Writer Pains: Creativity and Brutality in American Horror Story: Red Tide
Red Tide remixes vampire lore with crazed artist myths, breeding this notion that some people are born with talent and others aren’t—eschewing the common MFA adage that writing is a war of attrition, and those who ultimately publish are those who never give up.
My favorite moment in the first half of American Horror Story’s double-header tenth season comes towards the end. Belle Noir (Frances Conroy) and Austin Sommers (Evan Peters) tramp from a drag night to an apartment in downtown Provincetown. Bloodthirsty vampire-artists, they brutally kill the night’s performers who they believe maligned Austin. Blood trailing a frown down his chin, Austin asks, “What do we do now?”
“Now, we go write,” Belle replies.
Watching, I cackled. There’s something at once terrible (in terms of both brutality and writing) and wonderfully campy to this scene. I so actively resist the season’s conceit, yet I love seeing writing represented in this unhinged, bloodsucking way.
Red Tide remixes vampire lore with crazed artist myths, breeding this notion that some people are born with talent and others aren’t—eschewing the common MFA adage that writing is a war of attrition, and those who ultimately publish are those who never give up.
A biomedical engineer played by Angelica Ross is tasked by the US military with studying the neurological basis of creativity and talent, in an effort to suppress soldiers’ individuality. Studying apes, she uncovers the connections that talented people have in their brains which others lack. She develops a pill to draw this instinct out; talented apes who took the pill could suddenly play complicated piano sonatas, while the plebes given the pill became violent, angry when confronted with their mediocrity.
There’s something wildly reductive to this imagination of creativity, evoking for me studies of psychopaths and CEO brains. The show conceives of talent as static, inert, an endowed gift. There’s no work to it, nothing to refine as it’s purely innate. Isn’t part of it the love of learning and experimenting? Creativity is all results-oriented in AHS’s vision. Talented pill-takers decide that being a New York Times bestseller or a master tattoo artist is worth killing the Cape’s degenerates—they stalk Craigslist for victims they believe nobody will miss.
Creativity is capitalist, a gift thrust upon those with a god-given right to it. Those so deprived become pale, raging, mindless vampires when they must accept the conditions of their worth. Cast against the background of Provincetown, an opioid epidemic, and the specter of AIDS, the show’s messaging on creativity refracts on too many spheres, a kaleidoscope with silt gunking the gears.
However, I’m not sure how ironically I love the show’s flashback fourth episode, when Austin and Belle kill and snort drugs and drink and write. Frances Conroy goes on a book tour and sells one copy of her self-published smut. Her husband leaves her, and she snorts meth with a local hustler, Mickey (Macaulay Culkin), at a gay bar; she dances wild with her tresses of white witch hair. The episode teeters on a parody of narratives—finding sisterhood and self in middle-age. In this flashback episode, Red Tide comes closest to American Horror Story’s characteristic interplay of camp and horror.
Yet, elsewhere I find the show’s main through line to be dull and predictable. At turns The Shining, at othersGaslight, a young family descends into chaos as the husband (Finn Wittrock) goes on the pill. He finds a creative renaissance and attains wild success. Meanwhile the wife (Lily Rabe) gives birth and asks to leave Provincetown as her husband and daughter descend into creative mania. Her pleas are ignored. Red Tide’s narrative is a truncated meld of the series’ first season, Murder House, and The Shining, or Rosemary’s Baby. To mix things up, their young daughter Alma sneaks the pill from her dad’s bag because she wants to be concertmaster at the New York Philharmonic by the time she’s eighteen. Yet, from here the season strikes familiar notes. Dad and daughter bond over their shared need for blood. They get mired in the world of procuring blood to satiate their creative impulses. The young prodigy pesters her dad—“I’m hungry”—spoken as the truly spooky child she is. This is a familiar family drama, just done up with vampire and Provincetown lore.
Underneath it all, I do find a compelling question. The American Horror Story franchise finds itself at a peculiar juncture. Its tenth season is a double-feature, split between Red Tide and Death Valley. Murphy and Falchuk also just premiered another anthology series, American Horror Stories, each episode telling one tale of horror. The latter feels like a Gen-Z version of Goosebumps, which is to say, it stars Paris Jackson and Kaia Gerber and is shallow and teenaged in its imagination of scary stories. With the tenth season of AHS, I can’t help but ask, why approach the show this way? Are they running out of stories? This all feels wildly ironic when Red Tide is about these blood-crazed artists who strike creative gold by drinking blood.
However, I connect with this worry. What if there’s nothing left to say? What if there’s no new way to say something familiar? Or what if I can’t just think of anything original to say? What if imagination wanes? What cost will we be willing to pay for inspiration? But then I remember the inventive horror and speculative fiction of such writers as Carmen Maria Machado or Lesley Nneka Arimah. Horror can keep doing new things. Creativity and imagination are not a zero-sum game.
AHS has taken some risks in its storytelling. Roanoke uses the found footage of a haunted house reenactment and reality show to tell a haunted house story. It’s been over the top––Hotel, Apocalypse, Cult. In its tenth season, the show finds itself at an important crossroads. Can it return to the dark imagination and deep character work of the show’s first seasons? Can it find for itself some new, exciting, previously inconceivable possibility?
