On Tuesday, Ryan Murphy released his latest contribution to what's starting to feel like a streaming platform takeover, following up "American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez," "Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menendez Story," "Grotesquerie" and a string of others with his return to "American Horror Stories," which plopped into our laps in a five-episode dump on Hulu, just in time for peak spooky season.
If you're saying to yourself, "Wait, I didn't know there was a new season of 'American Horror Story,'" there isn't. This is "American Horror Storie(s)" — plural — and how that differs from "AHS" proper is that by centering each episode on a standalone story that begins and ends in 38–49 minutes, Murphy takes a break from fiddling around with how to land the end of a full season narrative arch, which he historically gets called out for fumbling. Interweaving plot lines that come together satisfyingly after 9 or 10 episodes? Too hard. Throwing together whatever bonkers thing he can think of for one nonsensical (but in a fun way) episode? Yeah, that's his sweet spot. And that's exactly what we get here.
In the new "American Horror Stories," Murphy, per usual, keeps his finger on the pulse of pop culture much in the same way we all do, by farming the hive mind (AKA, TikTok) for content. And as is also his way, he musters up one big swing that cracks harder than all the rest. In Season 2, that was an episode titled "Milkmaids" which centered on people quite literally eating pus and made me also quite literally puke. This season, it's "Backrooms," where he sets a child-murdering Michael Imperioli loose to go nuts in liminal spaces — those eerie, dreamlike abandoned rooms that TikTok has been haunting most of our "For You" pages with for years. And while Murphy and the episode's writers, Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, do a very watchable job of providing viewers with a crash course on liminal spaces and the "backroom" phenomena, TikTok does it better. It usually does.
The set-up of "Backrooms" is as such: We're introduced to Imperioli's character — a self-absorbed, award-winning screenwriter — and as soon as it's mentioned that his young son went missing, we immediately know that whatever was done to this boy, he did it. The fun of Murphy's shows is never the "how" of it all, it's the "what's next?"
The twist of this episode, given away in the title, is that by keeping the truth of his child's whereabouts a secret, the father detaches from reality and dips in and out of an in-between place — finding himself in uncanny grocery stores when he had, moments prior, been in his apartment. Or in eerie linoleum-lined rooms mid-visit to a restaurant bathroom.
And because Murphy wants this to be easy for everyone, he gives us some exposition on just what the ever-lovin' heck is going on here by way of a signature Murphy ™CrazyMan.
After Imperioli's character does some research and chances upon a video made by a guy who used a Super 8 camera to capture footage of backrooms, he visits him at the prison where he's being detained for vehicular manslaughter — a deception that broke him from his own reality, landing him in liminal spaces of his own — and we get the full breakdown via visiting room prison phone, which feels so right.
But even with this exposition, TikTok explains it or, rather, shows it better.
For an even bigger scare, Google "are liminal spaces real," and you'll come across articles from sites like How Stuff Works which details that, yes, they are.
"Liminal spaces are transitional or transformative spaces that are neither here nor there; they are the in-between places or thresholds we pass through from one area to another," the article explains, citing University of Missouri professor Dr. Timothy Carson who uses the pandemic as an example of how a person can dip into them, referring to it as an "involuntary social liminality, a time/space that was full of uncertainty and ambiguity, all the landmarks gone, the future undefined."
An analysis of liminal spaces, like one in the YouTube video below, put Murphy's "backrooms" to shame but after watching his episode of "American Horror Stories" and viewing it as a gateway, he's actually given us a gift in that today, most assuredly, is now creepier than yesterday was. And, as always, it's just fun to watch Michael Imperioli run around and do stuff.
