Dan Wohl, Author at The Mary Sue

Dan Wohl

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American Horror Story: Freak Show Recap: “Show Stoppers”

The influence of Tod Browning's 1932 cult classic film Freaks has been apparent throughout American Horror Story: Freak Show. (And throughout the entire modern conception of freak shows in general.) Both stories include a bearded lady giving birth; both stories include conjoined twins who feel sexual pleasure simultaneously; both stories revolve around the theme that the feared and discriminated-against “freaks” are good people while the “normals” are real monsters.

American Horror Story: Freak Show Recap: “Edward Mordrake, Part 2”

When we last left two-faced ghost/Dickens cosplayer/green smoke monster Edward Mordrake, he was determining that Ethel was not the “true freak” he'd come to the Jupiter freak show to find and take back to Hell with him. So who's it going to be? Turns out we do have a little bit of the identity-based mystery that I said felt lacking in my last recap.

American Horror Story: Freak Show Recap: “Edward Mordrake, Part 1”

What better way to kick of the annual two-part American Horror Story Halloween episode than with an allusion to Halloween? Everyone's favorite homicidal clown makes his first appearance in this episode standing ominously next to a sidewalk, much as Michael Myers did in the 1978 horror classic.

American Horror Story: Freak Show Recap: “Massacres and Matinees”

When we last left the hardscrabble sideshow veterans of Freak Show, they were hacking up a killed police officer's body with an apparent lack of concern for any possible consequences. Oh, American Horror Story.

American Horror Story: Freak Show Recap: “Monsters Among Us”

2011. It was a simpler time, at least as far as American Horror Story goes. The then-unproven anthology series kicked off its first season, Murder House, as one might expect—with a couple of hapless kids making their way through an abandoned and obviously haunted house, setting the tone for the brilliant but relatively humble ghost story that followed.