Dead as Vaudeville : American Horror Story 13

The following review contains spoilers from American Horror Story 13: Episode 7, “The Baddest Witch of Them All”; Episode 8, “Hell No”; and Episode 9, “The Devil Is In the Details”

I wrote slash fanfiction when I was sixteen. I say this not as a confession but as a credential, because it is the single most useful qualification I brought to the third act of American Horror Story: 13, and because it is the thing that finally let me name what this season actually is. Somewhere around the hour when a resurrected H.H. Holmes proposed an alliance with Constance, and was then promptly murdered by the very killers the devil raised to help him relive Devil’s Night, via AHS: Hotel.

I stopped reaching for the usual critical vocabulary—pacing, tone, structure—and reached instead for the one that fit. Ryan Murphy is writing fanfiction of his own universe. And I know exactly what that looks like, because I used to do it too. Daily. I won awards. But I digress…

Here is what I mean, precisely, because it matters. For most of its run American Horror Story was an anthology. Each season was its own sealed world, and thin connections between them—Murder House touching AHS: Hotel, much like AHS: Coven was braided together in Apocalypse—were Easter eggs, rewards for attention, planted lightly. The thrill was in the glimpse. Season 13 takes that restraint and sets it on fire. The crossover is no longer a buried detail; it is the entire premise. Coven and Hotel and Murder House and “Devil’s Night” are yanked into a single room, their characters colliding regardless of whether their original stories support the collision, for the simple reason that it would be cool to see them together. That is not a knock on fanfiction. Fanfiction is a completely valid form for entertainment. It is the purest expression of loving a world so much you refuse to let it stay finished. But fanfiction is honest about being unofficial, unpaid, made for love with no stakes to protect. What Season 13 does is run that same engine at prestige-television prices—a flagship franchise, a legend’s cast, a creator in the director’s chair—while pretending the result is canon rather than the thing fans make in the margins of canon. The man has become a fan of his own back catalogue, and he is writing it, in my opinion, the way a devoted fan would.

Once you see it, every flaw in these three episodes resolves into a single cause. Start with the one that broke the season for me: nobody dies. Not truly. I do not mean the body count is low—it is enormous. I mean death has been abolished as a consequence. Count it up across one batch of episodes. Madison is stabbed and resurrects. Cordelia is killed by H.H. Holmes and is resurrected by Fiona. Fiona herself, whose death in Coven was one of the few the franchise ever truly earned—the fading Supreme, the daughter rising, a woman going out on her own terms—is simply back, the whole weight of that ending spent for a reunion. Holmes is murdered by his Devil Night buddies—originally meant for the witches—Constance raises them and, graciously, kills off Evan Peters’ Transatlantic mess. The screen is drenched in violence and none of it means anything, because any of it can be undone in the next scene. This is fatal, specifically, to horror. Horror runs on jeopardy, on the fear that a person can be lost. When resurrection is free and routine, every death is a temporary inconvenience, every sacrifice is refundable, and the long-promised war between the witches and the killers has no stakes at all—not only because the witches have limitless power and the killers have knives, but because, in this universe, losing is not permanent for anyone.

The show knows this, too, at the level of plot, which is the funniest and most damning thing about the batch. Late in the run the witches go to Papa Legba to inform him that Fiona has escaped Hell, and Papa Legba is furious. Of course he is. He is the gatekeeper of the dead, the figure whose entire function is that the claimed stay claimed, and the season has broken its own rules so completely that it has to summon the god of death himself to show up and complain about it. The one character taking death seriously is the deity contractually obligated to.

Two Supremes cornering a god in his own domain is set up and paid off in roughly five seconds. He is told she escaped Hell and is practically bursting through her vanity door before the sentence lands. Then Cordelia and Fiona blackmail him—they will keep raising the dead unless he does something for them—and he says, you’re clever, what do you want Papa to do for you, and the show cuts to commercial. A confrontation that should have been an entire episode of tension.

And that is the other half of the problem, running underneath the fanfic logic: there is no room to breathe. The episodes run barely over twenty minutes, sometimes a little more, and the premises Murphy generates are feature-sized. A furious death-god is a good idea. A pair of witches blackmailing the keeper of the underworld is a good idea. The season is full of good ideas, delivered at a sprint, each one crushed flat by a runtime that cannot hold it. This is the real shape of the complaint I keep coming back to across this whole season: Murphy generates premises faster than almost anyone working, and cannot, or will not, write the scene. The premise is always fine. Everything between the premises is the problem.

What fills that space instead is a loop, and once you hear it you cannot unhear it: a cheesy quip, a morbid joke, a long character monologue, and then the loop begins again. Evan Peters spends what feels like the entire first half of an episode seated at a piano, narrating in a poorly learned transatlantic accent, while mayhem is intercut around him playing the piano perfectly—your run-of-the-mill-madman—a bid for depth that reads as pure camp. The accent itself is the same lazy instinct as the dialogue, a shorthand for “this character is from the past” so that nobody has to establish anything about him. He calls someone “dead” as vaudeville, which does not even work as a simile, because vaudeville did not die violently. It died slowly, outcompeted by the movies over a decade, which is a thing I will return to. The quips between the witches are written to be witty and catty and simply are not. The morbid jokes sit directly against the solemn ones with no hand on the tiller, and I finally understood why when I looked up everyone who writes this aside from Murphy. The answer is Ned Martel and Charlie Carver, credited on nearly every episode of the season, Murphy and Falchuk bookending them. This is not a chaotic room of too many cooks. It is a consistent, two-person voice. Which means the tonal whiplash is not an accident of staffing. It is the stable, repeatable output of the people hired to produce it, and that is worse.

Nowhere is the whiplash clearer than in how the show decides what to take seriously. It will stop cold for a grave, earnest speech — the witches lecturing Richard Ramirez about the women he murdered, about finally facing a fair fight. Real weight, real sincerity. And then, one scene over, Jeffrey Dahmer stabs Madison and she quips, am I your first girl, I’m kind of honored, and we are meant to laugh. A woman being murdered by a serial killer, played for a cute one-liner, in a show that just delivered a funeral oration for a different serial killer’s victims. The season cannot decide whether atrocity is sacred or a punchline, so it does both, in adjacent rooms, and the inconsistency is the flaw. Pick a lane. A show that moralizes at random has not earned either register; the solemn speech and the camp quip cancel each other out, and you are left unable to tell whether you are watching a tragedy or a bit.

I will plant one flag here as someone who actually reads the material the show keeps strip-mining. When the witches blackmail Papa Legba, they call him a spirit. Papa Legba is a loa—the gatekeeper of Vodou, the one you pass through to reach every other loa. Calling him “a spirit” is not shorthand; it is a tell. It is the same move the premiere made with a Baphomet worked into a tapestry to read as pure devilishness, when the figure has always carried associations of duality and balance. I called that fear frosting at the time. This is the same recipe. The show reaches for real religious iconography because the names carry a frisson, and then gets them wrong, because the frisson is all it ever wanted. The inaccuracy is the proof. If you understood the figure, you would use it precisely. Occult imagery and misknowledge, deployed as extra BOO!

By the ninth episode I could no longer tell you who was in which hell, trading which soul, to whom. Fiona stands inside what turns out to be her personal hell, which strongly resembles H.H. Holmes’s fabled murder maze. Queenie, back after twelve long years, is escorting Cordelia down to see Papa Legba, and then she and Kathy Bates’s LaLaurie are talking in the underworld for what feels like a geological age, and a soul is being bartered, and a snake crawls into a fire for reasons the show does not trouble to supply.

I am an attentive viewer. I came to this wanting to love it. I could not follow it, and neither could the people I watched it with, and I have stopped believing that is my failure to correct. Queenie, for her part, is given exactly one thing to be across the batch, a single repeated function, the way Coven gave her a character and this season gives her a job. When a show brings a beloved figure back after more than a decade and can only find one note for her to play, that is not a reunion. That is a cameo wearing a character’s name.

Because that is finally what all of it is—the whole roster. Papa Legba arrives because he is a fan favorite, the gatekeeper of death summoned into the one season that has abolished death. Fiona arrives because people miss her, her hard-won ending spent for the applause of recognition. The killers arrive, the Supremes arrive, the icons arrive, and each of them exists for the jolt of being seen again rather than for anything they do. It is recognition as content, a bill of acts rather than a story, and the thing about a bill of acts is that nobody ever rewatched one.

Which brings me, at last, to the title, and to the test that settled it. I asked the room, when Episode 9 ended on the witches teaming with Marie Laveau to go kill the devil, whether anyone found it entertaining. The answers came back a shrug. Eh. So-so. Meh. My friend said she was left with more questions than ever and nothing answered, which was a shared complaint. And then I asked the only question that has ever reliably told me whether a thing is good: would you guys watch all of that again, just because, for fun? Everyone said no. Not the way they have each rewatched series that show them something brilliant. Just a room of nos. And a show that fails even that bar—not the bar of greatness, the bar of fun/entertaining—is television with no reason to exist twice.

Evan Peters was wrong, by the way. Nothing in this season is dead as vaudeville, because vaudeville did not die in a knife fight. It died the way this show is dying: slowly, by indifference, outcompeted while still booking the same performers. The acts take their turn and exit and come back for the next show, and nobody is ever really gone, and nobody is ever really watching.

The crypt is still open. The bill is the same as it ever was. I just can’t find a reason to buy another ticket.

Camellia Peebles is a writer, visual artist, and cultural critic teaching in Seoul. Her fiction appears in Maudlin House, Expat Press, Plague Circus Press, BULL Lit Mag, and Mythic Picnic, with more forthcoming. She writes about performance, mythology, and the systems underneath the frame.

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