• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 7, 2015

You either love the kind of horror depicted in “American Horror Story” or you don’t.

I happen to fall into the latter category. This series’ stylized bloodletting holds no appeal for me whatsoever. To me, the premiere episode of this fifth “American Horror Story” on FX that I watched to write this blog post is ugly, repellent and ultimately meaningless.

It is proficiently made, however. The setting this time around is a shabby art deco hotel -- the fictional Hotel Cortez -- in downtown Los Angeles. “Hotel” is the one-word subtitle of this year’s “American Horror Story,” which gets underway Wednesday night with the first of 13 episodes.

The hotel sets they built are stunning, starting with a cavernous two-story lobby and extending to the art deco elevators, and various rooms and suites. The long gloomy hallways and dimly lit rooms are the locations for various acts of depravity.

In the premiere episode – subtitled “Checking In” -- these include drug addicts shooting up, a pair of ghostly children feeding on a corpse, two young female tourists from Sweden being tortured by Kathy Bates, and a sex foursome that ends with Lady Gaga and Matt Bomer stabbing two naked victims in their throats and then gorging themselves on their blood. 

Hey, if this is the kind of entertainment you enjoy absorbing in your spare time, then knock yourself out. I’ve never been exactly prudish about on-screen violence -- either in movies or TV shows. But it’s also true that the extremes TV producers go to these days to depict ritualistic murders as realistically as possible has given me fodder for countless TV columns and blog posts over the years, so maybe I should be grateful to them.

Still, the attraction of horror stories is a mystery to me. Perhaps there’s an aspect of thrill-seeking in the enjoyment of filmed entertainment centered on prodigious bloodsucking and the spectacle of fair-haired undead children standing mysteriously still at the ends of long hotel corridors (something we’ve seen before, by the way, most notably in “The Shining”).

If there’s a storyline in “AHS: Hotel,” it seems to be this: The residents of the hotel are poised to have their freedom to take drugs, have sex and commit murder curtailed or taken away because their building appears to have been purchased by a real estate investor from New York.

Under the circumstances, it is difficult to side with the hotel people, since they’re a group of hateful sadists. In fact, despite all of its high style -- scenes filmed through fish-eye lenses and the like -- “American Horror Story” often comes across as a garden variety example of a horror movie.

Wednesday night’s season premiere, for example, starts with the two comely Swedes coming to the hotel after discovering its bargain rates online. Moments after they enter this woebegone hostelry, your mind begins to scream at them to leave and go elsewhere. But they remain true to all such scenarios seen in horror movies and TV shows since the beginning of time: They stay and live to regret it -- right up until the moment Lady Gaga slashes one of their throats with a fingernail.

“AHS: Hotel” boasts a notable cast. In addition to Bomer, Lady Gaga and Kathy Bates, there’s Wes Bentley as a troubled cop, Chloe Sevigny as his wife and Cheyenne Jackson as the investor from New York. Jessica Lange, seen in previous “AHS” seasons, apparently sat this one out.

Lady Gaga appears to have taken Lange’s place as the ensemble’s nominal star. In the first episode of “AHS: Hotel,” Gaga is the worst actor in the show -- a pop star pretending to be an actor by posing her way through the role.

In addition to all the horror being perpetrated within the hotel, a ritualistic killer is also on the loose leaving corpses in various states of mutilation (eyes gouged out, a severed tongue, entrails exposed). How this killer will connect to the goings-on inside the Hotel Cortez is not made clear in Episode One.

Almost predictably, the episode concludes with the Eagles’ song “Hotel California,” and cuts to the end-credits just when you hear the song’s final lines: “You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.” Ooh -- that’s so deep!

The song is wrong, though. The truth is, you can leave. And unlike those hapless tourists from Sweden, you can just skip this “Hotel” and go elsewhere.

“American Horror Story: Hotel” premieres Wednesday (Oct. 7) at 10 Eastern on FX.