American Horror Stories is a horror-drama television show created and produced by Ryan Murphy. It is a spin-off series to American Horror Story, with each episode being hour-long, contained anthology episodes. The series premiered Thursday, July 15, 2021, exclusively on FX on Hulu.
This is how Rotten Tomatoes describes this anthology web television show:
A horror event series from prolific, award-winning producer, Jason Blum’s independent TV studio.
The series includes 12 super-sized episodes, with a new installment released each month inspired by a holiday and will feature Blumhouse’s signature genre / thriller spin on the story.
I would have never heard of this show if it were not for a random comment that I saw at a streaming video website, no one I follow or know ever mentioned this show before, and so I am glad that I saw that random comment because this show was better than The Twilight Zone (2019) and Black Mirror (Season 5) and most of Channel Zero.
It is a shame that this show is not known by most people and I guess was not marketed very well, if you get a chance please do watch this show or at least my favorite episode and maybe a few others, because it deserves to be more well known even if some of the episodes could have been better and even though males/men were often portrayed as the villains.
Each episode is basically its own movie pretty much, each episode is inspired by a different holiday which is a cool concept in my opinion, and so I will list some of my thoughts for each episode.
The main actress did a good job portraying her mental disorder, and I was surprised how this episode managed keep things watchable even with a longer run-time.
This episode had a boring start and it had me wondering where they were going with it, but things picked up at the end as things escalated and it ended in a way that made you think about how you feel about the main character.
This episode also had me wondering where they were going with this and how were they going to fill the rest of the time, but at some point the episode started to escalate after a twist.
This episode had me wondering where they were going with it and it did a good job tricking the audience, but the episode had some flaws and it did not live up to its full potential.
This episode had me wondering what would happen, some twists happened and things escalated, and it ended in a way that had me wondering and in a way that was unexpected but that went with the mood / theme of this episode.
This episode surprised me, it was more Black Mirror-like than Black Mirror (Season 5), and I liked the science fiction of this episode which featured some interesting futuristic technology that was blended nicely with the world in a way where it did not stand out too much.
This was one of my favorite episodes, my favorite episode probably, and it was good enough to be released as its own movie online in my opinion.
This episode was possibly the first of only two episodes to contain something paranormal / supernatural, there were some things that I liked about it, but it was a bit disappointing.
This episode reminded me of something from the video game series Fallout combined with one or more other things that I can not think of, it clearly had a message, and Spanish and English was used in this episode so it was a bilingual episode.
While this episode did have me trying to guess what would happen, I was able to narrow things down too early, and this episode was similar to the episode New Year, New You in the way that it ended; but this episode could have been better.
This episode started out trying to make you feel a bit unsettled and like something was not right, at first even the main character looked strange, and that combined with the environment and the situation created its own atmosphere.
In my opinion this episode seemed to bring together a pretty common theme throughout most of this season where it seemed that males/men were usually portrayed as the villains, this episode took it to the max, and it ends implying that something major is going to happen; and a certain group is likely on the chopping block.
Would you journey down the “rabbit hole?” This eight –part event series follows Jake Epping (James Franco), an ordinary high school teacher, presented with the unthinkable mission of traveling back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
Jake travels to the past in order to solve the most enduring mystery of the 20th century: who killed JFK, and could it have been stopped?
But as Jake will learn, the past does not want to be changed.
And trying to divert the course of history may prove fatal.
Final Thoughts
The visual quality and acting in this miniseries was better than I had expected, but they changed so much from the book that they messed things up in my opinion.
I think that it was a mistake for them to change so many things, it basically became its own thing in some ways, it would have been better if they had followed the book more closely without contradicting parts of it.
They created characters who did not exist, they changed some characters, they changed the order of some events, they skipped some things that I think were worth showing and they even referenced a few things confusingly without explanation, they had some characters doing and saying things that they did not do or say and that conflicts with their character in the book, et cetera.
Even with them messing up with those things, I would still give it a 3.5, and one part near the end made me tear up a bit to my surprise; but the book is without a doubt better than this miniseries.