American Horror Stories 1x06: Feral//October 319th, 2021

 We’re just one episode away from the finale of this interesting, up-and-down season of American Horror Stories...and after this week’s episode, I can honestly say, I wish there were more. Because I finally, finally feel like this show went exactly where it was supposed to go. 

I am absolutely obsessed with this week’s episode, Feral. 

Let’s hope I can keep this review somewhat concise because I truly can’t say enough about it.

Our story starts off, like so many before it, with a family, Jay and Addy Gantz, and their toddler son, Jacob, driving to a new place. They’ve decided to go camping, though Addy seems against it and little Jacob declares “I want TV!” when asked for his input. I don’t know why, but I instantly get a “Gage from Pet Sematary” vibe from Jacob.

The camping trip commences, the first night ending with Addy admitting she’s glad they came. The next morning, Jay and Jacob (Is Jay short for Jacob? Random thought but I can’t help but wonder.) are playing hide and seek in the woods, and Jay gives Jacob an old Boy Scout compass of his. Soon after, Jacob disappears seemingly into thin air, and we break for an opening sequence that makes me weep for how robbed we were of an opening sequence for Roanoke, and also pretty much everything Roanoke could’ve been if it hadn’t been formatted as shows within shows within shows...but I digress. We’ll save my dissertation on Why Roanoke Is My Least Favorite Season for another time.)

After the break, we jump ahead ten years. Jay looks exactly the same, but he’s now divorced and living in a small apartment and has papered the walls with things relating to both the case of his missing son and things that have happened in that particular national park in general. (He reminds me very much of John Lowe from Hotel, honestly.) Apparently he’s become an outcast, shunned by many because they believe he may have killed his own son. 

On this day, though, he is approached by a man named Bob Birch. Birch has a picture of a boy around the age Jacob would be now, taken by camera traps he placed in the woods for hunting. Of course he wants money in exchange for information, claiming the park has been taken over by illegal marijuana growers involved with cartels, and he needs the money to bribe them. Jay is reluctant until Birch produces a compass identical to the one that Jay had given Jacob just before he disappeared.

After some tough prodding, Jay convinces Addy to go along and see what they can find out. Addy is not quite as convinced as Jay seems to be, but nonetheless, all three of them embark on a journey back to the park, to find the growers’ camp where they may be able to learn more about Jacob’s disappearance after all these years. 

Along the way, they run into a park ranger named Stan Vogel, played by Cody Fern speaking in his actual Australian accent that I didn’t realize he had until this episode. It suits him. 

Stan warns Addy and Jay that there are things in the woods they shouldn’t be messing with, and not just the growers, though he “legally can’t say” what they are. He also insinuates that Birch is a con man, to which Birch retaliates that Stan is obviously mentally ill. Stan tries to stop them from going any further, but they don’t heed his warnings, and soon step into what can only be described as a carnage camp. Bloodied bodies are literally everywhere. It’s probably the most visually impressive scene of this series so far. Birch says it was probably some kind of gang war between rival cartels, but soon admits that he was actually conning them the whole time, having made a deal with the growers, and that the picture that supposedly was of Jacob was actually of his nephew. He pulls a gun on them but before anything can happen, one of the dead bodies, directly behind Birch, wakes up, and bites him in the neck. The gun goes off, injuring Jay, but he and Addy manage to escape while Birch is ripped apart by the seemingly dead creatures.

They make it back to the ranger’s station, where, after consistently trying to say he legally can’t talk about what’s really going on, Stan finally tells the true story.

Apparently every national park has a population of feral human-ish creatures dwelling within it. The park system was developed solely to keep them contained. No one really knows where they originated from, but Stan believes they have been around a long time. Addy and Jay recall that the day Jacob disappeared, Army rangers came that didn’t seem to really be attached to the investigation, to which Stan responds that they were there to wipe out as many of the ferals as they could find, which apparently happens whenever they’re believed to be involved in a disappearance. Stan does think it’s strange, though, that the ferals are moving out further than where they normally reside, and decides to call for backup to have another sweep done. Before he can finish, though, he’s attacked by a feral who’s been clinging to the wall unseen this entire time, and killed. Jay and Addy once again manage to escape, but end up in the woods surrounded by ferals. They wind up in front of a throne made of bones and skulls, and, in easily my favorite plot twist of this series, sitting upon the throne is a boy that looks to be around thirteen, with a compass around his neck. 

Jacob has become king of the ferals! He greets his parents with a “Boo,”  as he used to do in his toddler hide and seek days, and when one of the other ferals asks, in their language, who these people are, Jacob pauses for a moment and then responds, “Dinner”. The other ferals waste no time in killing and eating Addy and Jay, while Jacob looks on, unaffected.

This was, easily, my favorite episode of this new seres. 

While the previous episode, Ba’al, was appealing because it felt more like AHS than most of what preceded it, Feral’s appeal lies in the fact that it truly felt like a separate, fully formed horror story. Everything played out clearly; the only question I really had after this one was, how in the world did a three-year-old, intended to be a snack, become king of a feral cannibalistic human tribe, but I suppose they just saw him as someone they could shape, who had not yet fully fallen victim to the confines of civilized human life. It’s not nearly as “WTF?” as some of the plot holes in the other episodes have been.

I think one of the biggest problems with American Horror Stories as a whole so far is that it’s tried so hard to basically be, as a friend of mine recently referred to it, “AHS Lite”, that, for the most part, it’s almost projected a “trying too hard” sort of vibe. What I initially expected out of this series was just some good short form horror stories, maybe some relating to the universe created by the original AHS, and some not, but the previous episodes all seemed to center around one big returning cast member or location (or Danny Trejo’s addition to the cast in The Naughty List) with a pretty mediocre storyline written around them. While Feral boasted the return of Cody Fern, the episode flowed naturally without feeling like it was written just for the sake of including him, and he seemed to really relax into his role. I found myself not really thinking of this one as an episode of AHS, but as its own little horror film, and that was a nice feeling. It really gave me hope for the rest of the season, but sadly, there’s only one episode left and it’s another throwback to the Murder House with a heavily teenage cast, and while familiar settings always make me smile, it makes me ache a little bit that we can’t have more of what Feral brought us before the season ends.

Also, I once started making up a story about an area in a local state park that scared me as a child because I was convinced a cannibal tribe lived there. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. But perhaps I should try writing it again, someday.

Stay spooky, my friends.