In American Horror Stories: Milkmaids, available on Disney+ and Star+, paranoia is a dense dimension of fear. The story, set in 1750 New England, uses the claustrophobic setting of a smallpox epidemic to narrate a kind of silent terror. Of course, this is a well-crafted trick, which draws immediate parallels to the COVID pandemic.
But it is not just a narrative twist that seeks to establish threads between a pessimistic perception of the future and something more corrosive. It is also a look at the disease as a faceless monster and, especially, as a dehumanizing condition capable of creating an unprecedented type of violence.
As if all of the above weren’t enough, it incorporates the religious element and body terror in a relentless and disgusting combination. The result is a story that ranges from delirium for faith to the panic that the disease as an entity can cause. What would we be willing to heal?
American Horror Stories: Milkmaids
American Horror Stories: Milkmainds goes beyond the simple idea of using everyday items to prop up horror. His extraordinary insight into what lurks in collective panic, vulnerability, and pain takes the chapter’s discourse into new regions. Especially when he uses the historical context to build the foreboding feeling of a violent apocalypse on the horizon.
The rigors of a monstrous fear in American Horror Stories: Milkmaids
The question is repeated several times in American Horror Stories: Milkmaids, but there are no easy answers to assume. In fact, the plot — a holy woman apparently able to heal through her body — remains in the realm of the inexplicable. Bearing a certain resemblance to Cronenberg’s dark vision in his approach to the fearsome organic, the chapter is a journey through the repulsive.
Also because of how terrifying it is linked and sustained from the biological and its enigmas. There is no explanation as to why the holy healings occur — do they actually occur? — in the narration. What is clear is that American Horror Stories: Milkmaids want to delve into how superstition can overcome any abyss of rationality in the most unexpected moments.
A success that gives the script the conception of time and its endless passing as a cycle destined to repeat itself. The devout hysteria that narrates the story has much of the superstitious fear of current science. Also, of the perennial and progressive despair that causes, sooner or later, weakness and fragility.
Human fear and the ferocity it breeds
During much of his anthological collection, American Horror Stories has delved into human nature as the elementary source of the unsettling. From serial killers to terrifying fears hidden in the midst of everyday life. His most recent look at the world has a lot of avant-garde narrative and an approach to terror as a human spectacle.
However, the turn of American Horror Stories: Milkmaids It goes beyond the simple idea of using everyday items to prop up terror. His extraordinary perception of what is hidden in collective panic, vulnerability and pain takes the chapter talk to new regions. Especially when he uses the historical context to build up the apprehensive feeling of a violent apocalypse on the horizon.
All mixed with the conception of how simple the probable fall from normality as we know it to the abyss of chaos is. The universe created by Ryan Murphy, this time, infers how fears that are usually kept in the shadows can become weapons. When Santa Celeste (Julia Schlaepfer) claims that she can cure smallpox through the pus that oozes from her body, the script links the miraculous with the grotesque.
Also with the search for an answer to the terrifying from the natural. The bodies of the sick collapse on dirty beds, the corpses in the streets, the open wounds are shown in repulsive close-ups. But it is the quality of the miraculous woman, capable — apparently — of turning back all the horrors, which makes the whole story maintain its sense of fatality. The woman, who is both a vehicle of the divine and a promise, although not from the beautiful or beatific, is a contradiction in itself. So frightening and unbearable that she ends up linking pain with hope in a twisted darkness that she is, perhaps, the most powerful point of American Horror Stories: Milkmaids.
American Horror Stories: Milkmaids and its inexplicable end
Of course, with such a premise, American Horror Stories: Milkmaids it needed a resolution to the height of what it proposes. But not only does he not make it, but in the midst of his increasingly dark plot, he falls back on simple explanations about superstition and the occult. The unique vision of twisted faith, the temple body converted into the terrain of good and evil decays and, in the end, remains unfinished.
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American Horror Stories: Milkmaids it’s a combination of great ideas that don’t quite connect with each other. Especially, in its inexplicable second section. In the end, the narrative is left in the middle of a narrative blank that, as often happens with AHS and its stories, tends to confusion and disorder. All in all, the anthological episode has enough strength to sustain itself despite that. Also of elaborating and linking dark ideas with a disgusting force that can rarely be seen on television. A point in its favor that corrects its worst elements.