American Horror Stories 1x04: The Naughty List//October 304th, 2021

 It’s that time again, boils and ghouls. Time to talk about the wild ride that is American Horror Stories.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so conflicted going into anything relating to AHS as I did toward this week’s episode, The Naughty List.

I generally don’t like watching Christmas episodes of anything if it’s not actually the Christmas season. I’ve been this way since I was a kid. I’ll watch Halloween-themed anything, any time, but a Christmas episode comes on in the middle of the summer and I’m not going to be into it. And it’s not even about the fact that I don’t really enjoy Christmas anymore. It just feels wrong to me somehow. Christmas just seems like something that should be contained to its particular time of year, to me anyway. 

But, this episode also promised me Danny Trejo as Santa Claus, and while Leigh Emerson will always be the Santa of the AHS universe, I have to admit, this was intriguing to me. 

This episode starts off in a very crazy way, introducing us to four social media influencers: Zinn, Wyatt, James, and Barry, known collectively as the “Bro House”. We get a crazy introduction montage (Apparently Zinn, Wyatt, and Barry have been friends for years with James being a bigger influencer known for male beauty videos who merged with them.) of crazy pranks and general douchebaggery, and the guys complaining that they’re pushing thirty, which is almost forty in influencer years, and need to up the ante to stay relevant before they lose everything. (Meanwhile one of them, Wyatt I believe, was once a pre-med student, but of course that doesn’t compare to making money off of acting like a middle schooler.) These guys are honestly annoying as fuck, but that’s the whole point. The fact that this episode isn’t taking itself all that seriously is what makes it watchable. And this introduction definitely works to get you excited for the payoff, because by the time it was done, I already couldn’t wait for these douchebags to die.

After a chaotic opening credits scene set to the same music as the opening of AHS 1984, we regroup with the Four Horsemen Who Wouldn’t Have Made It Through Apocalypse, camped out by a bridge, literally waiting for someone to come along and commit suicide so they can film it for their next video. After about sixteen hours (that’s dedication), they finally get their man, and while Zinn, James, and Wyatt are pretty sure they’ve somehow just struck comedy gold from a most likely innocent man’s death, Barry is starting to have second thoughts. I, personally, have many questions about why they ever thought it was okay in the first place. I mean, putting all moral issues aside, wouldn’t there be some sort of repercussion for witnessing something like that and not reporting it to the proper authorities? Also, aren’t videos featuring actual death generally regarded as more of a dark web thing? I mean, Kai Anderson didn’t find Judgement House by watching Bro House, I’m sure.

Regardless, Barry ends up going along with it in the end, and I kind of feel for him there. I know what it’s like to get caught up in the schemes of not-so-nice friends, and also just to want to be able to make something out of doing what you enjoy (He’s the filming/editing guy.) so yeah, I get that he’s in a tough spot, but seriously, this is over the top.

The Bro House’s followers, sponsors, friends, etc., all seem to agree when they debut the video at a Christmas party and it is beyond not well-received. People walk out of their party, they start bleeding followers about 50,000 at a time, and their biggest sponsor comes to take away all they’ve given to the Bros the next morning. And, of course, legal threats are coming in from the dead man’s family! Who would’ve ever thought?

So now our boys are left wondering what to do next, and since “get a real job” is apparently not an option,  they decide to “go gay” for their followers...which basically means just do and say very homoerotic, suggestive things, and simply tack the phrase “no homo” on at the end, because, apparently, chicks dig that sort of thing. We get a few minutes of this, and it so over-the-top ridiculous that I can’t imagine it ever actually happening in real life, but I have to say it’s hilarious to watch in all its insanity. Needless to say, the chicks don’t dig it, and Barry, bless his still-somewhat-pure heart, has a better idea: They should all just go to the mall and film themselves just having fun doing Christmas-y things.

But sadly, to his three compadres, Christmas-y things consist of sexually harassing an elf and announcing to everyone who will listen that Santa Claus isn’t real. (Seriously, Barry seems like a pretty good dude for the most part and if I were him, at this point, I’d just break away and either find some new friends or be so traumatized that I’d elect to never be friends with anyone ever again.)  But Danny Trejo Mall Santa is not amused, and promises the Bros that they will “get what they deserve”. 

Poor Barry once again gets roped into uploading the footage, and the Bro House (guess what?) loses another 50,000 followers. However, shortly after the video has been up, they receive a call from the local police. Apparently Danny Trejo Mall Santa was not the Santa that the mall hired, and that Santa has been found cut up and stuffed into a gift box in his home. 

The Bros, I guess thinking they can redeem themselves by catching a serial killer, find an article about an ancient legend known as “The Wild Man”, which is actually a pretty interesting story and makes you wonder if maybe the legend of Santa Claus is actually based on something not-so-pleasant. Even in my most holly-jolly childhood moments, I did sometimes have to wonder how a man so adept at breaking and entering ever became so celebrated. It’s something to think about. 

Anyway, as the Bros stare at their deteriorating legacy, Wyatt heads downstairs to find more beer, and when he opens up the refrigerator, he finds a camera inside. He winds up getting his neck broken by Danny Trejo Mall Santa, and then suddenly, the other three Bros see a video uploading itself onto their website: The in-fridge footage of Wyatt getting his neck broken! They, of course, think it’s a prank at first, but it turns out the fans are eating it up. It is, of course, not a prank, and the Bros end up getting picked off one by one by Danny Trejo Mall Santa, a couple dying in some semi-festive ways. Zinn’s death in particular is visually pleasing if you enjoy a Christmas horror aesthetic. 

Barry is the last to go, ambiguously burned alive after Danny Trejo Mall Santa pours gasoline down the chimney. Up until that point, I genuinely wondered if he was going to be spared, since he never was as bad as the other Bros, but I suppose, the old saying about people who see evil things being done and not doing anything about it, being just as evil as the people doing them, comes into play here. Just before Barry seemingly bites the big one (I say seemingly because a lot of people did seem to find it debatable, but since I can’t really see a reason to use him again, I’m going to say he’s most likely dead.) the Bro House finally hits five million followers. And I am left to wonder, if the people watching Bro House are this into watching people die, then why was the initial suicide video such an issue? I guess the Bros were just so hated at this point that it didn’t matter anymore? But still. 

The episode ends with the police coming to look over the Bro House and finding a very impressive, albeit horrific, Christmas tree full of blood, guts, and entrails, and topped off with Zinn’s head. Meanwhile, Danny Trejo Mall Santa is outside another mall, about to claim his next Santa victim. 

This episode was not the best thing to come out of the AHS universe, but it’s also not the worst, despite its silliness. As I mentioned previously, the fact that most of the episode doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously is what makes it work. We’re not expected to like the Bros, nor think one of them will turn out a hero. As likable as Barry is in his “all my friends are douchebags but I’m mostly not” kind of way, it’s established early on that he’s really too weak to be a hero in any capacity, unable to even get his friends to have a rational conversation about what they’re doing, and he stays consistent throughout, unlike the protagonists of the previous episode whose only motivation was to get laid, and then suddenly we were expected to see them as badass action heroes. This episode doesn’t aim to be anything more than it is, and what I’d say it is, is a fun, light watch that I will likely add to my very small list of Christmas time must-watches, along with the original AHS Christmas episode from Asylum, and the wild, over-the-top Christmas horror/thriller film Better Watch Out. (If you’ve seen the latter, it’s very similar in tone somehow to The Naughty List, in a way I can’t quite explain.)  

I think my biggest question, though, is just simply why this had to be a Christmas episode. I mean, I guess we’re supposed to surmise that Danny Trejo Mall Santa is actually the Wild Man and goes after mall Santas and anyone else he thinks is disrespecting what he regards as the actual spirit of the holiday? We don’t really have enough evidence to go on for that theory but it makes sense, in almost a Sam from Trick ‘r Treat kind of way, which you obviously know I can dig. Still, though, I think it would have been more effective to have Danny Trejo play a relative of the man from the suicide video, and murder the Bros on camera as an act of revenge. I feel like that would’ve made the episode darker and more horrific, as, despite a few good kills toward the end, there really isn’t that much true horror to be found in this piece. Having the killer dressed up as Santa only added to the overall goofy vibe. Also, AHS already has such an established murderous Santa that I just don’t think it needed another one. It didn’t feel right. At the very least, someone should’ve acknowledged him as a Leigh Emerson copycat killer. 

This will always be my AHS Christmas.

Also, on the American Horror Stories series as a whole, is anyone else feeling like the storylines of these episodes so far are a little young? It kind of seems to me that despite the TV-MA rating, they’re operating under the assumption that the main audience here is teenagers. I know teens and young adults getting into trouble is a popular horror trope and I’m not saying it doesn’t work, for the most part, but AHS has run for nine successful seasons with predominantly adult storylines and I’d like to see a little more of that from this series. At the very least, I’m hoping maybe next week we get a break from the plot of the episode being based around “a video is viewed and people die”. Because there’s definitely a pattern emerging here.

But, either way, I did enjoy this episode more than the previous one, even if it was mostly because I was laughing out loud at how ridiculous the main characters were. I’d rather have ridiculous characters be intentionally ridiculous, you know? And I thoroughly enjoyed finally seeing Danny Trejo join the AHS cast. I just wish he would’ve had a little more of a speaking role. 

Stay spooky, my friends.