American Horror Story: Murder House re-watch – Episode 3: ‘The Murder House’

“Good luck with this lemon,” she says to Marcy, regarding the house. She looks up and we see Tate in a top floor window of the house. She waves to him, and next thing you know, he’s not in the window anymore.

Ben and Vivian go to the doctor to see if Vivian is okay. Her doctor says that it was only spotting and that everything was fine. Vivian said that her bleeding seemed to calm down once she walked into the house. While the pair are in the doctor’s office, Ben passes out–again. Vivian’s doctor does some blood work just to make sure that he’s okay.

Next thing you know, Ben runs into our burn victim who we now know is named Larry Harvey. He is soliciting Ben for money and Ben tells him to leave him alone for what is definitely not the last time.

Vivian (Connie Britton) gets her first potential “murder house” buyer in Nora Montgomery (Lily Rabe). (Photo: FX)

While Ben is fending Larry off, Vivian is incredibly happy to be receiving her first potential buyer for the house. The woman knows a lot about the architectural intricacies of the house, and she well should because she’s the one who had it designed. Our potential buyer is none other than Nora Montgomery.

There’s a wonderful rotating shot where we see that she has a bullet hole in the back of the brain. We don’t know why yet, but one thing is clear, the woman is dead, and so is Moira. We finally start to see that this house has many more residents than the actual owners of the house know about. Nora Montgomery ends up being scared by the newness of the kitchen and disappears while Vivian has her back turned. Vivian and Violet go to look at an apartment.

While they’re gone, the police detective who visited Ben about Sally Freeman returns. He has the tape recorder (that Ben thought Moira stole) with him. It turns out that Ms. Freeman was found in an intensive care unit. She had attempted to kill herself. We find out from the recording that Ben went into a trance while Sally was in his office. She got so upset about it that she slit her wrists with a letter opener. Ben grabs her hands, which is where the blood came from, and Sally ran out. The detective says another favorite line out this season on his way out of the house, “I guess being an a**hole isn’t a crime”.

While Violet and Vivian are looking at an admittedly crappy apartment, Violet is berating her mom the whole time about being scared after the home invasion and threatens to run away and that she knows how to do it so where Vivian would never see her again, if they choose to live in the apartment in which they’re standing.

Ben then receives a phone call from Vivian’s doctor. She tells him that he’s fine but that the reason he’s been having these lapses of time go by where he wakes up in random places is because he had a laudanum compound in his system. Laudanum is a drug from the 30’s and probably what Charles Montgomery was getting lit on, in addition to ether. The doorbell rings, and as Ben passes Moira, he says “I know you’ve been drugging me” to which she replies “Prove it”.

Who’s at the door, but our good friend Hayden! Ben forgot to meet her because of his taking Vivian to the doctor and the cop showing up. She had been left waiting for him at their established meeting place for three hours. She’s pissed! She’s screaming “Mrs. Harmon! Mrs. Harmon! I’m having your husband’s baby” and all matter of other angry bile she has towards Ben. He manages to walk her out of the house to the outside, where she is still yelling, and then Larry Harvey comes through with a shovel and beats Hayden over the head.

Ben had been digging a hole in the yard this whole episode, not really knowing why. Constance had told him the soil was poisonous and that there was no reason trying to plant anything. She put the idea in his head that he should build a gazebo. After Hayden is hit over the head, Larry finishes the hole that Ben had started digging. We see that their is a skeleton in the hole already, which Larry dumps Hayden into. One of the final lines of dialogue in the murder house episode is Constance to Frances Conroy’s Moira “Now you’re stuck here forever” as Ben lays concrete over the hole in the ground where Hayden, and also poor Moira are buried.

Ben (Dylan McDermott) holding Hayden (Kate Mara) in his arms one last time. (Photo: FX)

The episode ends with Nora Montgomery standing by Vivian’s bedside while they’re asleep. We’re presented with a lot of the underlying themes of the show in this episode. That the house is full of ghosts that died on the property. It’s as if the house possesses the inhabitants from the moment they set foot in the door, and never lets them go. This is something we come to find out even more with each episode. I’m wondering who the lucky inhabitants of the house will be in Apocalypse.

Until next time, this has been Lorry Kikta with an AHS: Murder House recap. Next time, read all about the very first Halloween episodes of AHS, as I take you back to “Halloween” parts 1 & 2.