Grotesquerie Premiere Recap: Was Ryan Murphy’s Latest Horror Show Even Scarier Than AHS? Grade It!
Ryan Murphy’s new horror story — but not that horror story — got underway Wednesday night. But did the fear auteur’s latest series put a shiver in your quiver like the trailer promised?
Read on for the highlights of Grotesquerie‘s series premiere. (Note: The series debuted with two episodes; this recap covers the first.)
More from TVLine
Det. Lois Tryon (played by Niecy Nash-Betts, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story) is awoken from a nightmare of a burning curtain by a call to a murder scene. “If this isn’t a hate crime,” one of her uniformed officers tells her as she walks into a home where a family was murdered, “I don’t know what is.”
It IS pretty horrific inside, where three bodies are posed at the dinner table, hands wired behind their backs and organs (theirs?) stuffed into their mouths. Another body, headless, lies on the kitchen floor. There’s blood everywhere. Though other cops are vomiting after taking one look at the tableau, Lois only looks vaguely perplexed.
From the way Lois nearly always has a drink nearby, even while driving home, we get the sense that she’s got some issues. “Something happen at work?” her adult daughter, Mary (Being Mary Jane’s Raven Goodwin) wonders while they watch Jeopardy! that evening. But Lois evades the question and goes to bed, instead.
The next day, Lois visits her husband Marshall (Lovecraft Country’s Courtney B. Vance), who is comatose and has been on life support at a hospital for 28 days. “I don’t feel his spirit anymore,” Lois tells Nurse Red (The Crown’s Lesley Manville), but the very odd nurse maintains that Marshall is definitely present. She shames Lois for not being “present” during her visits, and she knows what goes on, because she’s got cameras in every room on Marshall’s floor. “He knows! He hears! He feels!” Red calls as an indignant Lois leaves.
At work the next day, Lois is frustrated: The killer left behind no prints or DNA, and they aren’t sure what, exactly, a puddle of black goo they found on the floor is. The Burnside family was incredibly normal and good; no one can figure out who would want them dead. “You have to really hate people to do something like this,” Lois says. “It’s inhuman. No — it’s unhuman.” Still, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s seen something like this before.
Lois is called away by the arrival of Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond, Elsbeth), a young Catholic nun who introduces herself as a reporter from The Catholic Guardian, a publication focused on social justice. Megan’s beat is crimes and cults, and she’s highly interested in how good and evil are manifested through both. The Burnsides’ priest is a friend of the nun’s, and Lois agrees to talk to her on background.
As Sister Megan listens, Lois runs through what happened to the family. The mother and three children were tied up at the table, still alive. “The father was salted and peppered, seasoned with fennel seed and cayenne and roasted for two hours in a 375-degree oven with sunchokes and baby carrots,” Lois says. The killer served the father’s body and then forced his family to eat some of it. Then the killer boiled the baby. The mother and children died of heart failure — “some kind of acute shock,” Lois explains — and then a neighbor called the cops because Mozart’s “Requiem” was blaring from the house at 3 am.
When Sister Megan correctly guesses the name of the song playing, Lois has a moment when she thinks that maybe she’s talking to the killer. But the suspicion passes as Megan tells her that sometimes she can just sense things. So she asks for help in figuring out what the black goo is; sometimes it smells like one thing, sometimes another, but almost always “acrid.”
The conversation gets sidetracked when Megan presses Lois on whether she believes in God. Lois doesn’t, but she does believe in prayer. Megan says she does, too… “half the time, which is better than never.”
The next night, there’s another mass murder, this time of drug users in a rundown building. The killer exsanguinated the three victims, separated their torsos from their legs, and then nailed the torsos to the wall — but the black goo is there. Sister Megan shows up without being called; when Lois gets over her surprise, she ignores all protocol and has Megan observe the scene and take notes.
On her next visit to the hospital, Lois takes Red’s advice and talks to Marshall the whole time. She winds up climbing into bed with him, begging him to come back to her. “It’s like a hole opened up in the world to the center of nothingness,” she says, starting to cry.
When she gets home, Lois has a sense that there’s someone else in the house with her. She pulls her gun and goes room to room; indeed, someone seems to be slipping by, just outside of her peripheral vision. When she gets to the kitchen, chamber music is playing on the radio. She chases someone out the back door, and even fires her weapon several times, but to no avail: He, she or it is gone.
Sister Megan is buzzing with possible theories after observing at the crime scene, but Lois is disturbed after her run-in at home. “This case… whoever is doing the devil’s work here is —” but she doesn’t finish before the young nun pipes up: “— f–king with you?” She points out that, as the world goes to hell, “everything feels personal to everybody.” They go over the lab reports on the goo: It contains large amounts of sulfur dioxide. “That’s brimstone, from the Bible,” Megan says excitedly. “Great,” Lois says, exhaling the smoke form her cigarette, “a religious psychopath.”
Now it’s your turn. Grade the premiere via the poll below, then hit the comments with all of your thoughts, feelings and ‘huh?’s!
Best of TVLine
Sign up for TVLine's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.