hellobeautifulcreatures

This season, Ryan Murphy’s bloodshot gaze switches from witches, asylums, and freak shows to hospitality—or rather, the lack of it. American Horror Story ’s fifth iteration, premiering tonight on FX, takes place in and around the fictional Hotel Cortez , a rundown Art Deco pile in Los Angeles. It’s Murphy’s most ambitious season yet, with an entire two- story building created from scratch on a Hollywood soundstage, where his regular crew of rep players like Sarah Paulson and Denis O’Hare can act out the creator’s gory, surreal fantasies. This season, those include forests of hypodermic needles, a serial killer whose drill bit has been customized in ways that would make Freud blush , and the misguided belief that new series headliner Lady Gaga can act well enough to evoke anyone other than, well, Lady Gaga. But like so many of Murphy’s showy doses of slasher clichés, a hotel is an astute setting for a series like this. It co-opts our primal, but much tamped-down, anxiety about stayi...