American Horror Story: Delicate had a surprisingly schlock-free premiere

polygon.com:

This season of American Horror Story opened with the most shocking premiere ever: nary a dead body, faceless ghost, or blood spill in sight.

Seriously — there wasn’t even a shot of fetish gear or a serial killer that resembles a real-life serial killer a little too closely. In fact, most of the terror was all in the main heroine’s head (or was it?), making for perhaps the most restrained premiere episode of American Horror Story yet. A few creepy motifs, like a dead baby bird on the side of the street and a spider in the main character’s hair, and one pretty harrowing anesthesia-induced nightmare sequence did cement that this is, in fact, a horror show. But for the most part there were no severed limbs splattered across the halls of the lead’s sleek Brooklyn Heights apartment. Showrunner Halley Feiffer and director Jessica Yu spun up a first episode like nothing else in AHS history.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the premiere of American Horror Story: Delicate.]

Delicate focuses on Anna Victoria Alcott (Emma Roberts), an actress who’s recently catapulted to the spotlight after the surprise success of a horror movie. In the midst of adjusting to her newfound popularity, she’s also been desperately trying to conceive and is in her third round of in vitro fertilization. But when she heads to her latest appointment, she can’t help but shake the feeling that someone is following her. That dread only grows as she keeps experiencing lapses in memory, all while items around her house keep being moved and the appointments on her digital calendar keep being adjusted without her knowledge.

The episode grounds the horror in how often Anna’s concerns are dismissed and her own desires pushed aside. Anna feels that