Director: Various
First aired: 2021
Contains spoilers
When I reviewed the fifth season of American Horror Story, I had to admit that I was not a regular viewer of the series, which to that point had been a different story per season. That trend continued after season 5, I was just not drawn to the series itself.
However, with season 10 (known a Double Feature) I was drawn back as it contained vampires (of a sort). In fact, this season booked the trend and rather than having 1 story it had 2; episodes 1-6 being entitled Red Tide and episodes 7-10 entitled Death Valley. The latter was an alien-based story, using all the conspiracy tropes around Roswell/Area 51 and split between black and white sections in the past and colour sections in the present. I have to say I rather enjoyed it.
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| a pale person |
Red Tide is our vampire episode however. It follows Harry (Finn Wittrock, Halloweentown High (Scroll down)), a struggling screenwriter, who is moving his family – heavily pregnant wife Doris (Lily Rabe) and young daughter Alma (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) – to Provincetown, Massachusetts. The trip, set for 3-months through winter, is designed to allow Harry space and quietude to write but also Doris is contracted to interior decorate the house they are staying in. Having found roadkill on the road into town, which looks like it has been attacked, they quickly notice strange men hanging round the streets.
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| Finn Wittrock as Harry |
Known as Pale people, they seem to be bald, inarticulate and “twitchy”. They all wear long coats and there is a Nosferatu-like feel to them. Harry attends a bar and, having brushed off local junky/rent-boy Mickey (Macaulay Culkin), he meets two other (world famous) artists in town for winter, Belle Noir (Frances Conroy, Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated) and Austin Sommers (Evan Peters). A further encounter with a pale person, involving a home invasion, convinces the family to leave the town but, before they leave, Austin calls Harry to say he has a cure for his writer’s block.
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| Belle just after turning |
Meeting Austin, Harry is given a baggy of pills called muse. After a call from his agent (Leslie Grossman), Harry drops a pill and finds himself writing almost immediately – finishing his pilot episode in record time and it’s the best he has ever written. The pill affects the creative part of the brain and causes it to go into overload. However, it also impacts the users’ blood and they are driven to supplement it by drinking it. The other side effect for a creative is that they lose creativity if they are not on the pill (so they can stop the pill, stop drinking blood, but not create). Belle and Austin have a routine of coming to the town in winter, where the chemist (Angelica Ross) who created and produces it lives, write several pieces for the coming year, murder outside of the town limits, and then live the summer months back home without being on the pill. They direct Harry to a genius tattooist/dentist/muse user (Billie Lourd) who shapes his teeth into a pointed maw and gives him denture caps to hide them.
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| teeth sharpened |
As for the pale people – if a non-creative person takes the pill it quickly turns them into a pale person; twitching, their hair gone, with an overwhelming need for blood and an anger at their lack of creativity (whilst the creatives develop a superiority complex). They are permanently in this state but will follow the commands of, and not attack, creatives on the drug. Why they seemed to have the shaped teeth was beyond me but they did get the long coats from the same source; the tattooist/dentist. With regards the story things start going south with some stolen pills, sloppy kills getting the attention of the new Sheriff (Adina Porter, True Blood & the Vampire Diaries), and also Alma (who is a genius violinist) seeing her dad take the pill and taking one herself in order that she can crack the piece she has been practising and, of course, becoming hungry for blood herself.
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| Angelica Ross as The Chemist |
I liked this, it was clever and a neat twist – whether it knew it or not – on George Sylvester Viereck’s House of the Vampires, where the creatives are the vampires rather than the vampire stealing creativity. The short format worked, preventing it getting stale… to a point. I would have actually stopped it after five episodes and felt the additional, non-Provincetown, coda was superfluous and diminished rather than enhanced the story. I did like the inference during the episodes that Quinten Tarantino was a muse user. Overall, for me, this was a fun, clever little run and (superfluous coda aside) deserves a solid 6.5 out of 10 (with the Death Valley section being stronger still).
The imdb page is here.
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