"Checking In," the 90-minute season debut of American Horror Story: Hotel, marks the fifth season of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's anthology spookathon. It delivers exactly the kind of shock horror that viewers have come to expect: Half a dozen grisly murders, kidnapped children, vampirism, ghosts, blood and gore, gratuitous male nudity, unexpected superstar casting, and just for good measure, a graphic homosexual rape scene. With series matriarch Jessica Lange gone, the series compensates by casting Lady Gaga as chic lady vampire Countess Elizabeth and Matt Bomer (White Collar, Magic Mike) as her boy-toy. Several members of the series' repertory company return, including Sarah Paulson as Hypodermic Sally, a wraith trapped in Courtney Love's old grunge wardrobe, Denis O'Hare as an aging drag queen named Liz Taylor, Kathy Bates as the hotel's concierge, and (the as yet unseen) Evan Peters and Angela Bassett.
New cast members include Wes Bentley as damaged L.A. detective John Lowe, who's investigation of a series of gruesome serial murders leads him to the Cortez Hotel as Lowe and his wife (Chloe Sevigny) try to get over the loss of their young son, who vanished mysteriously at a carnival several years earlier. Cheyenne Jackson plays Will Drake, a millionaire New York businessman who's bought the hotel sight unseen and plans moving in along with his pre-pubescent son. Not surprisingly, Lowe's missing son (along with several other very spooky children) live in the hotel, in a secret room filled with vintage video games.
The Cortez is a gauche art-deco hotel located somewhere on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and like the L.A. haunted house in the first season of AHS, it's peopled by ghosts seemingly fated to haunt the premises forever. We learn quickly that his is no ordinary hotel: When two Swedish girls check into the hote, they're first terrorized by a creepy apparition that crawls out of their bed, and then wind up chained up in a neon torture chamber, being force fed offal to "cleanse their bodies." When one escapes, Countess Elizabeth slashes her throat.
When a seedy rock star type (Max Greenfield) checks into the hotel to shoot up, his heroin stupor is interrupted by a creature who rips off his pants and graphically rapes him. We later learn that Bomer's character Donovan first came to the hotel 20 years ago to score heroin with Sally; when his mother (Kathy Bates) discovered his OD'd body, she pushed Sally out a window. And now they're all still at the hotel, unaged after two decades. When the soundtrack hamhandedly plays the Eagles' "Hotel California," it's pretty clear that you can check out but never leave.
In another particularly graphic scene, the Countess and Donovan (Gaga and Bomer) pick up an attractive young couple at an outdoor screening of the silent Nosferatu (credited as the first vampire movie) and bring them home for an orgy. That leads to shots of entwined naked bodies until Bomer and Gaga slit the twentysomethings' throats and start drinking their blood. "And you didn't want to go out," says Countess Elizabeth coyly. "It's not the party, it's the clean up," deadpans Donovan.
Meanwhile, the serial killer that Det. Lowe is chasing lures him to a murder scene by texting from his wife's phone number, resulting in the Lowes' young daughter seeing two disemboweled corpses. Fearing for his family's safety, Lowe moves out - and into the Hotel Cortez.
Ryan Murphy directed the debut episode and leans heavily on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining for his photography, shooting the hotel through fish-eye lenses to make the corridors seem like an endless maze and giving everything a disorienting, skewed look. At times the homage verges on plagiarism, but Murphy's never been shy about "borrowing" ideas from idols like Hitchcock or DePalma.
In other seasons, American Horror Story has managed to imbue both its villains and its victims with enough humanity that their stories held your attention; with AHS: Hotel, viewers will have to identify with Det. Lowe and his family, because every other character comes across as so loathsome, vapid, or evil that we don't care about their fate. "Checking In" definitely has potential but I'm not convinced yet that Murphy and Falchuk have it in them to top earlier seasons, especially season two's crazy but engrossing Asylum. There's a big difference between depicting horrible things (like the Hostel movie franchise) and creating true horror. You can always count on American Horror Story to gross you out, but it remains to be seen if it can still scare us.
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