American Horror Stories is the new anthology series from creator Ryan Murphy. Up until the first episode aired, there was very little by way of explanation regarding Season 1 other than to say that each episode will be self-contained and will feature “familiar faces.”
At one point, after a promo image showed a female version of the Rubber Man seen in Season 1 of American Horror Stories, a theory developed that saw Violet (Taissa Farmiga) returning to the series as the Rubber Woman.
Now that Episode 1 (titled “Rubber (Wo)Man: Part One”) has aired, viewers have gotten their first glimpse of what happened. So, without further ado, let’s take a step back to Season 1 of American Horror Story and return to the Murder House.
Two dads and their daughter flip the Murder House
Episode 1 of American Horror Stories opens by introducing the main characters.
Michael (Matt Bomer) and Troy (Gavin Creel) are just two dads with a daughter called Scarlett (Sierra McCormick). They also like to flip houses.
And the Murder House from Season 1 of AHS is the perfect place to flip, right?
Wrong. The answer is wrong.
This is particularly truer for this family as Scarlett has a fetish for hurting people.
Scarlett is into some shifty stuff
Before Scarlett’s fetish for watching porn and dreaming about hurting people is even revealed, she finds a latex suit, and you can see right off the bat that it’s like placing candy in front of a child and leaving the room.
Scarlett has it on quicker than the cooties inside of the pre-loved outfit can gather in the crotch area.
To give her credit, it does creep her out once she sees the figure of a man in the same suit in the mirror while she is admiring her form.
Quickly, she chucks it in the bin but, as anyone who has ever watched a scary movie with an old doll in it, that suit is in no way going to stay gone.
Plus, considering Scarlett has already worn the outfit, there’s no point throwing the doll’s clothes out since you’ve gotta throw the whole doll out with the trash in order to get rid of the problem.
Enter the Mean Girls
Scarlett is a lesbian, which is no biggie except when it comes to the covert teasing from the Mean Girls crew.
It starts with Mean Girl #1 AKA Maya (Paris Jackson) flirting with Scarlett. Once Scarlett falls for it, she’s invited to a slumber party.
And, for anyone who’s ever watched a true-crime podcast, this is how the nice girl gets murdered.
Except, the more you get to know Scarlett, the more you start to realize the mean girls just may have bitten off more than they can chew.
Scarlett gets grounded
Scarlett has had a porn addiction in the past – and a decidedly sinister one too, according to her dads. Then, when they bring it up again and she lies about checking out sites again, they ground her.
Rather than miss the slumber party, Scarlett agrees to see a therapist.
But, later, she dons the Rubber Man suit and scares the crap out of her dads, entering their room while carrying a large knife.
It scares the crap out of them and one dad gets stabbing in the kerfuffle but, you know, nothing to worry about, the therapist is coming tomorrow, right?
Scarlett gets therapy
It’s at this session, that viewers get a huge backstory dump and we discover that Scarlett was kidnapped as a three-year-old. She was missing for 10 days until she was returned so this might be a contributing factor for her liking violent sexual scenarios.
With the session over, the therapist excuses herself to use the bathroom and gets murdered by the actual Rubber Man.
No one notices that she has never returned and goes on about their lives until the bloody latex suit is found at the top of the basement stairs.
There’s blood everywhere too but the dads are like, “Meh, Scarlett’s been a b***h lately, she must have her period.”
Slumber party blues
Still grounded, Scarlett sneaks off to the slumber party and Maya quickly announces that Scarlett needs to borrow a pair of her PJs and they head off to the bedroom for some sexy time.
Except that the whole thing has been orchestrated and is being live-streamed for everyone to see.
But, before Scarlett can be alerted to this fact, she totally gives up the fact that she likes violent porn to the mean girl that she has only just kissed.
Yeah, so now everyone knows.
Scarlett plots her revenge
As soon as Scarlett finds out, she leaves. Once home, she plots her revenge.
Calling the mean girls back, she tells them that she is going to kill herself and they will be blamed unless they all turn up at her house.
They fall for it and it quickly turns into a bloodbath in the basement while Scarlett’s dads sleep upstairs, completely unaware that they should have worried about their daughter being a killer.
Scarlett kills them all and is now no longer scared of the OG Rubber Man when he appears again.
Also, considering Scarlett was earlier deeply upset by the prank the girls pulled and threatened to kill herself, it seems she has followed through with her threat before because she appears to have a lot of help with the other entities in the house when it comes to killing the mean girls.
American Horror Stories airs every Thursday night on FX on Hulu.