Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we celebrate our 550th post with a Weird Watch: “Aura,” the 2nd episode of American Horror Stories’ second season. The episode is written by Manny Coto and directed by Max Winkler, and first aired on July 28, 2022. Spoilers ahead!
Opening: Over the harrowing depiction of a home invasion, a commercial’s voiceover touts Aura, a “doorbell” surveillance device designed to be your “eye on the world.” Detecting motion, it sends a message and caller image to your cell phone. New-and-improved Aura includes “all-vision UltraSense technology,” which sees what you can’t!
At a hardware store, Jaslyn Taylor (Gabourey Sidibe) eyes an Aura. A clerk assures her that $199 is cheap for security against throat-cutting maniacs. Jaslyn buys it.
She and husband Bryce (Max Greenfield) have just moved into a gated community. Bryce complains that the Aura’s cost wasn’t part of their “plan,” but sympathizes with Jaslyn’s anxieties, given her childhood trauma. He installs the device.
Twenty years before: A bunny-masked intruder climbs through Jaslyn’s window. He puts his finger to his lips; she retreats under her covers. Seconds later, she hears her parents scream. Then, gunshots.
Present: Jaslyn is starting a website to sell her jewelry. Her Aura app dings and shows a hooded man: Bryce, testing the device. He jokingly chides Jaslyn for opening the door. A phone alarm reminds him of a department meeting—he warned Jaslyn he’d be working long hours now he’s a supervisor. Bryce gone, Jaslyn triple-locks the door.
Night. Jaslyn’s crafting jewelry when Aura dings but shows no caller. Venturing outside, she spooks a raccoon. Alert explained. The next alert displays an old man with gaunt features, deep-shadowed eyes, and straggly white hair. He calls her “sweet Jaslyn” and begs her to let him in. She threatens to call the police; he pounds on the door, rattles the doorknob, sings maniacally.
When the police and Bryce arrive, he’s gone. He doesn’t appear on Aura’s record or a neighbor’s surveillance camera. The officers suggest that Jaslyn dreamt the incident. Bryce endorses the explanation. With their move, her start-up, his promotion, she’s under stress. Plus her history…
Bryce uses rat poison to kill the troublesome raccoon, upsetting Jaslyn.
Another night. Aura dings. It’s the old man again, visible on-screen even to Bryce, though not to the neighbor’s camera. As before, he wants “sweet Jaslyn.” Bryce grabs a fireplace poker. Jaslyn restrains him. When she checks her phone, the man’s gone. Bryce decides someone’s prank-hacking their Aura. But Jaslyn heard the pounding on the door, saw the knob turn. Bryce says to Google “Aura pranks.”
Jaslyn does, but is unconvinced. She’s remembered the old man: In high school, the janitor, Mr. Hendricks, became obsessed with her, leaving candy in her locker and sneaking her love notes. Then he disappeared. Bryce maintains that Hendricks is a prank, and cautions Jaslyn about her obsession with him.
Jaslyn visits Hendricks’s sister, who says Dayle was always odd. He’s lived with her on and off, sometimes disappearing, then returning to sit hours at his computer. Now he’s been missing for months. A recent photo matches the man at the door.
Jaslyn returns home. Moments later, Dayle’s back, pleading for her not to be afraid. Jaslyn asks what he’ll do if she lets him in. He’ll see her, that’s all. She opens the door. No one’s there, but a breeze blows past. She turns, sees Dayle inside, screams. Dayle admits he wanted to do more than see her. He wants to apologize for making her feel unsafe in high school. Jaslyn apologizes for how she and her friends ridiculed him. Maybe they can forgive each other? The suggestion makes Dayle laugh, relieved, then crumble into dust.
Jaslyn learns from a newscast that Dayle’s long-dead body has been retrieved from the river. Aura dings. On screen is a disheveled, frightened young woman. She doesn’t remember what happened to her, except that she was in Grace Park… Bryce grabs Jaslyn’s phone and screams at the woman to go away. Jaslyn’s shocked by his callous rage. When she remonstrates, Bryce rips the Aura off the door.
Jaslyn goes to Grace Park. She finds a memorial bench honoring Mary Jeane Burkett. Internet searches reveal that she died nearby, victim of a drunk driver. A photo shows the disheveled woman.
Jaslyn confronts Bryce. He denies knowing Mary Jeane. Jaslyn shows him a vlog about how Aura uses “spontaneous parametric down-conversion, a form of quantum entanglement” that acts as a ghost-magnet. She describes her reconciliation with Dayle’s ghost, and demands to know who Mary Jeane is. Aura dings: Mary Jeane’s back. Between her pleas and Jaslyn’s pressing, Bryce admits that she was his fiancée. The night she died, Bryce had just broken their engagement, and she angrily left to walk home. Tearfully, he tells Jaslyn that her death has haunted him; he doubts Mary Jeane’s here to forgive him.
Jaslyn opens the door. Mary Jeane appears inside, holding Bryce’s never-born infant son. Bryce confesses that he told his pregnant fiancée to “get rid of it”: A child wasn’t in his plan. She pulled away, into the path of a speeding car. It drove away. Mary Jeane, badly injured, begged Bryce for help. Instead he finished her off. She wasn’t in his plan anymore, and now—he lifts the fireplace poker—neither is Jaslyn.
Before he can strike, he falls choking under Mary Jeane’s stare. You were right, Jaslyn says. She wasn’t here to forgive you. Bryce dies, and his body bursts into dust.
Three months later: Jaslyn’s new apartment. The superintendent presents her newly-installed Aura. Jaslyn protests, but the super says her lease requires it. He leaves. The Aura dings. It’s Bryce, come to talk about the plan. Refused entry, he rages, pounding the door and screaming that she’ll never get away from him.
What’s Cyclopean: The Aura works through Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion something or other, I didn’t catch the full technobabble. Therefore, ghosts!
The Degenerate Dutch: Racial dynamics around pervasive security are ignored in favor of gender issues, and the likelihood that the threat is coming from inside the house. Also, Mr. Hendricks’ room is full of nerd signifiers—action figures, posters for Alien 3 and The Fly, computer stuff.
Madness Takes Its Toll: After Mr. Hendricks left, there was a rumor that he ended up in an institution. Bryce, meanwhile, is impatient with Jaslyn “obsessing” because “it’s gonna mess up your head and make you go crazy.”
Anne’s Commentary
Thanks to IMDb, I know the exact date of my first exposure to horror TV. It was March 16, 1964, 7:30 pm EST, and at the tender age of six, I was supposed to be getting ready for bed, not settling down to watch TV, much less The Outer Limits. But my parents were out, along with my older sister. That left me with my two older brothers, whom I could depend upon to let me do whatever I wanted, so long as it was nonlethal. A little extra TV wouldn’t hurt me, they probably figured, and it would keep me from bugging them.
That evening’s episode was “The Mutant,” featuring Egg-Eye. No, Egg-Eye wasn’t the character’s name. That’s what I called him for the two years he starred in my worst nightmares. IMDb tells me he was actually Reese Fowler, colonist on a planet where there were regular rains of hazardous radioactive isotopes. Reese got caught in one of these rains, which mutated him into a narcissistic telepath with the ability to disintegrate others with a touch. Go here to see what the radioactive isotopes did to him.
As my brothers would later tell my parents, I sat through the show without a sound, much less one of the shrieks that would wake me up when I dreamed of Egg-Eye easing his head around my bedroom door. How were they to know my psyche was being permanently scarred?
Scarring isn’t always a bad thing. Some scars are badges of honor, and through history, scarification has been a cultural, spiritual, and/or aesthetic practice. Once my Egg-Eye scar toughened up a bit—but not too much—it seemed to become a receptor for pleasure and awe. I couldn’t get enough of the weird TV anthologies: Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Thriller, Night Gallery, Ray Bradbury Theater, One Step Beyond, and of course my friend Carl’s documentary series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Nowadays, for a series with stand-alone episodes, I’ve been turning to American Horror Stories. Some of the tales hit my Egg-Eye scar dead-on, others not so much.
“Aura” is one of my favorites. Horror based on technological advances goes back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for which contemporary experimentation with electricity inspired Victor Frankenstein’s reanimating “spark of life.” Wizards, sorcerers, and alchemists have been devising mayhem-causing magic since the dawn of stories. They’re still around, but increasingly they share fictional space with the scientists, inventors, and technologists whose creations can raise similar hells. Magic and technology alike tend to have unintended consequences.
The new-and-improved Aura is meant to provide homeowners with an “eye on the world,” at least as far as their doorsteps. There’s no mention of it providing an “eye” on another world, like the spirit domain. The Aura folks could be concerned that more consumers would be scared off than enticed by this selling point: “Who needs a medium when you’ve got Aura! Forget expensive seances—thanks to the wonder of quantum entanglement, your dead loved ones can deliver themselves directly to your door!”
Conveniently accessed ghosts aren’t to everyone’s taste, even if they were loved and loving. What Bryce draws is an unloved and unloving ex-fiancée. Later Jaslyn draws Bryce, a super-vindictive ghost determined to control her from beyond the grave, except he didn’t even get a grave, having disintegrated upon expiration. Disintegration was never part of the egotistical PLAN he imposed on himself and others, and for which he’d been willing to kill.
The first ghost to use Jaslyn’s Aura starts out terrifying. Dayle Hendricks looked and acted creepy enough in life; as the ghost of Jaslyn’s High School Past, he’s a specter who seems bent on anything but redeeming that past. Yet the pathos of his mental illness grows as Jaslyn first remembers his identity, then views his cluttered relics including a photograph of him as a boy on a bicycle—just a boy, no emaciated and mumbling monster. In spite of her past, she finds the courage to let Dayle in. When it seems Dayle has lied about his benign intentions, the suspense is torturous. Then comes his repentance for making her feel unsafe, and her answering repentance for having ridiculed him. It’s a classic ghost encounter, in which the spirit seeks reconciliation that will allow it to move on from “purgatory.” Here, both the dead and the living gain.
For me, it’s a plot flaw that Bryce disintegrates on death. Why should he, except to leave no corpse for Jaslyn to explain to the authorities? It’s a convenience, quickly moving the story to the conclusion that toxic technology can be inescapable, along with its toxic consequences. Poor Jaslyn. Even if she moves to an Aura-free home, she’ll have to live with the knowledge that Bryce is out there, just waiting for more tech-driven quantum entanglement to exploit.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
First, here is a graph of violent crime rates in the U.S. between the ’70s and today. Fifty years ago, when I was a wee baby in rural Massachusetts, you could definitely open your door after 6pm without encountering violent maniacs. And now (even with a small recent uptick) it’s much safer. Thank you for coming to my rant about public perceptions of violence. Longer version with bonus cognitive bias underpinnings available any time you see me at a con.
What has increased is anxiety, pushed by media and tech companies. And, totally coincidentally, pervasive surveillance, often with our help as consumers. Your Ring doorbell partners with ICE. Apple cooperates with Xi Jinping. But if you don’t buy the latest smart security system, that 6pm knock could be anyone. Plus your insurance costs will rise…
The Aura doesn’t share data with authoritarians governments (I assume), but has a whole different set of problems. It’s not clear whether it attracts ghosts, or whether customers come pre-haunted. My guess is the latter: sans Aura, the dead are already hovering invisibly around your house, begging for entry; with Aura, they quickly figure out their tech-enhanced capabilities.
Clearly ghosts, like vampires, can only enter with permission—though Aura also lets them shake doorknobs, bang fists, and otherwise make your life an anxious hell.
Once you let the dead in, the results are up to them.
Rolling back, Jaslyn and Bryce make an interesting couple. It’s unusual for the Black woman to want a gated community and a security system, while the white guy is ambivalent. Understandable, given her childhood experience—that bunny mask alone would give anyone nightmares. But it does let the show avoid the usual racial issues underlying this kind of security obsession.
That’s kind of fair, because 45 minutes is a tight timetable for the gender issues involved, of which there are so, so many. Jaslyn wants to be safer, but instead the Aura opens her to more male obsession and violence. First, her high school stalker, who is still pretty damn stalkery. Are the ghosts under contractual obligation to sound as creepy as possible while outside, and/or not to actually resolve anything unless invited in? Because I don’t, personally feel that you should have to make yourself vulnerable to a former stalker in order to give them closure. Nor apologize back for stupid things you did as a kid. I also don’t feel that a good apology starts with a creepy-ass song calling you “sweet.”
Quoth my wife, “This is creepy as fuck and also textbook how not to handle a stalker.”
But Jaslyn does open the door, and Mr. Hendricks does apologize, and then he disappears in a puff of fly-buzzing dust, and she starts to think the world is a safer place than she thought. Yay.
But in reality, most violent attackers are family members and romantic partners. The next supernatural visitor is Bryce’s ex-fiancée, who he dumped because her pregnancy didn’t fit his Plan, and then killed when a hit-and-run gave him cover. “It was a baby… I couldn’t allow that. It wasn’t in the plan. And now, neither are you.” Brr.
There’s plenty of foreshadowing, and it’s obvious from the start that Bryce isn’t Husband #1. That thing about the world being divided into people with plans and people who serve those with plans. The way he whiplashes between dismissing her experiences and fury at potential threats, with no in-between, and no memory of that time yesterday WHEN he wasn’t 100% right. The Type A controlling comments about his work, and the superficial support for hers.
His ex has every reason to return the asphyxiation favor—plus bonus making him collapse into buzzy dust. (How??????) Jaslyn’s life is better for it.
Except that her new apartment has a contractual requirement to keep insurance costs down. If I were her, I’d call the super back, tear down the Aura with hysterical threats to sue his ass, and find a new apartment while the landlord is trying to figure out how to handle the irrational lady in 10d. I’m really, really hoping that’s what happens next. And that, scary pounding or not, ghosts really can’t come in unless you open the door.
We’re off for the rest of the year, along with the rest of Reactor—happy holidays to all, whichever ones you celebrate and however many you’re trying to squeeze into the next two weeks! We’ll be back in January with leftover latkes and yule log, a bit of frostbite from the Innsmouth solstice vigil, and Chapters 23-25 of Sister, Maiden, Monster.
Thank you for turning me on to a new anthology series! Incidentally, your Egg Eye was played by the fantastic Warren Oates, one of the most thoughtful and nuanced actors of his generation.