New York City seems back in vogue with the horror genre at the moment, with American Horror Story and most recently Scream taking a jaunt to the Big Apple.
While Scream will be a modern story, the 11th season of Ryan Murphy’s series takes things back to the early 1980s, just ahead of the AIDS epidemic.
Inspired by William Friedkin’s Cruising whilst leaning into the overarching looming threat of AIDS, this is one of the most coherent seasons in recent memory. The argument always lobbied at AHS is that it can start like a house on fire but quickly come apart at the seams with convoluted plots and weird side narratives that don’t warrant being featured.
Here Murphy and Brad Falchuk manage to keep their focus for the most part, with AHS being more of a queer psychological thriller with AIDS just coming into the public conscious.
Brit Russell Tovey leads the cast, who many will recognise from series such as Being Human plus Looking and Years and Years.
We do get some AHS regulars such as Zachary Quinto and Denis O’Hare, but NYC does freshen things up with plenty of new faces like Isaac Powell, Charlie Carver and Joe Mantello.
Murphy has previous when covering the AIDS crisis on Pose plus his HBO movie The Normal Heart, but here his creative team successfully blends the paranoia and fear of this looming threat with commentaries on LGBT+ lifestyles at the time and a serial killer who likes to dismember his victims.
As usual, the production value is there to see on the screen, but it is the strong story components which make AHS: NYC one of the most pleasant surprises of horror television in recent times.
An unexpected treat.
AHS: NYC is streaming now on Disney+.
Bloody Flicks 