American Horror Story is a show that has a different story for each season, recycling the actors of previous seasons for other characters in different seasons. The show stands out because of the way it presents different stories in new ways, highlighting different topics and presenting that topic differently. This latest season was dubbed Roanoke, and was a commentary on reality T.V. shows and how the culture of current day media. The way that the season was set up, was that it was first presented as a documentary that was reenacted as the survivors of the attack told their story. The second half was a reality T.V. show where all the actors were gathered in the house during the time when it was being haunted. What I found so intriguing by this story was the way that they told the story, creating layers of reality that seemed to fold in on the bigger story.

In the first half of the season everything was reenacted as another set of characters who had actually experienced the event recounted what had happened to them and talked about their feelings. It was amazing the way that they had constructed the show because they created a layer between the story and the audience. These accounts of the events that had happened made the story feel more real, because it was presented as a true event. It was constructing the story in a new fashion that was experimental and subversive for the viewer. The reenactment of these events in the show were being presented as a show, making the first hand accounts seem all the more real.

The second part of the show that made it more submissive was that way that they changed the show to a reality T.V. series. They had built up these ideas where the viewers recognized that these different pairs of actors we saw in house were the same as their counterparts in the interview. But as soon as the second half of the season was introduced, these actors suddenly became characters of their own. It was so odd because this sense of familiarity with the people we saw on screen was replaced by an entirely new set of characters that had their own personality and a different role in the story besides the ones that were a part of before. It had taken this story of a house in the middle of North Carolina and turned it into a reality. After they had torn down these walls of reality and reenactment this story that had been told before still felt real, and that is what made it so horrifying.

Other parts that they had done to immerse the viewers was different mediums to tell the story after the ‘show’ had ended. They created a fake interview with the cast from the show in the first season, mimicking fans and convention goers. It created another layer of reality by showing the cast outside of this window of reality that we were presented. They used youtube videos and news broadcasts to create a whole other way to show these events and characters to the audience.

American Horror Story did an amazing job this season immersing the viewer into the show, using different mediums of storytelling that haven’t been utilized in this way. The layering in this show had created two separate realities that they utilized to tell their story for this new season. If you don’t mind body horror or other scary themes I highly recommend that you watch American Horror Story: Roanoke.