There's a Very Indonesian Problem at the Heart of 'American Horror Story'

The US anthology series American Horror Story has a knack for creating memorable villains. There's the chilling creepiness of the Langdon family, the nightmarish Twisty the Clown, and the sheer terror of The Butcher. But few characters are more dangerous than this season's fear-mongering TV news reporter Beverly Hope (Adina Porter). She's not one of the main characters, or even the most compelling one on screen—that distinction is reserved for Kai Anderson (Evan Peters), a manipulative burn-it-all-down cult leader. But she is, by far, the clearest representative of the dark voyeurism that simmers beneath the surface of Indonesian society.

The central theme to this season American Horror Story, dubbed AHS: Cult, is a dark parable about "the loss of communication as a nation," according to series regular Sarah Paulson. The series uses the US presidential election to hone-in on the feelings of alienation, confusion, betrayal, and sheer joy that many Americans felt in before, during, and after the campaign season. Paulson plays Ally Mayfair-Richards, a liberal restauranteur who suffers a complete breakdown when Donald Trump wins the presidency. She plays opposite Kai, a deeply disturbed cellar dweller hell-bent on spreading a wave of terror across his quaint suburban town in the American midwest. By the fifth episode of AHS: Cult, we learn that Kai's cultish group has expanded to include nearly everyone in Ally's support group. He's turned her baby sitter, her neighbors, and even her wife/ business partner Ivy into one of his bloodthirsty clowns.

But this murderous crew learns a disturbing truth early on—their crimewave needs to be packaged and sold by the media if they hope to inspire the level of terror Kai seems to crave. Enter Beverly. She's a local newscaster, the kind of journalist who stands in front of a camera and reports on car accidents and home fires. But her position gives her the kind of access Kai's cult needs to spread news of their terrible deeds. Soon Beverly is committing the murders herself, killing a younger rival for the anchor's seat and then her boss in a series of brutal slayings all caught on camera.

Beverly then packages the killings as the work of a mysterious, murderous gang who brands the homes of their victims with a sloppy spray paint smiley face. She says this kind of crime is on the rise before she goes full conspiracy theory on everyone spinning off to mentions of nighttime chemical trucks and government plots. She drives people to a paranoid place and leaves them wanting "change," regardless of the cost.

Here's why all of this matters: Beverly's paranoid propaganda works so well because her viewers are drawn to the scenes of carnage. They can't help themselves. The old adage on television news goes, "if it bleeds, it leads." There's a reason it's true. Some people will always be drawn to stories of violence and tragedy with a morbid curiosity.

Just look at some recent cases here in Indonesia. When Jessica Wongso murdered her friend with a poison-spiked cup of coffee at a trendy Central Jakarta restaurant, curious Indonesians flocked to the eatery to sample a cup of the same Vietnamese coffee that left a young woman dead —sans the cyanide, of course. “Since it happened, business is booming,” one waitress told a reporter with the New York Times.

Or consider how fast graphic photos of the victims of terrorist attacks, shootings, and traffic accidents hit our WhatsApp groups. When a Central Jakarta Starbucks was hit by ISIS-linked terrorists, bloody images of the carnage were spread on WhatsApp almost immediately.

We live in a country where motorists routinely stop their vehicles to get out and stare at the scene of a bad traffic accident. A place where a video of two sisters jumping off an apartment building to their deaths was shared on Twitter by a large news site without any warning whatsoever, where a TV news channel once aired live footage of the victims of a plane crash floating dead in the ocean, keeping the camera trained on the bodies for several minutes before cutting the feed.

We have a habit of sending these kinds of horrific images to our friends without a second thought. Sure, these images often come with a warning telling people to stay safe, but why do we need to send graphic videos of dead bodies just to remind our friends and family to be careful out there?

What's behind this fascination with the gruesome? Do we need to see the images to truly understand what's going on? Do we suffer from a lack of empathy, or too much of it? Are we addicted to fear? To mystery? Or are we just used to seeing these kinds of images because everyone else keeps sharing them?

It's important to remember just how much information most Indonesians see in a single day—and how new this really all is for a lot of people. Indonesia has one of the fastest growing rates of internet penetration in the world. In 2016, a report found that the rate of new internet connections was growing by more than 50 percent every year. There's a lot of people going online for the first time, entering a world where they are suddenly bombarded with new information by the second.

So, of course, only the most-sensational stories grab their attention. And what's more sensational than a graphic story about a crime wave or a grisly traffic accident? Beverly, in AHS: Cult, knows this. And we all know it too. It's why fake news and hoaxes are so easily believed while the real stories get ignored. Fake stories can be crafted to exploit our darkest curiosities in a way reality just can't, at least not with the same frequency.

"Indonesians lack an interest in reading, so we've become stubborn," explained Garcia Rahsti, a social media expert. "We read the news that comes first rather than the news that's accurate. We are infatuated with competitiveness, the ones who get to know the news are perceived as being the smartest. But when their news turns out to be fake, they throw a fit."

We're all gullible and easily convinced that a story is real. So, of course, Beverly is able to turn a few murders—murders she is complicit in—into a crime wave. But who should we really be scared of, the cult of murderous clowns or the newscaster who turned them into a phenomenon?