This piece contains spoilers for the first three episodes of American Horror Story’s 13th season, which premiered September 24.
Perhaps it’s time for Ryan Murphy to give up on the horror genre. A week after Netflix launched the fourth season of Monster, which prompted Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi to declare that “the most equitable thing Monster could do is stop talking,” American Horror Story: 13 delivered the anthology series’ most incoherent debut in its decade-plus of existence. The Shards, Murphy’s collaboration with Bret Easton Ellis that was released over the summer, wasn’t much better, nor was The Beauty before it. At this point, Murphy — who co-wrote AHS: 13 with Brad Falchuk and directed the first of three episodes that arrived Thursday night on FX and Hulu — might be wise to turn his attention away from scares and focus on that Glee reboot he apparently has on the front burner. Trotting out this try-hard trifecta of confusing, uninspired installments in a year that’s seen so many entertaining, thought-provoking additions to the horror genre? How embarrassing to put this shit on TV when Widow’s Bay just won 14 Emmys!
Murphy has said AHS: 13 would feel “like the Avengers,” and it does have a bit of a Doomsday vibe, resurrecting several characters who were presumed dead to battle some sort of evil existential threat. Exactly what existential threat? After the first three episodes, it remains unclear, adding to the sense that the show doesn’t know what story it’s trying to tell. That isn’t helped by the similarities between this premise and the one for Apocalypse, a.k.a. American Horror Story season eight, which was a crossover between seasons one, three, and five the saw the characters team up to thwart the end of the world. Not only does 13 seem to be copying Marvel, it’s also kind of copying itself.
These early episodes suggest several figures from previous American Horror Story seasons are in the process of making a deal with the devil that gives them supreme power. But 13 is so intent on maintaining a sense of mystery while it assembles its familiar faces that it’s damn near impossible to get a sense of what’s at stake. The show seems to hope that the thrill of fan service will do the heavy lifting, shoving one seemingly meaningful cameo appearance after another in front of the camera. Emma Roberts is here as her character from Coven for a few seconds! So is Evan Peters as both Kai from AHS: Cult and Tate from AHS: Murder House — in the same scene! Sarah Paulson is, as always, present and accounted for in the form of Cordelia Goode, her character from Coven, though she’ll apparently reprise more of her roles from the AHS Non-Cinematic Universe in future episodes.
Most significantly, Jessica Lange returns to American Horror Story for the first time since Apocalypse, once again taking on her season-one role as Constance, the nosy neighbor who lived next door to the Murder House. (Like Paulson, Lange will also inhabit more of her previous characters later this season.) In the third episode, Constance tells her son Tate that he must usher the Black Dahlia, a.k.a. Elizabeth Short — played here and in seasons one and eight by Mena Suvari — to a speakeasy that might also be a portal to hell. (The place is called Club Hell because I guess Satan didn’t have time to come up with a better name.) “You do your part down there and there’s a place for us in the future,” Constance advises him. Since we don’t yet fully understand what sort of future Constance is hoping to achieve, her words don’t carry the gravitas the writers seem to think they do.
Constance also serves as a caregiver to an old, ailing man called Mr. Nas, a Nosferatu-like figure who makes The Simpsons’s Montgomery Burns look fit and frisky. This is where her path intersects with home-hospice worker Ben (Joey Pollari, a recent Murphy favorite who’s appeared in two Monsters and The Beauty within the past year), whom Constance mentors in the art of giving sponge baths. “Swish that old thing around in the Jean Naté suds,” she commands, referring to cleaning Mr. Nas’s penis with the most ’80s-coded bath liquid known to humankind. American Horror Story loves nothing more than making viewers squirm.
Well, maybe one thing: being ferociously unsubtle. See, Ben reports for duty not long after the plane crash that opens the season premiere, following a laughably lazy initial sequence of him boarding a flight to St. Vincent and the Grenadines to join his girlfriend, Kira (Riverdale’s Madelaine Petsch), on a birthday trip. Kira is a Swiftie who, like her pop idol, believes the number 13 portends good luck; Ben, wouldn’t you know it, has triskaidekaphobia, an obsessive fear of the number 13 that makes him particularly nervous about this journey. Kira was born on the 13th, and her birthday this year takes place on Friday the 13th. She is so excited to celebrate herself and the number that she strolls into the airport wearing a T-shirt that says “Thirteen” on it while the Johnny Cash song “Thirteen” plays on the soundtrack. She then boards her flight to find 13 of her friends in their seats, all wearing “Thirteen” shirts as well. “She is really hitting the 13 extra hard, right?” remarks Winter (Billie Lourd) — making a reappearance from Cult — during a later episode, confirming AHS is at least self-aware enough to make fun of itself before viewers can.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” Ben asks before takeoff. Well, the plane could go down and break up mid-flight, which is exactly what it does, leaving him as one of the only survivors. That crash seems to coincide with a storm Cordelia warns later in the episode is a “harbinger of doom,” which suggests Ben is a significant figure and it’s probably not a coincidence that he shares a name with Dylan McDermott’s character in Murder House. But in the first three episodes, he’s mostly a nonentity, a character vessel through which the audience can get reacquainted with Constance. Lange, bless her, lends some stability to this narratively shaky material through her performance, effectively conveying a mix of vulnerability and grit as Constance. “Age is the ultimate cruelty and proof to me that there is no God,” she announces darkly to Ben at one point in one of the few lines of dialogue that actually packs a direct punch.
The idea that caring for the elderly and/or frail is a form of horror is an interesting idea these first three episodes nominally touch on in the scenes involving Mr. Nas but do not bother exploring further. Nearly a quarter of the way into its (wait for it) 13-episode season, AHS is much more intent on gathering some of the finest actors in the business — Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates, and Frances Conroy are among the other AHS alumnae due to make appearances in future episodes — and giving them even more nonsensical material than usual to work with. Watching the season gesture vaguely toward some sort of deal with the devil, it’s hard not to think of the familiar joke that these actors made their own cursed pact when they joined the Murphyverse, dooming themselves to a series of diminishing returns. As self-aware as AHS can be, it’s improbable (though not impossible) this allusion is intentional; these actors must enjoy the experience since they keep coming back for more. But as a viewer, at least, watching American Horror Story feels more than ever like being stuck in some sort of hell.
