American Horror Story: Hotel, Season 5 Premiere: Sexy And Insane With Lady Gaga

American Horror Story; Hotel, the real reason why many of us won’t be sleeping tonight, is back on FX. We are introduced to the Hotel Cortez, an art-deco style establishment with Kathy Bates running the front desk. The place is like a tomb, remarks one of the blonde European tourists forebodingly. But they’re not getting their money back, so the front desk attendant leads them up their room and the trouble officially begins.

American Horror Story: Hotel, Season 5 Premiere

The girls get to their room and it is the only one left in the hotel. Immediately, they notice a smell coming from the mattress. They call the front desk but the attendant forcefully reminds them that they are sold out. The girls begin cutting at the mattress and reveal a body that comes alive and makes rasping noises at them. The authorities are called about the corpse, no matter how alive it apparently is, and the girls are moved into a different room. This is a room the hotel staff never rents out, and the reason soon become obvious when one of the girls has her neck eaten by a pair of little boys in sweater vests.

Wes Bentley plays a detective investigating a murder in what is obviously a different hotel. This time, a couple has been speared through the ribs mid-coitus, with the woman’s hands nailed to the headboard. Whatever happened, happened fast. They are both believed to be dead when the man begins to groan something only understandable by the nearest detectives: He wants out of her. Apparently he was had more than an adequate amount of male potency drugs in his system at the time of the event.

The Detective Lowe gets a call and shows up to investigate room 64 at the Hotel Cortez. Meanwhile, a heroin addict is shooting up in a different room. It’s an extremely bad trip and he starts getting raped someone who looks to be covered in cellophane. Riding the elevator to room 64, the porter points out to Detective Lowe that he can tell he’s missing something in his life by the look in his eye.

The Countess Elizabeth (Lady Gaga) and her boyfriend are some kind of swinger couple. They find another couple at a screening of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and they take them back to their suite at the Hotel Cortez. This is one melancholy four-way in which they slit their throats and drink their blood in the end.

They bask in the blood of their quarries and share a cigarette. “And you didn’t want to go out tonight,” she says.

“It’s not the going out, it’s the cleaning up.”

“We’ll call house keeping.”

Iris (Kathy Bates) torturing the remaining European girl. She’s about to force-feed her oyster puree when Sally (Sarah Paulson) interrupts. Sally lets her go just to watch her run. She’s almost to the door when The Countess slits her throat with a fingernail. We learn that The Countess is the real boss around the Hotel Cortez. For the first time, Iris look scared. “This can never happen again.”

Detective Lowe is at sushi with his daughter when he gets a distress text from his wife. He rushes to the address to find police already on the scene. He tells one of the uniformed officers to watch his daughter while she waits in the car. Of course, the officer leaves her and the girl wanders into the building where her father went to find his wife. There is a man in a top hat and men hanging from the ceiling with their guts hanging out of their stomachs.

There is a flashback to a vacation Lowe took with his son to Santa Monica in 2010. This is where we learn that he lost a child. It is root of all his troubles with his wife. She blames him for losing their son.

The Countess is selling the hotel and Iris is in a panic. She doesn’t know where she’ll go. In anther flashback scene we discover how Iris got to the hotel in the first place. She arrived looking for her son, a drug addict sharing needles with Sally. He ODs on “China White” and Sally leaves her grieving. But Iris strikes back and pushes her out of a window. She walks back to the bedroom where her son is laying dead, and to the sound of “Hotel California” by The Eagles, The Countess is there to tell her that her “boy has a jawline for days.” She turns him into a vampire like her, and they both become shackled to the Hotel Cortez.

American Horror Story: Hotel has clear ties in classic rock (Neal Young, The Eagles), that much is obvious. Lady Gaga’s character has a talent for making her guest indebted to her. Even Detective Lowe returns to stay after he leaves to protect his wife and child by drawing away the mysterious man who seems to be stalking him. Is he trying to draw his attacker into the hell that is the Hotel Cortez and let the hellish environment destroy his enemy? They both seem to be isolated anomalies and one could possibly destroy the other.

American Horror Story: Hotel airs Wednesdays on FX.

Pictured: Wes Bentley as John Lowe.