Why is it so gratifying to see these characters sucked up in a cyclone of misery? Maybe because for the first time in a long time it doesn’t seem so improbable. It hints at newly recognizable anxieties, not just the stranger knocking on the door after dark but the stranger knocking on the door and demanding a thousand dollars that don’t exist (whether for head shots or the cable company); Vivien and Ben are as frightened, as desperate in the meeting with a Realtor about putting their house on the market, as they are when a recently bludgeoned corpse shows up in the bathtub. People are almost as afraid of foreclosure as they are of death. Maybe it’s because sometimes it’s the house that haunts you, but more often it’s you who haunts the house.

I keep expecting to hate American Horror Story, but instead I’m riveted.  Also, “the everything bagel of haunted house stories” needs to become a graphic on the FX promos.