appears outside and lures her into the woods. Lee, Shelby and Matt search the house, then run out into the forest to look for her. They find her yellow hoodie, impossibly high up a giant tree, and that's where our episode ends.
Odds and Ends:
- The “Dramatic Re-Enactment” title cards are just all kinds of unintentionally hilarious.
- The fact that these people just don’t leave despite the fact that they keep seeing increasingly terrifying things that they both agree are at least partially real is almost offensive. I know, I know, they’ve put their life savings in this house or whatever, but what’s $40K versus being brutally murdered??
- I’m still not sure the story of Shelby and Matt can sustain this entire season. Can we really expect to spend eight more episodes watching them do stupid things and not die?
- We need a lot more house-based flashbacks that don’t include the Millers.
- Maybe this general letdown sort of feeling is inevitable after his unforgettable performance in “AHS: Hotel,” but after watching Denis O’Hare portray Liz Taylor last year, his role as Cunningham feels disappointing thus far.
Thoughts, comments, or elaborate theories to share? Hit me up on Twitter: @LacyMB