In July we ran a piece built on Ryan Murphy telling Entertainment Tonight that everybody had the thirteenth season of “American Horror Story” wrong. “Everybody thinks it’s a Coven season and it’s not,” he said. “It’s all the seasons.” It was a big claim from a man who makes big claims, and the honest position at the time was that we would believe it when we saw it. FX put the official trailer up on 10 September. We have now seen it, and he was not exaggerating.
Two minutes and twelve seconds, and it opens with Jessica Lange on a stage in a spotlight saying “welcome to the greatest show on Earth.” That is Elsa Mars from “Freak Show.” It closes with Lange again, in a different face entirely, delivering a line about ruling the world. That one is Constance Langdon from “Murder House.” Same trailer, same actress, two of the four characters Murphy promised she would be playing. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “American Horror Story: 13” trailer, including which legacy characters turn up, who the new cast member is playing, and the line the trailer ends on.
It was a big claim from a man who makes big claims, and the honest position at the time was that we would believe it when we saw it.”
The structure of the cut is a relay race between eras, and it moves quickly enough that you can miss a handover. Elsa gets the opening. Then a car door, a “get in,” and Evan Peters turns up in the back seat with the moustache and the flat mid-century delivery of James Patrick March out of “Hotel,” announcing that “it’s witch-hunting season.” That line has been read in some quarters as evidence that “Coven” is running the season after all, and you can see why, but it is worth noticing that the trailer has already changed installments twice before anyone mentions a witch.
The “Coven” block does arrive and it is the longest sustained stretch in the trailer. Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts) asks Cordelia Goode (Sarah Paulson) what she is sensing, and Cordelia’s answer is the closest thing the cut has to a thesis statement: “a harbinger of our doom. So much terrifying and vengeful death. Something wicked this way comes.” Later the coven is seen walking down a New Orleans street in formation, which is the shot the marketing knows people want. Madison also gets a properly unpleasant image, floating above her own bed with her eyes rolled back.
Then the trailer produces its actual news, and it is a casting reveal rather than a returning face. John Waters has joined “American Horror Story,” and he is playing a medical specialist called Mr. Phibes who works alongside Constance Langdon. He is the one who explains the season’s organising superstition: “13 stands for instability, chaos.” Casting the director of “Pink Flamingos” into a Ryan Murphy anthology is the kind of move that either sings or sits there, and naming him Phibes, after the Vincent Price character, tells you which register the show thinks it is in. Winter Anderson (Billie Lourd) then punctures him from off to one side: “he’s really riding that 13 thing extra hard, isn’t he?” That is the trailer being funny about its own premise, which is a good sign.
The rest of it is a parade, and the parade is the point. Kai Anderson calls this “our darkest time of year,” dragging “Cult” into the room. Twisty the Clown (John Carroll Lynch) resurfaces from “Freak Show.” There is a burned, ruined face in the dark that the trailer declines to explain, a hand closing around something in a corridor, somebody flatly observing “he’s a vegetable” before another voice offers “time for the sponge bath,” and a fire and billowing smoke inside a plane in what is clearly not a good afternoon. A “13” made out of contorted black bodies fills the frame in red. Somewhere in there a voice says “a mother has so few chances to bring her brood together,” which for this show is practically a mission statement.
One thing worth knowing before you rewatch it, because we ran both cuts through a frame by frame comparison: this is not as new as it looks. FX released a teaser on 13 August, and at least 47 percent of the trailer is footage that was already in it. The recycled material includes the single most striking image in the whole thing, that “13” built out of contorted black bodies on a red field, lifted from the teaser intact. What is genuinely new is concentrated in the dialogue, which is the right call, because the August teaser was atmosphere and this one is people talking. Nearly every line quoted above is new even where the pictures behind it are not. The cast has grown in public since then too. Beyond Lange, Peters, Paulson, Roberts, Lourd, Waters and Lynch, the season also carries Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates, Gabourey Sidibe, Leslie Grossman, Joey Pollari, Paul Anthony Kelly and Mena Suvari.
And then it hands the last word back to Lange. Cordelia says there is “a darkness closing in, I know you feel it,” somebody shouts “you all got to unite,” somebody else answers “I’ll drink to that,” and Constance Langdon closes the whole thing with the best line in the cut: “if you’re going to rise up and rule the world, you better get yourself a damn sense of humor.” Constance was always the funniest thing in “Murder House,” and giving her the sign-off is a small statement of priorities. This is not being sold as a solemn crossover.
So where does that leave the July claim? Murphy said Paulson is playing six or seven roles, Lange all four of her iconic characters, and Peters five. The trailer does not verify those counts and we are not going to pretend it does. What it does verify is the shape: four separate installments of this anthology are represented inside two minutes, two of Lange’s four are visible in the same cut, and the connective tissue is a number rather than a haunted address. That was the part of the pitch we flagged as the genuine structural change, and it survives contact with the footage.
The doubt we raised in July also survives, and it is worth restating rather than quietly dropping. Murphy called this “like the Avengers,” and Marvel’s crossover worked because a decade of solo films had been laying track underneath it. This show has spent thirteen seasons resetting the board on purpose. “Apocalypse” tried a smaller version of exactly this in 2018 and split the fanbase. Nothing in the trailer answers that, because a trailer cannot: assembling the cast is the easy half, and the hard half is whether thirteen half-hour episodes can carry four eras of continuity without turning into a curtain call. “American Horror Story: 13” premieres Thursday 24 September at 9pm on FX and Hulu, thirteen half-hour episodes across six weeks with multiple drops most weeks, finishing on 29 October. Fitting, for a season about instability, that it will not even air at a steady rate.
What Do You Think? Does putting Elsa Mars and Constance Langdon in the same trailer sell you on Lange playing all four of her characters, or does it read as a stunt the season will struggle to justify? Is John Waters as Mr. Phibes an inspired piece of casting or the exact moment this tips into pantomime? And after “Apocalypse” divided everybody in 2018, does a thirteen-episode crossover need to explain how these worlds connect, or is it better off never explaining at all?
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!
