Easily the highlight of an uneven but enjoyable third outing for American Horror Story, newcomer to the series Kathy Bates flexed her acting chops to give a complicated, funny, relentlessly dark and brutal take on one of history's great mass murderers - Madame Delphine LaLaurie, a notorious racist and torturer. Delphine soon finds herself immortal after being cursed by Marie Laveau, and awakened in the modern day in order to be a bargaining chip between Jessica Lange's selfish Supreme Fiona and the modern, ageless Marie. In the series opener, LaLaurie discovers a dalliance between one of her beleaguered daughters and a house servant, Bastien. In revenge, she tortures Bastien and then sews the head of a bull to his head, transforming him into a minotaur in a sequence that is equally brutal and mesmerising in its cruelty. Bates sells the role of Delphine with panache, and while she almost softens down the line, at the start she is at her genial finest, blending elegance with senseless and bigoted violence that's tough to stomach.
