American Horror Story: 13 Review: Ryan Murphy Finally Opens the Doors to Hell
WARNING. This post features spoilers for the first three episodes of American Horror Story: 13.
There are television shows that celebrate their history, and then there is American Horror Story. After fifteen years of haunted houses, witches, serial killers, demons, ghosts and enough dead characters to fill several cemeteries, Ryan Murphy has decided that the only sensible way to celebrate the show's thirteenth season is to bring almost everyone back from the dead.
It is gloriously excessive.
It is also, occasionally, completely ridiculous.
And after the first three episodes of American Horror Story: 13, it is still far too early to know which side of that line the season will ultimately land on.
The three-part premiere, released together on September 24, wastes very little time establishing that this is not going to be another self-contained chapter. Instead, it reaches backwards into the show's history, pulling characters and mythology from Murder House, Coven, Freak Show, Hotel and Cult into one increasingly strange supernatural story. The season has been designed as something of a greatest-hits collection, but there is an important distinction between nostalgia and storytelling. So far, 13 is attempting to do both.
The first episode introduces Ben DeSoto, played by Joey Pollari, a hospice worker with an intense fear of the number thirteen. His girlfriend Kira, meanwhile, has almost the opposite relationship with the number, embracing it as part of a planned celebration with thirteen friends. It is the kind of wonderfully unsubtle setup that American Horror Story has always enjoyed. The number is everywhere, and naturally, things go very badly.
A plane crash leaves Ben alive while Kira and the others are killed, and his survival eventually leads him to a bizarre hospice assignment in New York. His new patient is an elderly and deeply disturbing man named Nas, whose enormous penthouse occupies the thirteenth floor of the Apollyon building.
And looking after him is Constance Langdon.
Jessica Lange's return is the moment 13 stops feeling like another season of American Horror Story and starts feeling like an event. Constance remains one of the show's greatest characters because Lange never plays her as simply evil. There is always something else underneath the cruelty: vanity, grief, desperation, motherhood and an almost pathological obsession with preserving her family. Seeing her again, particularly after such a long absence, immediately gives the season a connection to the show's original mythology.
More importantly, Constance doesn't feel like a cameo.
She feels like she belongs here.
That is crucial, because 13 is going to live or die by the way it uses its returning characters. There is a very real danger that this becomes little more than a supernatural version of a cast reunion, where the audience applauds every familiar face but eventually realises there isn't much of a story underneath them.
Thankfully, the first three episodes suggest there may be something more substantial happening.
Nas is the biggest mystery.
He is grotesque, ancient and seemingly connected to the deaths occurring around him. When Ben's plane crashes, Nas reacts. When thirteen people are murdered at a clown school in Los Angeles, Nas reacts again. The number itself begins to feel less like a theme and more like a rule governing the entire story.
And then Twisty the Clown returns.
John Carroll Lynch's Twisty is one of those characters who requires almost no introduction. His appearance in Freak Show made him one of the franchise's most recognisable monsters, and his return here is pure AHS. He walks into a clown school and turns the entire thing into a bloodbath, leaving exactly thirteen victims behind.
It is excessive. It is grotesque. It is also exactly the kind of thing the show knows its audience wants.
The second episode is where the pieces begin to move closer together. Ben becomes increasingly suspicious of Nas and starts investigating the strange collection of objects and imagery surrounding him. Constance, meanwhile, remains evasive about what she knows, and the season begins to suggest that the Langdon family has somehow found a way to escape the limitations of death.
That revelation is where things become particularly interesting.
Adelaide returns.
Tate Langdon returns.
And then Evan Peters turns up as Kai Anderson.
Seeing Tate and Kai in the same room is so inherently absurd that it becomes almost brilliant. These are characters from completely different corners of American Horror Story, with completely different histories and personalities, now existing within the same story as if this has always been possible.
It shouldn't work.
Yet it does, largely because the performances are so familiar. Peters knows exactly what makes Tate Tate, and exactly what makes Kai Kai. The contrast between them gives the reunion scenes an energy that the season's exposition occasionally lacks.
The same is true of Emma Roberts' return as Madison Montgomery and Sarah Paulson's return as Cordelia Goode. The witches bring with them the world of Coven, and their presence gives the season another layer of mythology. Cordelia senses that something is wrong long before she understands what it is, while Madison remains, wonderfully, Madison.
There is something almost comforting about hearing these characters speak again.
And that may be the biggest strength of 13: it understands that familiarity itself can be frightening.
The third episode, Rauhnacht, pushes that idea considerably further. Constance hosts a bizarre Christmas gathering, bringing together characters who should never logically have been sitting around the same table. Winter Anderson arrives with Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, played once again by Mena Suvari. The party is supposedly celebrating Rauhnacht, the pagan period when the boundary between the living and the dead becomes particularly thin.
By this point, the show has stopped pretending that these characters are simply making guest appearances.
They are pieces of the same puzzle.
Elizabeth is told she will become one of thirteen important women, before being taken to Club Hell beneath the Apollyon. There, Wilhemina Venable appears and reveals the building's horrifying purpose: it is a portal to Hell.
It is an appropriately extravagant ending to the opening trilogy, but perhaps the most interesting thing about it isn't the revelation itself.
It is Constance.
Because for all the supernatural madness happening around her, Constance remains the emotional centre of these episodes. She has spent her entire existence trying to preserve her children and maintain some form of control over death. Now she appears to be participating in something that could fundamentally alter the relationship between the living and the dead.
That gives Lange something more interesting to play than simply being the returning face of Murder House.
It gives Constance a reason to be here.
And that distinction matters.
The danger with a season like this is that the audience becomes more interested in recognising references than understanding them. American Horror Story is clearly enjoying its own mythology. The returning characters, the repeated imagery, the familiar locations and the actors slipping back into roles they haven't played for years are all designed to reward longtime viewers.
But fan service can only carry a television series so far.
At some point, the audience needs to care about what happens next rather than simply enjoying who happens to walk through the door.
Fortunately, 13 has created enough of a mystery to keep that door open.
What exactly is Nas? Why does he appear connected to the deaths? Why is the number thirteen so important? Why are characters being brought back? What does Constance actually want? And why does Cordelia's sense of impending doom appear to be connected to everything happening in New York?
Those questions are considerably more interesting than simply asking which character will return next.
Visually, the season is also leaning into the kind of lavish gothic aesthetic that suits the franchise particularly well. The Apollyon penthouse is beautiful in the way American Horror Story locations are often beautiful: expensive, ornate and deeply uncomfortable. The show has always understood that horror doesn't necessarily need darkness. Sometimes the most unsettling place in the world is an immaculate room where something is very obviously wrong.
There is also a pleasing return to the atmosphere of the earlier seasons. Murder House, Coven and Hotel are obvious influences, and Murphy has described the new season as drawing particularly heavily from those worlds.
And, naturally, there is Jessica Lange standing in the middle of everything looking as though she has known the ending all along.
But the season is not flawless.
Ben remains the weakest part of the story. He is necessary as our entry point into this world, but compared with the returning characters around him, he doesn't yet possess the same magnetism. That may change as his connection to Nas and the wider mythology becomes clearer, but at the moment he often feels like the person whose job is to ask the questions the audience already wants answered.
The other concern is that 13 may simply have too much to prove.
There is an enormous amount of history being dragged into this season, and the temptation to constantly reward the audience with another familiar character must be enormous. The first three episodes occasionally feel less like a new chapter than an extremely expensive reminder of everything viewers loved about the old ones.
But then something happens, Constance appears, Cordelia appears, Tate appears and Twisty appears.
Yet somehow, despite all the absurdity, you remember why these characters mattered.
That is the strange achievement of American Horror Story: 13. It has taken one of television's messiest, most inconsistent franchises and discovered that its greatest asset may not be its mythology at all.
It is the people.
The performances.
The characters.
The history.
After three episodes, 13 isn't yet a great season. It is too crowded, too pleased with its own callbacks and occasionally far too chaotic for its own good.
But it is undeniably entertaining.
And more importantly, it has created a mystery strong enough to make the nostalgia worthwhile.
The first three episodes feel like Ryan Murphy has opened every door in the American Horror Story house at once. Behind one is Constance Langdon. Behind another is the Coven. Somewhere else is Twisty. Tate and Kai are somehow sharing the same universe. The witches are preparing for something they don't yet understand. And beneath it all sits Hell, waiting.
Whether the season can turn that extraordinary collection of characters into one satisfying story remains the real question.
For now, though, American Horror Story is back in familiar territory.
And perhaps, after fifteen years, the most frightening thing of all is that it finally seems to have remembered exactly what made us want to come back.