In the ‘American Horror Story’ recap for the season 6 premiere, the theme is finally revealed as ‘My Roanoke Nightmare’…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
In a world where spoilers seem to fester on the internet, it’s hard to imagine where a show as popular as ‘American Horror Story’ could hide the theme for the season for several months until the premiere.
To be fair, despite creator Ryan Murphy’s best intentions to throw the audience off with 26 different teaser trailers that he said may or may not actually have anything to do with the theme for season 6, TMZ ended up with the real scoop after releasing photos from the set that hinted at a setting in Roanoke, North Carolina — the site of the infamous “Lost Colony” where more than a 100 settlers just mysteriously disappeared in 1590 and were never heard from again.
That secret may have been revealed against Murphy’s wishes, but the actual plot and story behind the new season of ‘American Horror Story’ season 6 did manage to stay hidden until Wednesday night’s debut, which featured the tagline — “My Roanoke Nightmare”.
In an interesting twist, the story this season is being told in a “Unsolved Mysteries” kind of way with the “real” participants telling how things unfolded — including Lily Rabe’s return as well as Andre Holland and Adina Porter — with the re-enactment being played out by Sarah Paulson, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Angela Bassett in the featured roles.
Somehow — at least through one episode — Murphy once again manages to re-invent the show and keep things ultra creepy around every corner. The idealistic couple who moves to the country soon finds out that their dream house is being stalked by what we can assume are the missing colonists who disappeared more than 400 years ago and have never been seen again.
Until now.
With that said, let’s recap the ‘American Horror Story’ season 6 premiere for “My Roanoke Nightmare” chapter one….
LA to NC
As the episode begins we meet the focus on this particular story — Matt and Shelby — (played in the re-enactment by mainstay cast member Sarah Paulson and newcomer Cuba Gooding Jr.), who are living a happy existence in Los Angeles when disaster strikes. Just after Shelby finds out she’s pregnant, Matt is beaten in a random attack during a gang initiation. The assault leaves him with a broken orbital bone while Shelby was knocked to the ground and either through the physical trauma or the stress of the situation, she loses the baby.
The horrific incident sours them both to living in L.A. so they decide to pick up and move cross country to Matt’s boyhood home in North Carolina. It’s there where his family lives and because Shelby is a yoga teacher by trade, she can pick up work virtually anywhere. The fresh start is bolstered when the couple find an old farmhouse for sale in the middle of nowhere that they win in an auction against only one other bidder — a trio of backwoods rednecks, who they beat out with a bigger wad of cash on the day the home and the surrounding land is sold.
As soon as Matt and Shelby move into the house, strange things begin happening because this is ‘American Horror Story’ after all.
While the couple are having sex upstairs, Matt and Shelby begin hearing strange growling noises outside that disturbs their private time. Matt decides to go outside to check it out and when he gets there, he finds trashcans and the entire area has been ransacked and torn apart. At one point, a trashcan even goes flying by his head. As disturbing as this entire scene might be to most, Matt chalks it up to the angry rednecks who got outbid when trying to buy the house.
The strange occurrences begin to mount while Matt is away at work and Shelby hears the house being bombarded by hail during a storm. When she goes outside to look, Shelby finds instead of ice pellets decorating the house, it’s human teeth that are falling from the sky. Unfortunately for Shelby, when Matt arrives home the teeth have disappeared and he’s wondering if the stress of losing the baby might still be sticking with his wife in their new home.
Later, Matt himself gets spooked when he finds a dead, slaughtered pig laying on their front doorstep but rather than concern his wife, he buries the animal out in the woods to keep her safe from this latest attack.
Shelby’s apparent psychosis manifests again while Matt is a couple hours away on business and after witnessing a pair of girls wandering through the house, she decides this is a good time to relax with a nice dip in the hot tub. Now never mind the fact that she just saw the grown up versions of the twins from “The Shining” mysteriously walking through her house, it doesn’t seem like this would be the best time to go outdoors for a late night relaxation session with a glass of wine, but alas she does it anyways.
To no one’s surprise, a group of hands appear out of nowhere and slam Shelby down into the pool nearly drowning her before she escapes. Matt rushes home to find his wife and the police at the house, but the lead officer tells him that there were no signs of a struggle, no footprints and no evidence whatsoever that anybody actually attacked his wife.
Shelby may be seeing some things, but Matt knows she didn’t just imagine being attacked and thanks to their surroundings and people who might not look too kindly on an interracial couple living nearby, he decides to take action.
Pig Man
Following the latest incident, Matt installs a series of security cameras all over the property so whenever he’s away from home, he can still keep an eye on his wife and the house. Add to that, Matt calls in backup by asking his sister Lee to stay with Shelby while he’s away.
Lee (played in the re-enactment by Angela Bassett) is a former police officer, who was discharged from the force after she got hooked on painkillers following a shooting on the job. Lee was found out by another cop and fired immediately after she chased down a suspect while she was high on pain pills.
Now Lee is serving as a babysitter to her brother’s wife, who she’s never had much use for considering she looks at Shelby as a new age hipster thanks to her non-job as a yoga instructor and her ridiculous gluten allergy. While Matt is away, Shelby and Lee attempt to co-exist but not without a few jumps along the way.
Shelby gets spooked after she’s cooking one night and hears a noise. After returning to the kitchen, Shelby finds a butcher knife plunged into the meat she was just cooking. Meanwhile, Lee asked Shelby to curb her habit of drinking wine whenever she’s around because the former cops is hanging onto her sobriety by a very thin threat. See, after Lee was fired from the police, her husband left her and got full custody of their daughter. So it doesn’t help much when Lee is haunted by mysterious sounds, which ends up being an empty bottle of wine being rolled into her room.
Lee accuses Shelby of the underhanded trick, but the reality is her sister-in-law had nothing to do with this.
At the same time this is happening, Matt gets an alarm on his phone that one of the censors from his security system has been tripped. When he looks on the camera, Matt sees a group of mysteriously dressed people running towards the house with torches in their hands. He tries to call his sister and wife, but no one is answering because they are bickering with each other.
A moment later, another noise like screaming is heard from the basement and Lee decides to investigate. Once they get to the basement, Lee and Shelby find a TV has been turned on with a tape playing inside the VCR. The video shows a jumpy camera moving around the woods and a brief glimpse of a creature wearing a pig head that looks directly at the camera before the person behind the lens is attacked and left for dead as the shot fades to black.
It’s a creepy video but even creepier are the lights going out inside the house while Lee and Shelby see people moving around outside while they are in the basement. They sit there for more than 30 minutes before Lee decides to go back upstairs to see what’s happened. When they climb up the stairs, Lee and Shelby discover the entire inside of the house has been decorated with string tied from one corner to the next with disturbing straw men — like the ones in “Blair Witch Project” or perhaps “True Detective” — tied up all throughout the house.
Let’s Get Out of Here
When Matt finally arrives home from his business trip, he sees the twisted message left behind and at this point both his wife and sister are appropriately rattled. But despite the video in the VCR and the creepy stick figures left behind, the police aren’t convinced this is anything more than a prank and even Matt believes this is the work of the shifty rednecks who want them gone so they can then buy the house at a discount.
Even Lee tells Shelby that the cops need time to work this out.
But Shelby’s had enough so she grabs the keys to the car and bolts out into the night because in a fight or flight situation, she’s got no problem running away. Sadly, Shelby doesn’t get very far before she literally runs into a woman (played by Kathy Bates) standing in the middle of the road. Shelby’s car plows over the woman but when she stops to investigate, the strange person she hit (dressed in colonial garb mind you) just gets up and walks into the woods.
For some reason, Shelby decides to give chase to find out if the woman is OK and soon finds herself in the middle of the woods, unable to get back to the road with only a flashlight to keep her company. Soon enough, Shelby has plenty of people surrounding her as the torches reappear, a bearded man comes out of the shadows (played by Wes Bentley), a half-decapitated man comes tumbling out into the night with a blood curdling shriek and there’s poor Shelby left all alone with nowhere to go.
As the last scream is heard, the screen fades to black and we await the next chapter of “My Roanoke Nightmare”.
To get you ready for what lies ahead, here’s a season preview for ‘American Horror Story: My Roanoke Nightmare”
