American Horror Story: Delicate’s premiere is a surprisingly good time

The season is upon us. American Horror StoryThe premiere was the most shocking ever. There wasn’t a single dead body or faceless ghost in sight.

Seriously — there wasn’t even a shot of fetish gear or a serial killer that resembles a real-life serial killer a little too closely. In fact, most of the terror was all in the main heroine’s head (or was it?The first episode was perhaps the least tense of all. American Horror Story yet. A few creepy motifs, like a dead baby bird on the side of the street and a spider in the main character’s hair, and one pretty harrowing anesthesia-induced nightmare sequence did cement that this is, in fact, a horror show. But for the most part there were no severed limbs splattered across the halls of the lead’s sleek Brooklyn Heights apartment. Halley Feiffer, the showrunner and Jessica Yu were responsible for a unique first episode. AHS history.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the premiere of American Horror Story: Delicate.]

Eric Liebowitz/FX

The Delicate focuses on Anna Victoria Alcott (Emma Roberts), an actress who’s recently catapulted to the spotlight after the surprise success of a horror movie. In the midst of adjusting to her newfound popularity, she’s also been desperately trying to conceive and is in her third round of in vitro fertilization. But when she heads to her latest appointment, she can’t help but shake the feeling that someone is following her. She is increasingly frightened as her memory continues to fail her, and she notices that her appointments are being changed on her digital schedule without her consent.

The episode grounds the horror in how often Anna’s concerns are dismissed and her own desires pushed aside. Anna feels that something is off, but everyone in her life — from her husband Dex (Matt Czuchry) to her publicist and best friend Siobhan (Kim Kardashian) — tell her that she’s just a little hormonal and overwhelmed. Additionally, her decisions to sometimes prioritize her career (she’s on track to be nominated for an Oscar!) She receives many negative comments from male doctors about this potential pregnancy. All of this is an extreme example of how women struggle to choose between their family and careers. And that’s without adding in the strange black-clad figures that may or may not be following Anna, and the dead baby bird she keeps fixating on.

Image: FX

Feiffer and Yu produce an atmosphere of fear that is not based on jump scares, nor does it rely on new monsters. Instead, it’s done via the overly austere minimalist sets that heighten the hostility, and with the trippy mirror shots that warp reality. She’s doing her best just to stay afloat, but everything she does is undermined and questioned. It’s clear that the world around her — the people and the places — are out of reach and only exacerbating her feelings of detachment. AHS settings typically heighten the horror (to the point where many of the seasons’ subtitles are literally the location of choice), but in this case it’s not about how inherently scary the setting is, but about making the everyday incredibly dissociative and eerie.

By keeping the horror firmly planted in Anna’s mind, this season seems like it might actually tip into firm psychological terror, instead of the often overly schlocky shocks of AHS’ past. The comparably conservative ‘past. AHS NYC, This show, which delved into the horrors of being a gay person during the AIDS Crisis, featured a fair amount of gory serial killing lairs and BDSM (Body Dismemberment Surgery) scenes with ambiguous consent. It also had severing body parts. Whether or not this psychological dread will continue effectively has yet to be seen, especially given the show’s track record of introducing a cool concept and then immediately fumbling it. But it You can learn more about it here.Second, AHS The show’s reputation is deservedly abysmal, but this will be the second season to follow a subdued humanistic approach. Perhaps, with a brand new showrunner behind the scenes, this will be a season of rebirth for the show and its deservedly infamous reputation. AHSCan finally be directed in a different direction. I’m hopeful, even though that may very well end up getting me stabbed repeatedly in the back to die a very gory death.

The new episodes of American Horror Story: DelicatePremiere on FX Wednesdays, 10pm EDT. Stream on Hulu on the following day.