American Horror Story - Murder House

In my opinion, American Horror Story is undoubtedly a well-made series that incorporates action, romance, mystery and horror, all of which are cleverly and effectively mixed together to form a great combination that I have absolutely no complaints about. Of the cast, I was most drawn to Jessica Lange, who can be both endlessly warm and extremely stone cold. The atmosphere is tense, poignant and perfectly paced. The soundtrack is slight, rather dominated by eerie sounds, and the intros to each episode perfectly capture the nature of the series. Morbid, bizarre, creepy, claustrophobic, but also poignant and (to some extent, e.g. the Harmon couple's line) from life. In short, one of the best series of our time. (06/19/2012)

Pilot: American Horror Story came out of nowhere. Until the day the pilot was out, I didn’t have any detailed information about it. When foreign horror websites wrote about it, I didn’t pay attention to the articles because the title made be expect some kind of documentary (like, Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film). Under these circumstances, I didn’t have time to get sufficiently excited and maybe that’s why I liked the pilot more than if I’d been expecting something great. So far, it feels like Twin Peaks in a B-movie package. The cold opening is fantastically scary and the rest of the episode is entertainingly unsettling. I’m very curious about what aces the creators have up their sleeves, because stretching a haunted house story to the length of a TV series won’t be easy. There are two things that bother me: the character of Ben and that the scenes don’t link with each other very well – I’ve no idea whether the first episode takes place during a week, a month, or even more… The rating is provisional, I feel that with the remaining episodes the series can either drop to three or go up to five :) 1st season: So, it held to four. I liked the interesting characters and the story as a whole, which exploited everything it could out of the trodden premise of a haunted house, especially considering it is a twelve-episode series. If there’s one thing to complain about is that we didn’t get that many horror moments. But thumbs up. The last episode was a beautiful farewell to the characters and I’m looking forward to the second season, which will be about something completely different. (10/08/2011)

It’s nice, bizarre, and disturbing. Ryan Murphy. It also has more than just the excellent idea of combining the story of Victor Frankenstein with Lindberg's child. The Black Dahlia is always a pleasure too, and the two faces of Moira is what it's all about. I've missed Alexandra Breckenridge tremendously since the end of Dirt... In the end, who wouldn't want to buy a house in La La Land on the famous murder trail? Jessica Lange is great and so is Connie Britton, and strangely enough, it's all one big romance again. Constance's fawn is proof of that. The ending is also delightfully satisfying and gives us the opportunity to get excited about the sequel and to be satisfied with the loop. (02/11/2012)

Relationship problems, infidelity, trust, new beginnings... and yet this story is definitely not a romance. Evil under the stairs, a ghost around the corner, and lots of skeletons that want to come out of one scary house's closet – and yet I wouldn't label the series purely a horror show. Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have merely shaken off the optimism and enthusiasm that followed them for three years on Glee and decided to write down all the negative thoughts that had accumulated in their heads since the end of Nip/Tuck. And when the phenomenal Jessica Lange or the captivating Evan Peters come to their aid, they hit the mark. Although AHS is unsettling from the first seconds and creepily unpleasant with all its converging storylines, I found it hard to look away. If the family conversations didn't occasionally stutter in terms of pacing, the events could have been all that much more captivating. Still, this was the first obsidian from the black treasure box. (03/17/2012)

Weird, weird, weird! Which was actually the purpose. Some see fear in it, others see the atmosphere of the town of Twin Peaks. One thing is clear, and that is the fact that this series doesn’t care about reality, simply playing with the viewer, and even though the story is based on paranormal phenomena, it seems to me as if it was not about them at all. The touch of the creators of Nip/Tuck is evident here. Some things managed to properly disgust me, but I don’t know if I can stand it until the end. Somehow the characters didn’t dazzle me enough to keep me going. But the idea definitely deserves it and the same goes for some of the characters. Anyway, I have to say that it’s pretty little for a long-running series. (07/07/2013)