‘It’s a filthy goddamn helpless world’: Reimagining columbine, tate langdon and the spectre of school shooters

You cannot watch the opening sequence of ‘Piggy Piggy’ without recalling the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, and it is these similarities that caused many media outlets to state that the series, already known for transgressive depictions of rape and murder, had ‘gone too far’. This article compares the fictional West Field High shooting with media reports of the Columbine shooting, and examines how the series reimagines the massacre - in keeping with American Horror Story’s (2011-2018) blending of the horror genre with real-life events in American history. By exploring stylistic and narrative choices made in Murder House, this article demonstrates how Tate Langdon is aligned to the perpetrators of Columbine, allowing Tate to occupy an intriguing space at the juncture between real-life trauma and fictional representation. This article details Tate Langdon’s subsequent adoption into the True Crime Community on Tumblr.com, where he often appears alongside the Columbine killers in fan products. Through an interrogation of how Tate is seen as an archetypal ‘twisted dream boy’, this article makes a connection between the depiction of Tate, the spectre of Columbine that is evoked within American Horror Story: Murder House and the under-researched area of the serial killer fandom.