Wednesday, October 15, 2014

#63-72 American Horror Story: Coven & Specials Galore!


So this week I got closer to being caught up to the average of a horror movie a day. A lot of this was thanks to Mandy, who decided to watch American Horror Story with me and applied her binge watching nature to the whole affair. So I broke it up into two episode entries on the list.

This season of American Horror Story is, for obvious reasons, the most female driven. Anyone who thinks that there aren't enough good roles for ladies should look into this, because there are about a dozen award-worthy performances in this season of exceptionally written female characters. Kathy Bates tops the list, as she usually does, as the immortal racist slave of the coven's house. This woman will do anything for her art! I think I can say with some certainty that she is my favorite female actor of all time. Her ability to find quirky, challenging roles and then throw herself into them so completely that it is (literally, sometimes) scary makes me want to cry with joy. Every moment of her bigoted, ignorant, murderous character's journey is 100% believable, even when she is only a severed head who is still too proud to watch Roots

And that is a perfect image to sum up this season. In a lot of ways it is far more linear and straightforward than the previous seasons (its general plot is almost right out of a tween book series), but the magic is in the individual moments and the power struggle between the characters. It has its moments of total schmaltz, but that is forgivable because they are usually directly followed by moments of extreme violence.

Other than that, I've peppered in some of the old classic specials to pad my below average movie watching. The most notable are Disney's "Dance of the Skeletons" and the Fantasia Segment for "Night on Bald Mountain." The Fantasia piece is possibly the most frightening bit of animation that Disney ever produced, right next to the tripping scene from Dumbo.

I also watched the old standbys from the Peanuts, Fat Albert and Garfield. I love all of these and have posted about them before. Finally, I watched the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VI which is, in my opinion, the last of the classic ToHs, ending with Homer being literally dumped into the real world (if there is such a place).

63. American Horror Story: Coven Episodes 1&2 (10/7)
64. American Horror Story: Coven Episodes 3&4 (10/8)
65. Disney's The Dance of the Skeletons and (Fantasia Segment) Night on Bald Mountain (10/9)
66. Peanuts Halloween Special (10/9)
67. Garfield's Halloween Adventure (10/9)
68. Simpson's Treehouse of Horror VI (10/9)
69. American Horror Story: Coven Episodes 5&6 (10/10)
70. American Horror Story: Coven Episodes 7&8 (10/10)
71. AHS: Coven Episodes 9&10 (10/10)
72. AHS: Coven Episodes 11-13 (10/11)

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