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American Horror Story is a violent show, but its worst horrors aren’t bloody. Peer pressure can be an even bigger monster.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for American Horror Story: Double Feature Episode 5, “Gaslight,” which aired Wednesday on FX.
For all its bloodletting — and this season has featured its share — American Horror Story’s most unbearable moments are psychological in nature. The raw monstrosity of violence and gore pales before the casual cruelties normal human beings can inflict on each other. In the show’s universe of extremes, the quietest moments are often the most shocking.
Season 10, Episode 5, “Gaslight,” offers two such examples, and in each case, they’re quietly horrifying. Both entail examples of peer pressure used to convince people to commit monstrosities that they wouldn’t even think of on their own. In both cases, a viable form of damnation is involved, and the damned soul is peer pressured into doing so. The lack of blood makes it all the scarier.
The first moment has been building the entire season, with the relationship between Doris and her daughter Alma. Alma has taken the black pill, turning her into a violin prodigy and erasing any shred of humanity the small child once had. She’s eager for more blood and doesn’t even mind drinking from her newborn baby brother to get it. Doris — exhausted, suffering from postpartum and a horrific victim of the episode’s titular gaslighting — is pressured into finally taking one of the black pills.
In this case, the peer pressure works, despite a parent-child relationship because Alma knows where her mother’s insecurities lie. Doris is an interior designer, but her work isn’t nearly on par with her husband’s writing or her daughter’s music. Alma pressures her into taking the black pill, even though she’s all but certain to fall to its effects and become one of the pale ghouls wandering the streets. Her insecurity at her own talent, and the emotional brutalization of the situation in general, are both awful, but it’s Alma’s relentlessness that makes it so unbearable. The girl wants Doris out of the way and is using the pills to do it.
Similarly, Mickey has ingested the black pill too, and his never-completed scripts are now about to launch a new Speed Racer franchise. He pressures Karen into taking one of the pills in a different but no less sinister manner: forcing it into her hands as the Pales close in on her. Unlike Doris, Karen has talent. Her paintings are beautiful, and with the help of the pill, she could probably put works in the Louvre. But she refuses — living as a homeless vagrant rather than commit murder as the black pill would demand.
She holds out to the end, too, in one of the season’s most vivid and tragic moments. Surrounded by ghouls, she takes the pill to save herself. Later, when Mickey tries to convince her to kill someone with him, she murders him instead. She then paints a single painting in front of his corpse on the beach and slits her wrists before walking into the sea: creating the red tide of Double Feature’s first half-title.
Both characters now rank among the show’s most heartbreaking victims. Had they been torn limb from limb by some fiend, it would be bad enough. Instead, they’re induced to their fates by people they trust, telling them that their damnation is really for the best. Victims have a way of being avenged in American Horror Story, and karma will likely settle the scales for them. But the fact that their deaths came not from blows but from the words of loved ones makes their fates all the more cruel.
American Horror Story: Double Feature airs each Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on FX.
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