I have looked at two of the American Horror Story seasons here; Hotel and Double Feature. As I don’t religiously watch the series, all I knew about Coven (which is season 3 and was aired in 2013) was that it was about witches and that character Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe) recurred in Hotel (and a couple of other seasons). It was reading the Handbook of the Vampire chapter Bloody Countess Elizabeth Bathory that I discovered there were some vampire/Bathory moments in the season. Indeed, there is an energy vampire moment and something akin to Bathory.
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| draining his life |
The energy vampire moment is the first we see and it involves Fiona Good (Jessica Lange). We later discover that she is the Supreme, the powerful witch in charge of the coven of witches that dates back to Salem. When we first see her, she is meeting with Dr David Zhong (Ian Anthony Dale, Angel) whose research into a de-aging/youth serum she has been sponsoring. It is still being trialled on animals but she demands he use it on her. In the next scene she is in her apartment, listening to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and taking drugs. Zhong comes in, having been summoned, and she has not seen any tangible results and demands a higher dosage. He refuses and says he’ll tender his resignation. She starts using her power, stopping him leaving and throwing him round the room. Then she gets him and sucks the youth/life out of him, leaving him aged and husked. She becomes younger but just for a moment – she can’t get the energy to stick.
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| using the poultice |
The other scene is back in time and involves Madame Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates, AHS: Hotel). She is a reprehensible character all round (she becomes a character in the present but not due to her ‘beauty regime’), who is vicious to her daughters, racist, a slaveholder and a sadistic serial killer. We discover later in the series that she tortured animals as a child, but from the beginning we realise that she imprisoned, tortured and brutalised slaves. We see her applying a poultice, red like blood, and she is running out and so makes her daughter help her cut open a chained slave. The important ingredient to the poultice is not blood, rather it is the human pancreas. The poultice, incidentally, does not work so she is more acting like a vampire.
And that is it, two fleeting visitations of (very momentary) energy vampirism and using human organs (in this case) to maintain youth and beauty. The imdb page is here.
On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US
On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK
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