Thoughts On "American Horror Stories"

With “American Horror Story: Double Feature” on the very near horizon , I wanted to share my thoughts on the spin off series “American Horror Stories”.

I’ve been a fan of the original series and its creators for years. I’ve watched every season to the end aside from “1984” for reasons I will explain in another review, so I was naturally excited when I heard about this new series. Just the idea of a different story for each episode sounded like a fun new idea to give the fans before the new season and I was very much looking forward to it. However, upon watching this new series, I was left underwhelmed and vastly disappointed.

First off, a note to Ryan Murphy himself, PLEASE stop going back to “Murder House”! Everything that can be done, has been done with that story line. It worked beautifully for “Apocalypse”, but to follow that with a weak two part story with very uninteresting characters, and then closing the season with another story using the location and storyline that had less interesting characters and a story that no sense to the AHS timeline whatsoever was beyond frustrating.

Aside from two episodes I will dive into in a moment, the majority of the stories in this series were bland and laughable. The strongest of the weak I would say is “Drive In” but only really kicking off when we finally get to the actual drive and the story behind why the film is cursed. Also, I would have made the character “D.” the leading love interests. The uncertainty a cis girl has over losing her virginity in a horror story setting has been done a million times. If you’re going to have an interesting Non-Binary Trans character, don’t kill them in their third scene or turn them into a monster. Give them some more dimension than that. Plus, that would have made a much more interesting story with the cis male love interest that I personally haven’t seen before. This show was small enough where it was something that could have been tested out with a small show like this. This would have been an amazing opportunity to open more doors for more minority and marginalized groups than simply having a walk on and walk off character like “Drive In” had. But this is just my opinion and what I personally would have done differently. As far as the explanation for why the film is cursed and the ending of the story, that was brilliant and I wouldn’t change a thing about those two details.

All of the other weak stories are filled with horror clichés, which would be fine if these writers were adding new spins on these clichés.

The two best episodes for me were “BA’AL” and “Feral”. These stories had very good writing, great direction, great building of tension, and amazing actor performances that made any of the smaller issues unnoticeable.

With two out of seven stories being good, there is SOMETHING there. There is SOMETHING there that can lead to something unique, and maybe even brilliant.

I know everyone involved with this series tried their best to create around the restriction and budget cuts all caused by the COVID 19 Pandemic. So for this, I can’t really blame anyone for the finished product we got. In the same breath, with the tease of two great stories, I had just hoped this show would be something more.

The future for “American Horror Story” as a franchise is a good one, despite this hit and miss series. And I hope they prove me right with “American Horror Story: Double Feature”.