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.

To think of AHS (2011–present), Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's internationally acclaimed horror anthology television series, is to think of a cultural manifestation with deep and complex political, economic and sociocultural ramifications. Accordingly, these ramifications take explicit shape in the series in terms of the conscious articulation of fear, sexuality and violence. By channeling widespread sociocultural fears and anxieties, AHS explicitly depicts contemporary issues and concerns in terms of the dynamic relationship between horror and desire. Nevertheless, as with the relational boundaries linking horror and desire, the political and sociocultural implications of this cultural manifestation reach far beyond their conscious and explicit deployment. Furthermore, horror and desire designate a complex and dynamic circuit of unconscious tensions and attractions intricately linked to sociocultural intelligibility by which the subject is constituted on individual and collective levels – that is, they designate those intrapsychic and intersubjective dynamics through which subjects come to understand themselves and their relationship to the world. In turn, this relationship between processes of subject constitution and sociocultural intelligibility cannot be detached from the profound political, economic and technological transformations of the last three-to-four decades. And it is in light of this relationship that the ninth season of Murphy and Falchuk's series, AHS: ‘1984’ (2019), becomes a critical tool for the analysis of the contemporary re-articulation of sociocultural intelligibility. With its participation in the current trend of revisiting and rememorizing the social and cultural settings of the 1980s and 1990s, this cultural manifestation provokes a contextual disruption; it slashes apart past and present issues and concerns, providing a critical entry point for the examination of the sociocultural transformation of the last forty years. But how does AHS, and this season in particular, constitute such a relevant slashing tool of sociocultural analysis? And what are the contemporary dynamics and transformations it reveals?

In this chapter, I will address these questions by, first, approaching those elements that, from its particular focus on pop culture and the slasher horror subgenre to the sociopolitical context it portrays, make ‘1984’ stand in a position that differentiates it from other seasons of AHS. Second, I will analyse this season's positioning in relation to sexuality by tackling its narrative deployment in terms of both the sociohistorical contexts it portrays and the political, economic and sociocultural ramifications that derive from its mainstream production and distribution.

A Company Convenes

During the opening, pre-title sequence of ‘Apocalypse’, the US anthology television series American Horror Story (AHS)'s first episode of its eighth season (ironically titled ‘The End’), we see the world all but destroyed by nuclear missiles. Only a select few are able to sequester themselves to a secret underground bunker, Outpost 3, to live out their remaining days under a bizarre rulesbased system that is both demanding and terrifying. On the first evening of their stay, the occupants of Outpost 3 sit down to a Gothic-banquet-inspired dinner where a company of familiar faces is brought together in this eighth act of television horror. Looking around the dinner table, we see actor Sarah Paulson playing the role of Wilhemina Venable, matriarch of the bunker. Up to this point, Paulson had appeared in every season of AHS, each time playing a different character. Evan Peters is also there – playing Mr Gallant (also in his eighth season). Kathy Bates plays Miriam Mead (in her sixth season and sixth role). Adina Porter plays the role of Dinah Stevens and Billie Lourd plays Mallory (both in their fourth season at that time). Leslie Grossman takes on the role of Coco (her second season), while there are AHS newcomers Kyle Allen and Ash Santos playing Timothy and Emily, respectively, Jeffery Bowyer- Chapman and Chad James Buchanan as lovers Andre and Stu, and, most surprisingly of all perhaps, Hollywood veteran Joan Collins playing the role of Mr Gallant's grandmother, Evie Gallant.

While these actors inhabit their characters consistently and singularly within the world of ‘Apocalypse’, the AHS audience who has travelled through its different seasons and stories inevitably frame a perception of each character through the journey of previous roles, generating multifaceted linkages which themselves resonate with the linkages afforded by the richly woven narratological lines that run vertically through the seemingly discrete seasons in the anthology. It is within these matrices of intertextual weaving encompassing actor and character, and character and past-and-future characters, that the AHS company has evolved. And it is also one that carries with it an important legacy from American television that dates back to the early beginnings of serialized drama – one that engages with the social and the political in ways that signal its antecedents both formally and thematically.