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American Horror Story May Have Just Exploited a Real-Life Tragedy
Spoilers for American Horror Story below!
This week, American Horror Story may have taken another page from our bleak reality. In the world of Cult, we meet the latest Emma Roberts character, a snotty broadcast reporter named Serina Belinda. During a news segment, she gets brutally stabbed to death in broad daylight by a gang of clowns. Her cameraman suffers the same fate. This double homicide, in the context of Cult, is pretty symbolic of the momentum of the season. It signifies the growing boldness of this insane clown posse (ha) and their willingness to be visible and to sow chaos on a global scale. But this death scene is also striking in a different way: it re-creates a real-life horror story that happened just two years ago.
In August 2015, a live news broadcast took a horrifying turn when Alison Parker, 24, and Adam Ward, 27, were shot to death on camera. Much like the chilling scene on AHS, Parker was the on-air reporter, while Ward was her photographer. The two were filming an interview with Vicki Gardner, the executive director of the local chamber of commerce, just before 7:00 a.m. in Moneta, VA. The gunman, later identified as Vester Lee Flanagan II, stormed the interview and fired off several shots, killing Parker and Ward and severely injuring Gardner. Flanagan took his own life by turning the gun on himself just hours later. Gardner survived.
Naturally, a lot of this relies on speculation, since AHS creator Ryan Murphy hasn't explicitly confirmed that Belinda's story is inspired by Parker and Ward's. But the similarities are too striking to ignore. Right now, we're in the midst of a season that is putting a horror lens on another story — the results of the 2016 election — way too soon. Perhaps Murphy meant to show this story in such a garish and hyperbolized way as a commentary about our willingness to consume media, no matter how horrifying. Yet even if we could place that kind of analysis on this creative decision, we may be giving American Horror Story too much credit. In all likelihood, this is just another instance in which the series thinks it's providing a provocative point of view by taking on something sensitive long before the wounds have healed. If this storyline really is inspired by the deaths of two real-life journalists that occurred barely two years ago, it's more tasteless than salient.
