Main cast: Debby Ryan (Jillian Fletcher), Melanie Field (Megan), Jeff Hiller (Niles Taylor), Melonie Diaz (Mary Gentile), Matthew Del Negro (Detective Watts), Frank Pando (Earl Gentile), and Matthew Holcomb (Mark Fletcher)
Director: Courtney Hoffman
Well, some people save the best for last, but this season of American Horror Stories saves its worst for last instead. The Thing Under the Bed has the longest title of all the episodes of this show to date, but the title is the only thing about it that is halfway coherent.
In what seems to be something straight out of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, we have some people that have been plagued by similar nightmares from young, and their personal Freddy Krueger may be the thing under the bed.
Jillian Fletcher should know, as she witnesses her husband get dragged under the bed by… something, and now she’s under suspicion for being the murderer because his blood was all over her when the cops found her in their bedroom.
In her investigation as to the thing under the bed dragging many people to their deaths in the past, she meets Niles Taylor, a fellow nightmare-haver, and he points her to Mary Gentile, a woman in a coma whose brain waves become active each time someone somewhere gets dragged to their death under a bed. What is going on here?
This is one of those episodes in which everything is supposed to make sense after the exposition dump that links everyone together, but I just get this feeling instead that these people are just pulling things out of their rear ends.
Indeed, this episode feels so much like some “We already have A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and the next two follow-ups at home” thing but compressed within a shorter time frame with all the interesting elements stripped out. The villain feels more like a gotcha plot device, the characters feel bland and one-note, and the overly convoluted plot has little wiggle room to properly develop within the runtime of the episode.
Sure, this one feels and looks glossy, but it is just… blah. Those A Nightmare on Elm Street movies that I mentioned look dated today and they are not the best movies by any stretch of the imagination, but there are some cool death scenes and amusing lines from the villain to keep things interesting. I have my doubts that I will remember much about this episode oh, ten seconds after I’m done with this review.
