Who’s in the mood for bacon? After coming out strong with a surprise docuseries theme in last week’s season 6 premiere, American Horror Story: Roanoke upped the ante in its second episode with all the classic AHS elements that make the FX series a tried-and-true fave: freaky imagery, familiar faces, campy horror humor and a lot of disembodied pig parts.
The story of Matt and Shelby and their seemingly haunted house ramped up this week with the introduction of a couple of seriously scary villains, plus new characters whose welfare you’ll now have to worry about from week to week. Here’s what went down on the latest installment.
Pure Pig-Headedness.
The last time we saw Shelby, she was being played by Sarah Paulson in a dramatic reenactment of a seriously scary scene, as she stumbled through the woods and came across a man with some essential pieces of his head missing. This week, that scene got even weirder: When the old woman in the bonnet (Kathy Bates) declared that the scalped man was a thief, he was strapped to a spit and burned alive with a pig’s head stuck on his noggin.
And that was just the beginning of the pig-headed shenanigans this week; Decapitated Porky showed up again in the form of a burning effigy on Matt and Shelby’s property, prompting the police to finally take their complaints of trespassers seriously … sort of.
Naughty Nurses!
For the first time, we got a really good look at two of the entities haunting the house. Waking up late at night, Dramatization Matt (Cuba Gooding Jr.) came around a corner just in time to see two cackling nurses in white uniforms putting a bullet in the head of an elderly patient. The whole scene then promptly disappeared, but a tape found in a cellar on the property confirmed Matt wasn’t just hallucinating.
On it, a previous tenant of the house (Denis O’Hare in a madman’s beard) explained that he came to write a true-crime novel about the evil nurses who ran an old folks’ home exclusively for the purpose of killing off patients whose names started with the letters M, U, R, D, E, and … well, you get the idea. (Because writing “REDRUM” on the mirrors would have been too subtle.) However, the nurses never finished spelling their favorite word. According to Video Guy, they were stopped by another, more evil entity.
Priscilla, Is That You?
Amid all this drama and violence, Lee (Angela Bassett) introduced some fresh blood to the house: her daughter, Flora (Saniyya Sidney).
In an interview clip, the “real” Lee (Adina Porter) said of her decision to bring a child to an evidently haunted house, “I figured if I kept her inside and kept a close eye on her, it would be all right.”
Needless to say, it was not all right. The scares started with Flora disappearing into a closet with her new invisible friend, Priscilla — and emerging to inform Lee and her ex-husband (Charles Malik Whitfield) that Priscilla intended to kill everyone in the house. Ex-husband freaked out and threatened Lee with the loss of visitation rights; Lee responded by taking an epic fall off the proverbial wagon and kidnapping her daughter back to the Mansion of Murder.
Left alone to do her homework, Flora looked out the window and saw a beckoning figure out front … and promptly vanished. But not without a trace! In the final scene of chapter 2, the frantic family discovered Flora’s hoodie — wrapped around the topmost trunk of a 100-foot-tall tree. Will they find the poor child before someone does to her what they’ve been doing to all those unfortunate pigs?!
Tell Us: What do you think of Roanoke so far?
American Horror Story: Roanoke airs on FX Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET.
