I hope the show AHS could delve into these themes in a serious manner, but I think a television show can only go so far. It needs its cheap thrills, but it needs a tenacity of story telling beyond the television episodic to keep it going.

You say, “The genius of the Enlightenment project was to make passion an instrument of control. Horror is, on the whole, an expression of revolt.”

This is good. The genius of horror or gothic from Stoker, Shelly, Brockden Brown, Poe, etc. is to call this notion of rational control of the passions into question. These stories speak of such control as ultimately a failure, but also such a desire for control as missing out on the truth of human motivation. I always liked Leslie Fiedler’s book on Love and Death in the American Novel on this story of the novel, but especially on the story of the “gothic” novel and its allure to democratic denizens who think they sre free and equal, and the ways in which such novels point toward the limitations in terms of the social rational control that it critiques. The horror and gothic novels (and by extension films and television) are serious critiques of modern democracy, even if they present themselves in unserious manner.

The image of the house (or the manor or estate)with a history–the type of house that the yuppies in AHS live in–bespeaks an untold history of furious passion that cannot be controlled. The house was never in the right, but neither is the family that has moved into this home. The problem with AHS (or maybe it is its genius) is that the house is not an ancestral home, but one bought on the market whereby a yuppie family on the frontier of new beginnings could start their family anew in a way that doesn’t hand down the hangups they have inherited from their own parents. They have bought a new house (for them), and while avoiding their own family history, they have inherited a whole host of other family histories. Yuppies end up being more messed up because in the effort to avoid their own family craziness, then end up taking on much bigger problems. Okay, I realize that this was the theme of The Amityville Horror and sundry other imitations.

Call me an enlightenment enthusiast, but when I am confronted with the typical horror story I am emotionally defeated when the people trying to do good cannot defeat what is “evil” at the heart of the central scenario of the story. However, in American Horror Story, the husband/father is an adulterer/murderer. This is a big indictment of the motive for restoration and regentrification! Those who wish to renew are themselves criminals.

In AHS, the main husband/father character is also a psychologist who believes that one can control unruly passion through therapeutic modes of logos calling such unruly passion to account. It is the belief that logos can speak of pathos in such a way that it can control the deformation of character that bad deeds indelibly make on one’s character, but sometimes one is a messed up individual because one DOES messed up stuff.

So my problem with the show AHS is that it is near torture porn for the audience, in that we must watch this truly bad man (a murderer and in a lesser sense an adulterer) try to make right by concealing what he cannot make right. He works to cover over an act of murder and adultery that he cannot make right in the name of the modes of life of an ordinary “bourgeois” family all the while living in a house that has the most demented history you could ever imagine.

It makes pretty good television.