Sam (Madison Iseman) is in love with death. Beyond that, the rituals that involve the physical fact of the death of a human being. Her work as a mortuary embalmer allows her a careful exploration of the idea of the absoluteness of physical disappearance. As much as to explore, deepen and analyze life as a phenomenon in American Horror Stories: Necro.
The first ten minutes of American Horror Stories: Necro they are a patient journey through the funeral rituals. A theme that could seem repetitive if it weren’t for the fact that the script explores it from a vision of gloomy beauty. The director, Logan Kibens, focuses the interest of the camera in analyzing in particular detail what happens behind the closed doors of a funeral home.
But especially the way Sam is devoted to this construction of an image of the unknown that is almost beautiful. The expert transforms a corpse into an art form. She touches dead meat and looks into opaque eyes to create a version of life. “Not everything beautiful is precisely alive,” says the character in one of her first dialogues.
American Horror Stories: Necro
American Horror Stories: Necro is, perhaps, the most unique episode of the AHS-based anthology. Also the one that is most closely, painfully, and powerfully linked to primitive fears that are rarely analyzed artistically in horror plots. Most of the story takes place between the walls of a funeral home and a cemetery, which extrapolates the idea of dying to everyday life. Little by little it becomes clear that Sam understands death not as the end, but as the beginning of something fateful and precious. A journey towards collective memory, inherited rites and complicated spaces of social sensitivity.
The shadowy beauty of death in American Horror Stories: Necro
American Horror Stories: Necro is, perhaps, the most unique episode of the AHS-based anthology. Also the one that is most closely, painfully, and powerfully linked to primitive fears that are rarely artistically analyzed in horror plots.
Most of the story takes place between the walls of a funeral home and a cemetery, which extrapolates the idea of dying to everyday life. Little by little it becomes clear that Sam understands death not as the end, but as the beginning of something fateful and precious. A journey towards collective memory, inherited rites and complicated spaces of social sensitivity.
The director takes a good deal of time to show off the character’s hands as she does her makeup, hair, and dresses the corpses. Also to analyze in elegant close-ups the atmosphere that surrounds it. In American Horror Stories: Necrowhich at times seems enigmatic and at others poignant, dead meat carries substantial weight.
Is death the end?
But it is not about the morbid, but about what dying symbolizes in the contemporary world. The horrors it invokes, the terrifying it shows. “In our century, dying is a shame,” says Sam, leaning over the face of a corpse, ready to beautify the pale skin with care.
It’s a journey into a kind of abstract monster that today’s culture ignores. In fact, the emphasis of the plot written by Crystal Liu is in addressing the perception of death as an edge of the unknown. A crack in all the bland skeptical quality of reality outside the walls of the undertaker.
Therefore, Sam is not just a character in American Horror Stories: Necroit is a symbolic journey through what terrifies about death. Of its absolute character and sinister and singular spaces. The attention of the script elaborates an atmosphere that delves into a type of terror that is more intuitive and psychological than tangible.
The pale corpses, wrapped in sheets, are the end of all stories. Kibens manages to provide American Horror Stories: Necro a strange ambiguous sensation. Does it dialogue with death as a transit of collective memory? Is it a horror story encapsulated in a more elegant and profound one?
There are no easy answers to an argument that constantly moves between blurred lines. Even more so when Sam’s boyfriend, Jesse (Spencer Neville), seems to embody the culture that deplores death. For the man, the woman’s devotion to corpses and the mortuary rite is nothing short of repugnant. Of course, it is a projection of the character’s fears and anxieties.
the script of American Horror Stories: Necro it wraps the relationship in constant pressure, as if Sam had to decide between her aspiration to create “beauty in death” and the ordinary. Time and time again, Jesse opposes, criticizes, and denigrates Sam’s work. As much as, in the end, to demand the unimaginable. “No one so in love with death can love something more”he says angrily and disappointed.
In the midst of such a crossroads, Sam meets Charlie (Cameron Cowperthwaite), a gravedigger who understands death from the same perspective. Together they find an essential link that provides American Horror Stories: Necro its best moments, the most painful and, in the end, the most violent. Perhaps he regrets that, for its last stretch, the episode abandons its intimate and almost contemplative character for a brutal twist. Which was to be expected in an anthology story, but it breaks the elegant work of the director to create the atmosphere of the story.
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Like everything else, this great conversation about death that ends badly is a sinister allegory of a disbelieving age. American Horror Stories: NecroElegant and sophisticated, it could be better than it turned out. But at its highest points it’s a rarity in the series. American Horror Stories. Perhaps its most relevant point.