The fifth episode in Season 3 of the horror anthology series American Horror Stories is centered around the winner of the Tony Awards, the Oscars, and the Television Academy Awards, Daniel Hausman-Burger. Apparently his son, Roman, has been missing for quite a while, and in order to cope with it, Daniel has buried himself in his next project. He has cut himself off from the world because he feels that there’s nothing out there for him to explore. His agent, Aaron, assures him that every law enforcement authority is doing their best to seek out Roman, so Daniel should come out of the bubble he has created in his house and re-enter society. Daniel refuses to do so. He tells Aaron to leave him alone, and he walks back into his workspace to focus on his script. However, when he walks through the door to his room, he ends up getting transported to a mall. As he tries to figure his way out of there, he sees a dark, shadowy figure whispering into the ear of a masked kid who seems to be Roman. But when Daniel tries to reach out to the child, he inexplicably returns to his home. What’s going on? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
Daniel Finds Out Roman Is Dead
After returning from the liminal space and having a change of wardrobe, Daniel calls up Aaron to apologize for acting so rudely with him when he came all the way out to his house to check up on his well-being. That’s when Daniel learns that the vision of the mall wasn’t a hallucination; he was actually gone from the real world for three whole weeks. Daniel is shocked, and when Aaron tells him to meet him right away, he decides to rendezvous with his agent at a restaurant called the Muse. Daniel is a bit annoyed to see his ex-wife, Riva, sitting there with Aaron. He thinks he has been ambushed into an intervention of some sort, but he is shocked to learn that they’ve congregated there to break the news of Roman’s death to Daniel. The police found the kid’s body in the woods behind the playground on Latham Street two weeks after Daniel seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. He was buried in the ground with his red blanket.
There’s no news on the identity of the killer because the police are still pulling DNA and fingerprints from Roman’s body. This prompts Daniel to go on a weird rant about how hell exists parallel to our reality. He then promises to kill the person who has murdered Roman and walks out of the meeting with Riva and Aaron. He walks into the Muse’s bathroom and ends up in another version of the liminal space from before. This one looks like The Backrooms from all the creepypasta stories and 4chan threads from the late 2010s. Daniel tries to find a way out of the place and only finds a ladder leading to a vent. He avoids getting into it, but eventually is left with no option but to enter the dark hole. When he exits the end of that vent, he reaches a space filled with robes and masks. There’s a TV playing some movie (please let me know its name in the comments), and as soon as he switches the channel, a table full of all kinds of delicious food appears behind him. Daniel pulls out his Oscar trophy out of the roasted pig, and the robes and masks come to life as ominous figures to applaud him. Obviously, Daniel makes a run for it, but he is stopped in his tracks by a vision of Roman, who is bleeding from his eyes. As he tries to reach out to Roman, the masked figures in robes push Daniel back to reality.
Daniel Meets Another Backrooms Traveler
While coping with the bizarre altercation in The Backrooms, Daniel is seen staring at his gun. It seems for a second that he is going to use it upon himself to end his misery, but instead he chooses to go on some knockoff version of Google to research The Backrooms. This is where he comes across a YouTuber named Eli The Navigator who claims to have entered The Backrooms and recorded footage of it on his 8mm camera. Given how Daniel recognizes the green wallpaper and the mall, he decides to meet Eli. It turns out Eli is actually in jail. The reason he’s in there is because he killed a triathlete named Charlotte Hansley. Eli was driving, and he was on his phone to claim a coupon for dog food. He ran a red light and crashed into Charlotte. The impact didn’t kill the woman, but Eli didn’t call for help and watched her die.
To make things worse, Eli lied to the police that Charlotte ignored the stop sign and ran into his car, thereby absolving him of any blame. And the more he lied to himself that he wasn’t at fault for the death of an innocent woman, the farther he drifted away from reality. Apparently, that’s when he entered the liminal space known as The Backrooms. Eli theorizes that the human mind is hardwired to see only the surface of our reality, but there’s more to it that meets the eye. It’s only when a person loses their grip on reality by lying to themselves about something that they get access to this purgatory. This piece of information actually got to Daniel because he thought that Eli was insinuating that Daniel had done some criminal act, and that he was so deep in denial he was slipping into the backrooms. Eli said that if Daniel wants to free himself from this torturous process, he needs to be truthful about something that he has done in the past, or else he is going to keep alternating between reality and this liminal space until he completely loses himself. If it’s not clear already from all the snippets of Daniel and Roman, yes, Daniel has killed Roman. Why? Well, that’s the big question.
Daniel Killed Roman
At the end of American Horror Stories, episode 5, Daniel’s house is surrounded by the police. He calls up Aaron, who is heard lambasting him for killing his own son. He then gets a call from Riva, who is verbally abusing for obvious reasons. Daniel makes his way into his workspace, takes out his gun, and starts shooting at the police. The police return fire, and Daniel apparently dies. While falling to the floor, we get flashbacks of Daniel and Riva’s prickly altercations because of Daniel’s shortcomings as a husband and a father due to his job. Daniel walked out on his marriage, and then one day, while playing with Roman at the aforementioned park, he strangled Roman to death and then buried him. Now, as the life fades away from Daniel’s body, he re-enters The Backrooms and finds himself in front of a ghastly-looking figure, credited as The Red Woman, who is holding onto Roman’s dead body. They are surrounded by the ominous figures in masks and robes. Daniel knows that the only way to get out of there is by telling the truth about his involvement in Roman’s death. So, he promises that he is going to admit to the authorities that he has killed Roman and then pay for his sins if he is allowed to leave The Backrooms. The Red Woman seemingly lets him exit the liminal space and re-enter the real world. However, it quickly becomes clear that that’s not the case at all.
Daniel does leave The Red Woman’s lair, but he is made to sit in a waiting room where he is probably going to be punished or counseled for committing a heinous crime. He is given a token number, which reads 09223373032854775807, while the message board for the token number of the sinner who is currently in session reads 1, which means that Daniel is going to be in there for a very long time. So, yes, we don’t really get to know what pushed Daniel to kill Roman. Instead, the episode overexplains the concept of The Backrooms and manages to ruin the mystique that’s created by the lack of information around an urban myth born on the internet. Reducing something as confounding as The Backrooms to just a purgatory for criminals that is controlled by a demonic figure is so stupid. But what else can you expect from a “genius” like Ryan Murphy?
