American Horror Story S6E2 Recap: Chapter 2

AHS’s Roanoke Nightmare continues with new discoveries, old mysteries rearing their ugly heads, heaps of horror, and killer guest appearances.

In a move of utter assurance that we won’t have a moment to get comfortable and assess the situation at hand, AHS: My Roanoke Nightmare episode 2 opens with a super casual really chill not-all-alarming scene that features all the normal stuff: Kathy Bates as a forest queen leading a ritual. Lady Gaga as her dirty, as yet non-verbal nature minion. A pigman tied to a spit in preparation for a human sacrifice. And Sarah Paulson still super lost in the woods, accidentally and reluctantly bearing witness to all of this.

And though, as an audience, we’re invested in her safety, this insane scene makes it easy enough to kinda wish Shelby (Paulson) had stuck around a bit longer than she did so we could at least see how this situation ended. Of course she doesn’t, and instead, is whisked off to the hospital by her husband Matt (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), who you’ll remember is now on Team Shelby, re: believing what she’s seen at the house is the truth. So much so, in fact, that he’s now pushing to get out of the house as soon as possible.

Shelby, being the surprising badass that she is, rejects the notion. She’s convinced that everything can be blamed on the racist “inbreds” they encountered upon moving in, and refuses to move without a fight.

American Horror Story: My Roanoke Nightmare, episode: “Chapter 2,” via FX.

Meanwhile, back at the house of horrors, Matt’s sister Lee (Angela Bassett) brings her daughter, Flora, for an extended visit. And because nothing’s more enticing (read: absolutely horrifying) than a spooky child, Flora quickly finds herself with a new friend in the house. Only trouble is this “friend” isn’t visible to anyone but her. And she’s allegedly dressed in old-school clothes. And this lovely lil lady- Priscilla, as she’s called- says super sweet things to her new friend. Things like, “Make it stop” and that she’s “tired of all the blood.” Typical kid stuff, ya know?

As soon as Matt and Shelby return to the house for the night, all the nonsense starts up again. Matt wakes up to guttural pig noises, which prompts Shelby to assume that someone’s outside messing with them. So what does she do? She gets up and looks, because she’s pissed and also not great at context clues. They go outside together and search the house, seeing nothing unusual-until a huge hog runs past Matt and disappears into the night.

But this doesn’t send them packing. They keep looking and roaming, calling each other’s names, unable to find each other even though they appeared to have exited the house within an approximately 3 feet proximity to each other. So Shelby somehow gets lost, AGAIN. Yo girl, stop wandering off into those exact woods alone, maybe? She comes upon a huge fire over which a torn apart, bloody pig hangs. Matt finds her, knocks it down, and asserts that there’s something demonic about it. Which we’re definitely not arguing.

Again, the cops are called to the house and, as is par for the course in these situations, appear to be useless. They say they’ve found nothing, the fire’s been put out, and they’ll be on the lookout for suspicious behavior. But at Matt and Shelby’s insistence that someone’s targeting them, the police agree to provide them with 24 hour protection in the form of a patrol car camped out in their driveway. This is great, except that ghosts don’t typically tend to submit to the authority of the law, and so Matt almost immediately gets a real spooky phone call, on which a woman’s broken voice croaks, “Please. They’re hurting me,”  before disconnecting. He wanders into the living room, pretty shaken up, only to happen upon the old-school nurses that Shelby had just-barely-out-of-the-corner-of-her-eye seen cross her in the hall in last week’s episode. The nurses torture an old woman who lays before them in a hospital bed before shooting her in the head. Matt decides he’s dreaming, but tells the cops anyway in case A) it was actually real, or B) one of them happens to be a seasoned dream interpreter and life coach. Probably A though. Either way, they find nothing, and Matt and Shelby’s shared reputation as wolf-criers starts to worry Lee.

American Horror Story: My Roanoke Nightmare, episode: “Chapter 2,” via FX.

Though Lee has other, way more important things to worry about. As Flora’s dad comes to pick her up, the little girl engages in a solo game of hide-and-seek, which her parents lovingly confirm she’s prone to do. Only I’m guessing she’s not often, as an elementary schooler, hidden in a closet speaking to an imaginary little-girl ghost who tells her she’s going to kill her whole family, and save her for last. Way to ruin the game, little-girl ghost.

This terrifying insanity scares Flora’s father into taking the girl away indefinitely, which pushes Lee back into the dangerous arms of alcohol, and she quickly and fully falls off the wagon. Shelby and Matt come home to find Lee drunk on the kitchen floor. And if that weren’t worrisome enough, above her, a bunch of knives have been jammed into the kitchen ceiling. Even through the booze, she’s sure she didn’t do it.

American Horror Story: My Roanoke Nightmare, episode: “Chapter 2,” via FX.

After all that’s happened, a few ceiling-knives are almost nothing to worry about, and so Shelby gets immediately distracted by something moving out the window. She calls Matt over, and they both see a woman in a colonial dress standing in the distance. They run into the yard (GUYS, STOP IT), where they suddenly happen upon doors to a cellar. Meanwhile, inside, Lee awakes from a drunken blackout and feels like someone has been watching over her- which is supes intuitive because those scary nurse ladies are totally standing over her bed.

She gets up and goes into the hallway, where a bunch of detached pig tails have been nailed to the wall. But that doesn’t stop them from CONTINUING TO WAG, blood smearing and dripping down the wall. THIS HOUSE WILL NEVER SELL!!!!!

American Horror Story: My Roanoke Nightmare, episode: “Chapter 2,” via FX.

Outside, Shelby and Matt crawl down the cellar because, again, they’re real good at making decisions based on past circumstances and also I guess they’ve never seen a single horror movie in their lives. They realize it’s a bunker, and someone had been living there for an extended period of time. They find a video of a man (Denis O’Hare!) who claims to be a scholar and a writer, telling his tale of having lived in the house and having subsequently been chased out by something evil. And the initials subjects of the true crime novel he moved to the house to work on? The two scary nurse sisters. He chronicles the bizarre rituals and murderous behaviors of these sisters, recounting the lore of the sisters having painted “Murder” on a wall of the house and, no matter how any owner attempts to cover it up, the word won’t disappear.

The story continues, and he claims that the women were stopped before they could complete their murderous mission by something even more evil than they that lived within the house. As they continue to watch the video, in which the man has begun to walk through the dark house tempting whatever is lurking to show itself, Shelby and Matt, back in the present, hear a crash and the door creaks. A bloody cleaver has forced the door open.

American Horror Story: My Roanoke Nightmare, episode: “Chapter 2,” via FX.

This, of all things, is what sets them off. They’re donezo. It’s moving time. They seek out the banker who helped them with the funds when they bought the house in an attempt to get their money and get out. They quickly find that the house’s history was intentionally hidden by the banker, who gave them a fake address so that they couldn’t Google it and trace it back to all that scary nurse stuff. They’d been hustled into moving into a knowingly troublesome (putting it REAL lightly, here) house, and now, they’re essentially stuck.

Lee’s problems aren’t exactly getting any easier, either. She arrives back at the house, Flora in tow, much to the chagrin of Matt and probably of her ex-husband from whom she’d just kinda kidnapped their daughter. Matt is worried that Lee’s ex will fight even harder for custody now, but Lee’s desire to see her daughter is unshakable. Flora, just when you thought she was taking a break from ghost-whispering, is in the living room doing homework when she peers out the window and sees a little girl beckoning to her. Moments later, Lee realizes she’s missing, and searches frantically for her.

American Horror Story: My Roanoke Nightmare, episode: “Chapter 2,” via FX.

She’s nowhere to be found, and so Shelby, Matt, and Lee do what they do best- retreat to the woods, where they find, a hundred feet up a tree, Flora’s empty yellow hoodie waving like an ominous, cliff-hanger-y flag.

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American Horror Story: Roanoke continues next Wednesday at 10pm on FX