November 19, 2018

Don't worry I'm not going to spoil it for you. Mostly I thought it could have gone deeper with some characters and kinda copped out at the end there, but that's fine. 

This is still the first season of AHS I've finished in a few seasons so that's a plus.

I just don't like gore that much. Horror that leans too much on gore feels like cheap scares and though I love a good scare I'd rather have spent the last several minutes feeling tense and stressed out before a jump scare than some big gory death scene.

Come to think of it, I've always preferred ghost stories specifically for that reason: less gore.

Plus ghosts are spooky af.

When I was a kid I could have sworn I'd seen a ghost. 

It was in our old house on Murray Avenue. We had a U-shaped stair with a big heavy mirror handing above a table on the landing. 

My mom had these weird, round portraits of a small French children hanging on either side. I thought they were fancy when I was little because they had on nice clothes, but I've seen versions in vintage stores in the years since and they always give me the willies, now.

Of course when I thought I saw the ghost I thought I saw it in the mirror. 

I was going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, walking back from my parents' bedroom

(we cut through their bedroom at night for some reason even though the bathroom had two doors - one to my parents' bedroom, and another to the hallway - I forget why we kept the hallway door closed at night, though.)

which meant standing at the landing at the top of the stairs to the main floor of the house.

It must have been a clear night with a full moon, because the hallway wall was bright. That eerie blue-white things get when it's dark and the moon is full. 

It looked odd against the other dark shadows that contrasted against the soft orange light of the nightlight my parents kept plugged into the outlet in the hallway so my brothers and I didn't fall down the stairs going to the bathroom in the dark. 

I've always been a jumpy kid but for some reason I stayed there and watched the mirror instead of scurrying back to my bedroom like I usually did. I think the downstairs hallway looked so bright. That's why I stopped.

Of course I thought I saw something move.

Some fast shadow. A bird, most likely. Or a small cloud.

Whatever it was it scared me so hard that from then on I kept my eyes glued to the hallway ahead of me when walking back from the bathroom at night. 

Maybe that's why it's always been the jump-scares, not the gory scenes, that I gravitated towards when figuring which horror movies and TV shows I want to spend my time watching.

I prefer to be stressed out and waiting for the other shoe to drop - to find out what the hell is going on - than watch someone get hurt for fun.

Which has really been AHS' go-to tactic for a few seasons, I think. Especially the ones with the terrifying clown, which I did my best to watch and finish but definitely opted out of watching them as soon as we got busy. 

Maybe I would have liked it better if there'd been more ghosts.