Eighty seconds, and not one word of dialogue. That is everything FX handed over on Thursday for the thirteenth season of its flagship horror anthology, and somehow it lands harder than most full trailers manage in two and a half minutes. The teaser for “American Horror Story: 13” is a corridor of red wallpaper and candle smoke where nearly every door opens on somebody we have already watched die, and it does not bother explaining a single one of them. There is no plot here. There is no logline. There is a dinner table set for thirteen, and a lot of very familiar faces coming to eat.
It arrived with the part fans have actually been waiting on since last Halloween, which is a date. The season premieres Thursday, September 24 at 9pm ET on FX and streams the same night on Hulu, with Disney+ carrying it internationally the following day, and the rollout is stranger than the usual weekly grind. Thirteen half-hour episodes, three of them on premiere night, three more the following Thursday, then pairs every week until the finale on October 29. Half-hour AHS is a genuinely new shape for a show that has spent fifteen years in the hour-long format, and once you know that, the teaser’s chopped, restless editing rhythm reads less like style and more like a warning about pacing. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for American Horror Story and every returning character the teaser puts back on screen.
The teaser for “American Horror Story: 13” is a corridor of red wallpaper and candle smoke where nearly every door opens on somebody we have already watched die, and it does not bother explaining a single one of them.”
It opens on a lunge. Four seconds in, Twisty the Clown (John Carroll Lynch) comes at the lens out of a black hallway, that stitched grin catching the light for barely a beat before the cut yanks him away again. Then the palette announces itself and never really loosens its grip: an ornate iron grille lit furnace-orange, a chandelier burning at the far end of a long red corridor, an empty wheelchair parked against the wall with nobody in it. Whoever cut this spends the opening ten seconds teaching you how to read a hallway, because the rest of the piece is going to ask you to do it over and over.
At the ten-second mark the first proper resurrection arrives, and it is a deep cut rather than an obvious one. Evan Peters is back as Kai Anderson, the teal-dyed hair and the mustard waffle-knit sweater from ‘Cult’ reproduced right down to the stitch, sitting behind a row of guttering candles while the frame smears and doubles around him like a signal breaking up. A wheelchair rolls away down that same red corridor with someone in orange sitting in it. A spoked wheel turns slowly on carpet. A gramophone horn swings past the camera. None of it is explained, and the smearing effect is doing real work rather than decorating the shot, because it is the visual language of a person being dragged back through something they should not be able to come back through.
Then the teaser finds its actual centrepiece, and it is a table. At twenty-three seconds Jessica Lange sits at the head of a banquet hall in a high-necked black dress, blonde hair set in hard finger waves, staring straight down the barrel of the lens with an expression that could strip paint. The table runs away from her in both directions into the dark, and every single place setting carries the same number printed on the plate: 13. It is the strongest image in the whole thing by a comfortable distance, and it is also the thesis statement. Somebody has invited all of them. Lange is playing Constance Langdon, the ‘Murder House’ matriarch who has been the closest thing this anthology has to a queen, and seating her at the head of that table is not what anyone would call a subtle piece of casting.
The middle stretch does something we did not expect, which is to abandon the red entirely. For a few seconds the teaser drops into a bleached white corridor with tall windows blowing out into pure light, Gabourey Sidibe moving fast through the frame, everything cold and washed and wrong in the opposite direction. Then it dives straight into pure texture: milk, something pale and awful surfacing in it, and black tar pouring down over a white dome until it settles into the shape of a red 13. Most shows put that kind of abstraction in a main-title sequence nobody watches. This one is running its title sequence in the middle of the trailer, and it is easily the most confident thirty seconds of the piece.
At thirty-two seconds a hairless sphynx cat turns its head in deep red light, half wrapped in white cloth, and it is worth stopping on because the same animal is snarling right across FX’s official key art with a red eye and a mouth full of teeth. Then Angela Bassett arrives and the camera finally stops moving. Marie Laveau kneels on a red rug inside a ring of white candles with a burlap doll cradled against her chest, a fan of long pins laid out neatly on the floor in front of her, bookshelves receding into black behind her head. The next shot pushes in on the doll’s face and lets you count the details: a stitched mouth, a black star, and a button eye with 13 printed across it.
A few seconds later the teaser gives you thirteen black leeches arranged in a perfect ring on red damask, and by then the pattern is impossible to miss. This season is going to count things at you until the number stops being a season label and starts being a threat. The last third is the reunion proper, and it is where the teaser stops teasing. Several Rubber Men in zippered black latex tangle together in the dark with one bare, red-lit arm reaching across the pile, which is a notable choice given the original was famously a single figure in a single house. There are clearly more than one now. Peters turns up again in a red-drenched library, framed dead centre between the legs of a step ladder. A woman in 1940s curls with a white gardenia pinned above her ear turns her face into the light and reveals a Glasgow smile cut ear to ear, which is Mena Suvari back as Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. And a blond man in a burgundy smoking jacket sits at a huge bath of milk in a thicket of black sunflowers while two eels arrange themselves into that numeral again. The teaser never names him and neither will we, because guessing is how bad reporting starts.
Then it stops being coy altogether. At fifty-one seconds the screen fills with a cast card printed red on red, and it runs to two full pages, which tells you something about the size of this thing. Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates, Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd and Gabourey Sidibe on the first, then Leslie Grossman, Joey Pollari, Jamie Brewer, Frances Conroy, Paul Anthony Kelly, John Carroll Lynch, Orlando Jones and John Waters on the second. Conroy’s name is the one that should stop you cold. She had stepped away from acting, and she is coming back as Myrtle Snow, which is the sort of detail a cast card can deliver in half a second and a press release would take three paragraphs to bury.
Sarah Paulson gets the best piece of acting in the teaser and she gets roughly three seconds to do it. Cordelia Goode stands at an oval mirror in black, one hand raised toward the glass, and the reflection looking back does not seem remotely pleased to see her. That shot is doing more than atmosphere. Ryan Murphy has already said the quiet part out loud about how this season intends to handle its own history, telling press that some of the cast “will be playing two characters from two different seasons in the same scene,” and he has confirmed the production rebuilt Miss Robichaux’s Academy from the ground up. Putting Cordelia in front of a mirror is a fairly loud way to trail an idea like that. Then Twisty gets the last word, because of course he does. His face fills the frame in two escalating close-ups before he charges the camera in a blur of red and white until the image can no longer hold him, and the piece cuts hard to black tar crawling into a 13, the AHS 13 logo, and a card reading ORIGINAL SERIES, SEPT 24. Eighty seconds, no dialogue, no plot, nothing you could reasonably call information. For a season built entirely out of the audience’s own memory, that is exactly the right amount to hand over, and after ‘Delicate’ and the long quiet that followed it, this is the first time in a good while that this show has looked like it knows precisely what it is and who it is for.
What Do You Think? Is that banquet table a literal gathering of every AHS killer under one roof, or is Constance simply hosting the dead in her own house the way she always has? Does the half-hour format make this the tightest season the show has ever run, or does thirteen thirty-minute chapters just mean thirteen ideas that never get finished? And who is the blond man at the milk bath, a genuinely new face or somebody we already know wearing a very good jacket?
Catch up properly: every American Horror Story season in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s American Horror Story timeline.
See you on the next binge!
