The highly anticipated fifth season of “American Horror Story” has arrived, and with the subtitle “Hotel,” it has all the promises of another season of outlandishly gruesome entertainment. The Oct. 6 premiere received both delight and disgust from viewers just in time for the Halloween season. The episode began with a pair of blonde women from some unidentifiable European country checking in to the Hotel Cortez. Viewers were given their first glimpses of the Deco-era hotel that will presumably house the horrors that are to come throughout the season.
Many viewers felt the loss of Jessica Lange, who decided to hang up her coat as the series’ malevolent den mother. However, this gap might have been filled with Lady Gaga’s character, The Countess, who not only possesses a truly “American Horror Story”-esque bloodsucking fetish, but also presides over a secret chamber filled with stolen children, seemingly frozen in time. Gaga was probably the most interesting addition to the series; however, other than looking fiercely spooky, she says very little in the first episode, so it was difficult to judge her acting skills. Only time will tell if she can offer more than a sensational name and some fabulous outfits to this season.
This season hosts the return of many favorite cast members. Kathy Bates plays Iris, the hotel’s manager, Matt Bomer portrays Iris’s son, Sarah Paulson plays Sally, the hotel’s live-in drug addict, Evan Peters takes the role of the hotel’s sadistic builder and owner, James March, during the 1920s and Angela Bassett plays another one of The Countess’s ex-lovers.
The episode quickly reminded us of the gruesome boundaries that creator Ryan Murphy is willing to break in order to shock his audience. Before the viewers even lay eyes on The Countess and the atrocities that come with her bloodlust, they see one of the blonde Europeans being gnawed to death by two creepy looking children, a cheating couple impaled on a hotel bed (the woman is dead but the man is simply relieved of his eyeballs and tongue as well as subjected to a gruesome misuse of super glue) and the brutal rape of a drug addict by a featureless, worm-man mutant.
And so the series has been sufficiently set up. All we really know is that a lot of bad things have and will happen in the Hotel Cortez, and that you can bet your bottom dollar that the inhabitants of the hotel have something, if not everything, to do with it.
