When the massive protests erupted in Belarus in August 2020, as we have seen, many cultural figures and theatre workers joined their fellow protestors— demanding change: fair elections, the release of political prisoners, and an end to the violent, oppressive rule of the regime. Kureichik, members of the Belarus Free Theatre, the Contemporary Art Theatre, the Belarusian Army Drama Theatre, and many others across Belarus looked for various ways to express their opposition.3 Members of the elite, state-funded Yanka Kupala National Academic Theatre in Minsk also showed solidarity with the protesters, in spite of strict policies against political activity in their employment contracts and a decades-long culture of self-censorship.4 Like so many of their counterparts, most of the company members who stood up against the regime ended up in exile. Their stature could not shield them from the regime's reckless reaction to the growing opposition and near-total shutdown of civil society, independent media, and the arts. In spite of the loss of their jobs, their stage, and eventually their homes, members of the Kupala reformed as the “Free Kupalautsy,” using the digital space as their new creative home. Over the next few years, the company members who left the theatre regrouped, reclaiming their identity as “the national theatre” and found new ways to form a community, promote Belarusian culture and language, agitate for political prisoners, remember, and mourn. Although most of their productions have been adaptations rather than documentary or verbatim plays, by depicting the act of filming, the use of parallel texts and everyday actions like letter writing, and the use of costumes and props to signal the representation of contemporary events in Belarus acted in a similar manner.

On August 9, 2020, Belarus held a presidential election. The outcome was predetermined, as usual in the post-Soviet country where Aliaksandr Lukashenka held power since being elected to the presidency in 1994. Over time, Lukashenka had slowly increased and concentrated power in the presidency and assured he would remain uncontested by controlling the information space and eliminating opposition. In 2020, Lukashenka detained or forced major political rivals into exile prior to the election. His administration oversaw the election commission and vote counting. In the evening of election day, the commission announced that Lukashenka had received 80.1% of the vote. This was not surprising. This is how the four elections between 1994 and 2020 had gone, and why Belarusians were often cynical about the potential for change. What was surprising was the mass mobilization of the opposition—the largest in the 26 years of Lukashenka's rule—and the size and duration of peaceful protests that followed the election.

The regime “responded with unjustified, disproportionate, and often arbitrary force.” For a time, this display of brute force by the State further encouraged the resistance and destabilized the notion that Lukashenka had the support of the majority of Belarusians. Eventually, with the aid of Russian authorities, dissent was suppressed through thousands of detentions and the use of torture; the closure of all independent media, arts venues, and independent nongovernmental organizations; show trials; propaganda; firings; and forced exile. Nevertheless, as Alyena Batura has written, the 2020 civic mobilization “transformed an apathetic populace into active citizens” and “led to the creation of networks of solidarity and mutual support.” This book looks at how several theatre artists and filmmakers joined the opposition and used their own precarious bodies and artforms to help mobilize communities, oppose the State's propaganda narratives, agitate for political prisoners, collectively mourn, and “preserve the face of violence for the distant future.”

On October 30, 2023, Kupalautsy actress Krystsina Drobysh posted photos on her social media accounts of a forgotten production that had taken place in 1991 and was subsequently removed from public records. The photos are of an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning Belarusian author Sviatlana Aleksievich's oral history, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, at the Yanka Kupala National Theatre in Minsk, Belarus. Due to controversy around the production, which was televised in 1992, and a lawsuit against Aleksievich by mothers who objected to the dark portrayal of their soldier sons, the production was removed from the stage and most records of it disappeared. Due to her own sleuthing and contacts, Drobysh recovered documents and memories of the production, directed by Valery Raevsky, with a cast that included most of the troupe at the time. Drobysh told Kamunikat.org, the Belarusian Internet Library, why she wanted to recuperate the historical event:

Following the impulse of Belarusian theatre artists to document their experiences and work in 2020, the book aims foremost to create a public record of the performances of these artists in a time of crisis. Through historical description and dramaturgical analysis, photographs, and a vital interview with a key figure, this account attempts to capture various forms of preservation.

As we have seen, Belarusian theatre artists were key players in the resistance movement in Belarus, helping to mobilize the resistance, bringing international attention to the crisis, shaping counternarratives to the regime's propaganda, and providing spaces—both digital and physical—to mourn and grieve those who were murdered or forced into exile. Documentary theatre, film, and digital performance became a substantial way to respond to the crisis, building on historical evidence, phenomenological detail, and lived experience.

Late in the documentary film Courage directed by Aliaksei Paluyan, actor Pavel Haradnizky, who has been cleaning his apartment and contemplating emigration, thinks about the role of theatre in the midst of the political protests that erupted in Belarus following the 2020 Presidential elections. He considers the state of Belarus, saying it is no longer just a dictatorship, but a “complete tyranny.”

Filmed amidst the turmoil surrounding the elections, the documentary captures the shifting emotional states and trauma of alienation through the eyes of three actors of the Belarus Free Theatre. Despite Haradnizky's skepticism about the usefulness of performance and art in such a crisis, the film itself makes the case for the power and value of such work. Throughout the unnarrated film, built on a series of fragmented scenes of daily life and footage from scenes of mass protest, Paluyan also depicts segments from Belarus Free Theatre performances. Glimpses of these plays, themselves built on documentary events of the Belarusian past, reveal the ways in which these performances invited audiences to commune, remain engaged, remember, mourn, and heal. While the performances help mobilize communities, they also make lives grievable that the State otherwise designates as disposable. The film and the performances it features strip away romantic notions of revolution while portraying the ongoing struggle for human rights, dignity, and democracy in Belarus. This chapter analyzes both the film and the theatre performances it captures as part of documenting the resistance. Looking both at the documentary material depicted along with the aesthetic choices of presentation in their historical contexts, the chapter reinforces the particular value of theatre in a time of crisis.

As events were still unfolding in Belarus, playwright Andrei Kureichik turned to documentary theatre following the 2020 fraudulent election and vicious crackdown against protestors in an effort to share the story and compel an international community to press for action against Aliaksandr Lukashenka's regime. As a member of the Coordination Council created by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to publicly challenge the election results and hold Lukashenka's government accountable for unlawful actions, Kureichik left Belarus when he was called before an investigative committee shortly after the election. On August 20, 2020, according to the BBC, the Prosecutor General of Belarus opened a criminal case against the Coordination Council, a representative body made up of a core group of 110 Belarusian leaders in a range of disciplines organized by Tsikhanouskaya and her team, for its efforts to “seize power” and harm national security. Kureichik was advised to leave immediately or face indefinite imprisonment.3 Despite what he felt were absurd allegations, he knew there was no rule of law in Belarus and left his home on August 21, 2020.

In exile, still in shock from the severity of Lukashenka's violence toward the opposition, Kureichik immediately went to work using the only tools at his disposal—his playwriting skills and network of theatre workers. In September 2020, he wrote the play Insulted. Belarus., which directly represents the clash between Lukashenka's regime and the pro-democracy resistance in 2020, using real names and verbatim texts along with fictional, metaphorical material that captures the feelings, as he experienced it, of the August events. The following year, Kureichik wrote the play Voices of the New Belarus, an entirely verbatim piece based on the real texts of real political prisoners in Belarus.

Introduction

In ‘Go to Hell’ (S03E11), the penultimate episode of American Horror Story: ‘Coven’ (2013–14), nineteenth-century New Orleans socialite and serial killer Madame LaLaurie is disguised as a heritage worker and gives a tour of her ancestral home. Asked by a member of the crowd when they will get to see the attic torture chamber used to inflict punishment on her slaves, she tries to dodge the question before attempting to clean up her bloody past, denying the existence of the torture chamber and claiming that the room was used for storage and ‘the firm but humane correction of Madame LaLaurie's domestics’. After the tour, she is confronted by the witch Queenie, who retorts, ‘I see you finally got that makeover, guess you figured you could make over a little history too’, to which LaLaurie responds, ‘on the contrary, I’m here to set the record straight, this historical site was nothing but a house of lies before I came back’. As this sequence illustrates, the stakes surrounding history and which versions of historical events are given legitimacy are immense. In addition to cultural institutions such as museums, archives and heritage sites, historical fiction dramas such as ‘Coven’ has provided audiences lacking formal training as historians with an accessible means to engage with the past. However, historical fiction also raises questions regarding how fictional representations of history interpret the past, as well as which versions of historical events make it to the screen.

This chapter will consider the figure of the witch constructed by ‘Coven’ through a multi-methodological approach that draws from television studies, adaptation studies and early modern history, seeking to contextualize representations of female agency and monstrosity within relevant televisual and historical contexts. As co-authors, our respective research interests have been influenced by the disciplines of media studies and history. By examining discursive struggles between historians and media scholars, this chapter seeks to engage with representations of history on screen beyond discourses of authenticity and fidelity. The first section of this chapter will consider how American Horror Story has adapted witchcraft history and witch belief in ‘Coven’, arguing that rather than being ‘lost in translation’, such beliefs have entered ‘into a broader public domain of critical reception and audience review’ through their circulation as public history (Greig 2019, 99).

Death is a staple of AHS, as are themes of mortality, loss and mourning. Death is so much present in the series that Keetley (2013, 90), examining the first season, writes that it ‘incarnates the death drive’. She argues that for this reason it is one of ‘the most unrelentingly pessimistic cultural texts of the contemporary moment’ (Keetley 2013, 90). Yet at times, a more hopeful reading might also be made of this remarkably popular show. As character Mallory informs audiences (season eight, Ep. 8, 00.35.45), ‘nothing ever truly dies’. This is certainly the case in the imagined world of AHS, where death almost never equates with absence and the dead return in myriad forms. In this chapter, the first season, ‘Murder House’ (2011), and fifth season, ‘Hotel’ (2015), are examined in terms of their treatment of the (un)dead, exploring the ways in which the series can be understood to negotiate the complexities of what it would mean to extend hospitality ‘without reserve’ (Derrida 2005, 6), to choose to live with the (un)dead, and to join them. In particular for mothers who have suffered the traumatic loss of their children in life, AHS blurs the dystopian and the romantic by offering an eternity of mother/child bonding. ‘Murder House’ and ‘Hotel’ both imagine lives where instead of giving up your dead, you get to die (and live) alongside them.

What Does (Un)dead Mean in AHS?

The term (un)dead is adopted here for three reasons. First, because the vast array of (un)dead characters across the existing seasons of AHS calls for a term that is broad and can encapsulate vampires, ghosts, characters reanimated via magic and more. Various projects have sought to delineate the (un)dead in popular culture (Williams and Schafer 2013; Thompson 2014), but many of the (un)dead in AHS resist categorization. The (un)dead characters in ‘Murder House’ are ghostly because they are bound to a location that calls into mind a haunted house – as character Violet Harmon says when she sees the house (season one, episode one, 9:20): ‘Great, so we’re the Addams family now’. Referencing the Addams family signals both AHS's tendency towards intertextuality and its concern with the playful Gothic, whilst also, by referencing an iconic American nuclear family, the specific concern with this familial construct in ‘Murder House’.

It is Christmas Eve, and a character interpreted by Joan Collins has killed her husband. The punishment comes to her soon. Imprisoned in the house during a heavy snowfall, she is stalked by an escaped psychopath dressed as Santa Claus. The description above is not from the British horrorthemed portmanteau film Tales from the Crypt (Freddie Francis 1972) but from episode seven of the eighth season of AHS: ‘Apocalypse’ (FX 2018), which recreates the famous tale of a femme fatale hunted down by a serial killer donning a Santa Claus costume.

One of the elements that remains from the classic horror tale is the glamour that Collins always carries with her. As argued by Carol Dyhouse, ‘Joan Collins's career as a glamour icon spanned more than half a century’ (Dyhouse 2010, 142) since she was featured in the 1950s in the aptly named magazine Glamour. Interestingly, Dyhouse traces the origins of the word ‘glamour’ to its roots in association with black magic and the sinister. According to her, ‘the word “glamour” was obscure before 1900. It meant a delusive charm and was used in association with witchery and the occult’ (2010, 9). Indeed, the Encyclopedia of Wicca & Witchcraft explains that glamour is ‘the art of enchantment. In occult lore, glamour is the ability to create an illusion around a person, place, or thing’ (Grimassi 2000, 184). It was related to gypsies, Spanish ‘duendes’ (goblins) and the art of visual manipulation or ‘deceptio visus’ (Blanco-Carrión 2016, 27–52).

AHS, an anthology series known for its mix of camp aesthetics and queerness, evokes this first meaning, returning glamour to its historical roots: a charming surface with a dark side. Beyond the glitz, feathers, furs and sequins, we will argue, lies an underside that has often gone unnoticed but that the series emphasizes: as Postrel (2013) notes ‘the flip side of glamour is horror. Glamorous archetypes like the vampire, the con man, the femme fatale and the double agent remind us of how easy it is to succumb to manipulation and desire’ (Postrel 2013, 121), as glamour anaesthetizes and aestheticizes horror via prettiness. The glamorous component is the ‘up’ side of the fabric, and the horror is the ‘under’. As Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare) says in AHS: ‘Hotel’ (2015); ‘cut me and I bleed Dior’:1 horror and glamour synthetized in one short sentence.

Introduction

The first warning was given in the first episode of ‘Murder House’, season one of AHS, in 2011. In the first episode, a little girl named Adelaide with Down's syndrome warns, ‘You are going to die there’. Later, the same girl warns again, more ominously, ‘You are going to die here’. Maybe if someone older we know and trust were to give such a warning, we might listen to them. However, the characters in the story ignore the girl. The consequences of their doing so are inherently predictable, and the story's flow confirms the predictable. Adelaide warns at the beginning of the story, etching it in viewers’ minds. Her warning indicates that horror does not just come from dark basements, deserted streets at night, haunted houses, the souls of the deceased, postapocalyptic zombies, creatures from outer space or serial killers. Horror can come from anywhere, any person or any situation – depending on how we perceive it. The context of our relationship with a place, person or situation is also essential for perceiving fear. Maybe we would not have been afraid if Adelaide had been a different girl. How and with what elements fear is presented to us are essential.

The horror genre thrives on many different elements. These elements are structured based on cinematography, sound, narrative and characterization. If all these elements are used successfully and appropriately balanced, the viewer will encounter a more successful experience of a sense of horror through the genre's narrative. This is because the horror genre is more successful when it is believable with its story, impressive with its visuals, surprising with its sound, and identifiable with its characters. AHS, which Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk created, was first screened in 2011. Every season, the show explores a different horror theme. This anthological structure has made it possible to examine the horror genre from a more diverse perspective. As a result, the series has been a success because it can appeal to a more diverse audience and those who like different narratives of the horror genre, revitalizing audience interest in the horror genre. Given the diversity of the horror elements used in AHS, finding a common method of examining the horror genre across all seasons of AHS is essential to determine the series’ place within the genre.

The horror genre has incorporated identity politics within literary and visual studies.