American Horror Story: My Roanoke Nightmare
Season 6 Episode 3 “Chapter 3”
Directed by Jennifer Lynch
Written by James Wong
Created by Brad Falchuk & Ryan Murphy
Starring Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates, Wes Bentley, Chaz Bono, Evan Peters, Sarah Paulson, Lily Rabe, Cuba Gooding Jr.
FX Network
Air date: Wednesday, September 28, 2016, 10pm

Last week on American Horror Story, we learned more of the story that beset the Miller family, Shelby (Lily Rabe) and Matt (Andre Holland) portrayed in re-enactments by Sarah Paulson and Cuba Gooding Jr. It wasn’t enough that Shelby was attacked by who she thought were locals trying to scare them out of the colonial North Carolina house. Matt was the target this time, having visions of nurses murdering elderly patients and painting the word MURDER in blood on their walls. It turns out he didn’t imagine everything as they both stumble across a hatch where they find a videotape left by Dr. Elias Cunningham (Denis O’Hare) detailing the house’s history as an old folks home where sister nurses did indeed murder patients. If that wasn’t bad enough, Matt’s addiction riddled sister Lee (Adina Porter/Angela Bassett in re-enactments), who brought her daughter Flora there, where the young girl promptly made friends with a psychotic ghost who threatened to kill everyone, and then went missing.

Spoilers below for this week’s AHS.

In Episode 6.3, the search for Flora yields returns in the discovery of an abandoned farm deep in the woods. While they don’t find Flora, they do find plenty of dead pigs, mutilated pig-doll totems, and the topper, two feral children suckling a pig in the barn”¦ just when you think you’ve seen in at on American Horror Story. A social worker tries to speak with the children, but they say only one word repeatedly: CROATOAN.

Lee’s ex-husband Mason (Charles Malik Whitfield) shows up furious and begins to assert that this is some grand scheme on Lee’s part to steal Flora and run off. Things get physical before he storms off. Matt and Shelby get a call about a body, but when they arrive they don’t see a little girl, but a grown man’s charred corpse strung up like a Blair Witch totem”¦ it’s Mason.

Before the next move can be decided, a famed psychic shows up on their doorstep. Cricket, a delightful Leslie Jordan channeling his inner Zelda Rubinstein whilst also his outer Andy Warhol, walks through the house and gets vibes from Prescilla, a young girl who died in the 1500s and asks to conduct a seance. Soon he is face to face with the spirit of “The Butcher” Thomasin White (Oscar winner Kathy Bates). She wants them off her land and is willing to kill to keep her ancestral home safe. When Cricket challenges her, windows shatter and I get goosebumps. He yells one word repeatedly”¦ CROATOAN.

Matt is convinced the whole seance was a charade and when Cricket asks for $25,000 to get Flora back, his views are confirmed. Before slinking away, Cricket mutters to Lee about “Emily,” her first daughter, who went missing years early. In an interesting perspective, we are fully reminded of the show with a twist on the season as real Lee (Porter) is asked by an unseen cameraman/interviewer about Emily and she needs time to compose herself in the studio. Back to the Millers as Lee goes to Cricket and the Roanoke Story, which Lee claims every kids hears as a kid, a ghost story. Thomasin White was the matriarch of the colony and while her husband was off in England, colonists cast her out to die in the woods. She was rescued by a witch and returned purified to murder those who betrayed her. And then she moved the colony inland to where the Millers now reside.

Matt, Shelby, Lee, and Cricket return to the woods to conduct the transaction for Flora, but just then Matt disappears and Shelby finds him having sex with the same witch who possessed Thomasin hundreds of years early. Before Lee can retrieve her baby, she is arrested on murder charges.

This show is so unnerving that they actually went out of there way to remind you that you’re watching a re-enactment with actors”¦ and it is still creepy as hell. Last week we had a haunted house, and weird found-footage videos. Now we add witches and colonial cults to the mix. I loved the addition of the Cricket character, and we’ve only just met the great Kathy Bates on this show!

American Horror Story: My Roanoke Nightmare returns next Wednesday night at 10:00pm ET on FX.

Video

American Horror Story 6×03 Promo “Chapter 3” (HD)