People love to be scared whenever they watch a horror movie but after watching “American Horror Story”, people are convinced that no one behind the camera understands what makes for good horror. As each season progresses, the series has become more prone to laughs than scares, with a penchant for increasing absurdity and a complete disinterest in maintaining a coherent narrative or character introspection.
The kills in the series aren’t particularly inventive, and no amount of stunt casting or linked universes has made it feel new. Yet there is solace in something as trashy and mindless as “American Horror Story”, a show that is only as competent as it needs to be, which isn’t very competent at all.
Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story was a watershed moment not only for mainstream horror programming on television, but it is also largely responsible for the massive resurgence of anthology storytelling that has swept the medium. American Horror Story began as a daring and exciting new genre experiment, but as the series approaches its tenth anniversary, with at least three more seasons on the way, it has gradually devolved into a parody of itself and the genre.
It’s almost become a foregone conclusion that any American Horror Story season will begin with a compelling angle and tease some creative scares, only to gradually lose steam around the season’s halfway point. The development of the new spinoff series American Horror Stories has so much potential because it appears to directly amend American Horror Story’s biggest problem: its ability to sustain a season-long story.
It might sound like an insult and it very well could be, but people couldn’t help but be pleasantly surprised while watching the first two episodes of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s spin-off, American Horror Stories. It’s deeply stupid from the start, but it approaches the story it’s chosen to tell first with a sense of levity.
