Although it’s of an entirely different genre, episode four of American Horror Story: Hotel (Devil’s Night), reminded me of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. The good was that, except for two scenes that in effect bookended the episode, the story was fairly linear and followed one character. The bad was that the story didn’t really advance the overall arc of the season. The ugly was an extended scene around which the episode revolved that was just plain weird.
The bookends answer a question asked before the halfway point of last week’s episode: what happens after Alex (Chloe Sevigny) discovers her son, Holden (Lennon Henry) in the hallway of the Hotel Cortez? She takes him home and, being a good doctor, examines him. His temperature is 75.5 degrees and he’s extremely thirsty… not for apple juice, though. After feasting on the dog, he says, “I don’t feel good; I need my mommy.”
Alex takes Holden back to the hotel where he crawls into his glass coffin. Elizabeth (Lady Gaga) stands behind her and says, “You must have a lot of questions. I have answers.” She claims to have saved Holden like she saved all the children, “I opened my heart and the children came willingly. I brought them here to keep them safe; the world can be such a dangerous place.” She then tells Alex that to be with her son, she must be like him.
In the final scene of Devil’s Night, Elizabeth tells Alex that she must surrender completely. “You’ll rise to be reunited with your child for all of eternity.” Alex then drinks blood from her cut breast and lays her head in Elizabeth’s lap as the camera spins upside down. I’m wondering how John (Wes Bentley) is going to take this development. He’s wandering the hotel in a daze, commenting that he feels like he’s in a living nightmare.
He is the character we follow through the main part of the episode. When blood starts running down the wall in his room, he races upstairs for an encounter with Miss Evers (Mare Winningham). We learn that the two have something in common: a child who disappeared. In 1925, her son was abducted on Halloween and became one of the victims of the “Wineville Chicken Coop Murders.” She tells him, “I’ve known for a while that we’re kindred spirits.”
After seeing a picture of Miss Evers from the 1920s, John bellies up to the bar. He tells Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare) that his soon-to-be-ex-wife told him he was never an alcoholic, just a control freak. Liz says, “Control is an illusion.” John responds, “Then I surrender to the illusion,” and orders a double martini. When serial killer Aileen Wuornos (Lily Rabe) sits beside him, he thinks she’s sporting a fantastic Halloween costume.
Little does he realize that Devil’s Night, a much more serious occasion than the over-commercialized Halloween, is when the real ghouls come out to play. Once a year, all the famous serial killers join James Patrick March (Evan Peters) for a feast. This is the ugly/weird part of the episode. While it’s a potentially interesting concept to have these characters sit down together for a meal, they drink Absinthe and the whole thing gets a little psychodelic.
It’s a sometimes incoherent, entirely too long, sequence featuring an all-star cast of characters. Besides Wuornos, there’s John Wayne Gacy (John Carroll Lynch), Jeffrey Dahmer (Seth Gabel), Richard Ramirez (Anthony Ruivivar) and the Zodiac killer (unknown). March toasts them all, claiming to have helped them all through the years. March is the “master” to whom everyone refers, having built the hotel with all its mysterious chutes and ladders.
For dessert, Sally picks up a guy in front of the hotel. She offers him to the group as part of her annual arrangement, “This will buy me a year of being left alone, right?” The serial killers dive in on the poor bastard, stabbing him all over. Sally then comforts John, “There’s nobody here, John. You’re hallucinating.” “Is anything real?” he asks. “I am. You have to trust me; I’m your protector.” Yikes, with protectors like that…
