American Horror Story: NYC

“Have you seen Seven yet? It was made for you.”

By mid-October 1995, at least a half-dozen people, most of whom had never met, friends from high school and college and work, all used the same phrase to describe an urban cop drama that was keeping them up nights and—it seems—making them think of me: It was made for you.

Dutifully, sometime around Halloween, I found a theater still offering screenings. A couple hours later, I wandered back to my car in shock, not just wondering what sort of monster people thought I was but reeling from one of the most potent gut punches produced in Hollywood.

I ached and reveled for days. It was a masterpiece. It was a nightmare. It was a glimpse of a world that I never wanted to experience but which felt like home from the first shot. I’ve seen thousands of horror moves in the almost thirty years since, chasing the power and emotion of the final act of Seven.

Today we’ve come full circle, if not narratively then thematically. Today, I feel for the modern me, just out of high school, out there somewhere drinking a Mtn Dew, hanging with friends, hearing, “You’ve got to see American Horror Story: NYC. It was made for you.”

* * *

“I gave up after Murder House,” Me 2.0 might reply. Or maybe Coven. Or maybe they made it all the way to Apocalypse. At eleven seasons and counting, American Horror Story is the NCIS of horror serials. It’s bid farewell to most of its original cast but trudges through year after year, captivating a big enough audience to continue on despite an internet Greek chorus singing its self-inflicted failures before the credits can roll each week.

Bucking trends, American Horror Story: NYC foregoes self-referential and cheeky humor for rare authenticity and earnestness. Rock-solid storytelling is at the vanguard, borne on the shoulders of three-dimensional characters possessing strengths and failings, aspirations, fears. After seasons of ensembles uttering made-for-television witticisms, NYC presents a collection of men and women in the eponymous location during the summer of 1981, living.

Perhaps this autumn of 2022 is the moment for it. Maybe a world still telling itself that the global pandemic really is behind us is a world ready to experience the story of marginalized people discovering a sickness about to sweep across the world and claim the lives of over 40 million people. The pain is real, and deeply personal, but we’re viewing from a place of perceived safety. NYC has all the trappings of another season of American Horror Story, but it has something that most other seasons do not. Where prior stories are built on urban legend, folklore, or grandiose exaggerations of actual crime, here we have—at the heart—truth.

* * *

Of course, there’s a bogeyman. Every American Horror Story needs one. And, naturally, multiple storylines weave throughout the broad cast, intertwining character arcs in unexpected ways. Unlike several other seasons (I’m looking at you, Asylum), NYC comes together rather quickly, allowing ample time to deliver a focused punch when the end comes.

What elevates NYC beyond its more recent cousins is the placement of the real—which is to say “real life”—killer within the flow of the season. What at first seems like a strange subplot, not even tangential to the primary arc of the Mai Tai serial killer, gradually shifts across multiple episodes to demand attention. As it grows, it remains mysterious, never absent but always in the background. NYC keeps you focused on the symptoms while the source grows stronger in plain view. Only when the serial killer arc ends before the finale, do we face the emotional crux of the season and realize the juggernaut it’s become.

Historical accuracy, used in seasons like AHS: 1984 for quaint nods and the occasional sight gag, ratchets up the tension. The world is slower, with results coming in 7-10 days, and phone calls requiring a wall jack. Because the characters are so well-drawn, and sufficient time is devoted to underscore their courage and compassion and, yes, flaws, we are vulnerable to the impact of what comes last. We share their horror when strange rashes appear which ointments cannot cure. When common fungal infections present life-threatening risk. When routine lab work turns up anemia in people who should be in peak physical shape. We experience the reality that 1981 and New York City were unprepared to diagnose a disease whose only symptoms were the other infections it rendered deadly.

The world of NYC is cold in a tragically familiar way. It is an era marked by a deadly pathogen and othering, only instead of a “China Virus” and rampant hate crimes against Asian Americans, American Horror Story presents a mischaracterized “gay virus” from which an apparently disinterested nation is willing to look the other way. It is a season that could have wrapped its arms around any number of sermons, but it presents its findings without speech or eulogy and is stronger because of it. NYC doesn’t tell you what to feel. It makes you feel it.

* * *

Before NYC premiered, press focused on the return of Billie Lourd and Zachary Quinto, both of whom are excellent in their rolls. Quinto, who embodies handsome, wealthy Sam with absolute abandon, shines both as the host of decadent orgies and a late 20th-century Scrooge facing ghosts. Dennis O’Hare, another American Horror Story alum, brings some of the season’s best comic relief as Henry, the barfly with so much more going on than is first obvious. This is American Horror Story, after all; a certain amount of convolution is the price of entry.

The real show stealers are the pair of Charlie Carver as Adam Carpenter and Joe Mantello as Gino Barelli, investigators from a local paper who try to unravel the mystery of the Mai Tai Killer only to eventually face the reality that something much worse is stalking their community.

It’s a bold move naming a character Adam Carpenter. The dual biblical references to the first man and the Christ demand scrutiny into every action he takes. How will he fulfill the promise to change the world, and how early can we spot what’s going to happen? Adam embodies redemption for his lover, symbolizes the perseverance of an entire culture as he struggles to prepare the world for a virus he’s only begun to comprehend, and he offers the literal hope of a future generation as an expectant father. That’s a lot for any single character, but in Carver’s hands, as well as his strong jaw and emotive stare, this list of plot elements becomes a window into a singular quest for survival.

Mantello, who also appears in American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy’s 1994 movie The Normal Heart which covers the same New York City summer from a dramatic perspective, brings an air of experience, wisdom, and unflagging vitality to the role of newspaperman Gino Barelli. As Batman to Carver’s Robin, they brave the most dangerous areas of the city—some of which sparkle and others that brood—tirelessly fighting first to understand, and later to be heard. Mantello doesn’t just portray Gino, a veteran, a writer, the world-wise man with the connections and perspective to almost piece together what’s happening—he embodies him in a performance that sticks with you as you wander away from the screen, trying to process the combination of what you just saw and the knowledge that so much of it was not fiction.

* * *

The horror director creates tension through revealing details to the audience that the victim cannot know. The phone is disconnected. The chain by the apartment door isn’t just hanging, it’s still swaying. The knife block is missing the carving knife.

In American Horror Story: NYC danger builds in plain sight without assuming center stage until the final act. Fate creeps through the season, never hiding, and even a passing knowledge of the AIDS epidemic is enough to lay bare everything the characters cannot learn before it’s too late. We know where the carving knife went, and the damage it’s about to do, because for us it is history.

As the victims begin to understand that something far worse than a serial killer stalks them, we know what that something is. We root for them—some of the most consistent, sympathetic, and realistically drawn human beings in the venerable series’ long roll call. The end is unavoidable, but we lend our unreasoning hope to that of their loved ones as the epidemic takes root.

What makes NYC so effective is the same horrible alchemy that David Fincher unleashed with Seven almost three decades ago. Both stories intersect in the dark core of their horror. When we learn what’s in the box, we stand next to Brad Pitt’s Detective Mills. In the same way, Ryan Murphy puts us in the chair next to the hospital bed, wishing for a reprieve from something we know is inevitable. In both cases, it is the horror of the survivors we feel, rather than the victims.

We sit in that chair as people who got sick after us waste away faster, confusing doctors as experimental drugs fail them even as they prolong our lives. We sit watching loved ones, who were celebrated for their heroism just a short time ago, lose their ability to comprehend the world and wheeze their last breaths staring at something we can’t see.

NYC captures the evil genius driving the most poignant horror, from Poe’s narrator mourning poor Annabel Lee to Charlie McGee’s father in Firestarter facing the Shop for his daughter’s future to Detective Mills staring into a box and realizing his life is over. As in life, pain is not for the dead but the survivors, and true pain lies in losing those we love. NYC is a resurrection for American Horror Story. It will horrify you, but it will extract a piece of you along the way. Most frightening of all, maybe it was made for you.