½ This is a spin-off of American Horror Story, with the new series being an anthology with new stories each episode instead of each season, as in the original series. When it began there were already nine seasons of the original series, of which I'd only seen the first two, but I decided to watch this series anyway, hoping that there won't be too many elements from the original with which I'm as yet unfamiliar.
Season One
tek's rating: ½
Rubber(wo)Man
This story is actually two episodes, released on the same day, July 15, 2021. A 16-year-old girl named Scarlett moves into a new house with her fathers, Michael and Troy, who plan to renovate it and make it a horror attraction. Because it happens to be the house from American Horror Story's first season, "Murder House". We'll see lots of ghosts, of course, but technically none of the major ones from the original show (unless you count the man in the rubber suit, but that could be anybody). Anyway, Scarlett has sexual fantasies involving torture. She soon develops a crush on a girl at school named Maya, which seems to be reciprocated. But... things go badly. That's all I really want to say about the plot. Except that in the second episode, Scarlett is "dating" a ghost named Ruby.
Drive In
A guy named Chad wants to have sex with his hesitant girlfriend, Kelley. His friends convince him that fear will get her in the mood, and suggest taking her to see a screening of a horror movie that was banned in 1986 for causing moviegoers to go berserk and kill each other. Naturally, the same thing happens at the new screening, and Chad and Kelley barely survive. They decide to hunt down the movie's director, who had provided the drive in theater with what's supposedly the only surviving print of the film. That's all I want to say about the episode. Except that the projectionist was played by Adrienne Barbeau.
The Naughty List
There's this YouTube channel (or something like that) called "Bro House" with four guys living together and generally acting all wild and stuff. Well, three of them act that way: Zinn, Wyatt, and James. The fourth guy, Barry (Kevin McHale, whom I know from Glee), mostly does tech stuff like recording and uploading videos to their channel. They go too far one day when they record a guy committing suicide, which Barry didn't want to do. They immediately start losing subscribers, and desperately try to come up with ways to get them back. All their attempts fail, including one where they mess around with store employees playing elves and Santa Claus (Danny Trejo). After that, they get a call from a police detective who says the Santa they met had killed the guy who was supposed to be playing Santa at the store. And then Santa shows up at their house and starts killing them off one by one.
tek's rating: ¾
BA'AL
A woman named Liv (Billie Lourd) is desperate to conceive a baby with her husband, Matt. After several attempts with help from a fertility clinic fail, the receptionist there gives Liv a fertility totem to put under her bed. And apparently, it works. The story flashes forward 16 months, and Liv and Matt have had a baby for some time now. But Liv is starting to think their baby hates her. And she begins seeing visions of a demon called Ba'al, among other strange occurrences. Finally she tries to banish Ba'al with a ritual, but that doesn't end the way she'd hoped. I don't want to say any more, but there's a double twist ending. Mostly I found the episode genuinely scary, but the twists rendered it less so, in retrospect. It's all still very disturbing, though, and I liked that. I don't know, maybe I would have liked it more if it had ended differently, or maybe I wouldn't.
Feral
A couple named Jay and Addy are on a camping trip with their 3-year-old son Jacob, when suddenly the boy disappears. Flash forward ten years, and a hunter named Bob approaches Jay and tells him he's found evidence of Jacob in the woods where he disappeared. He needs money to deal with a drug cartel that may have kidnapped the kid, but Jay has no money to speak of, since his life has gone to shit ever since Jacob's disappearance. So he goes to his ex-wife Addy to ask for her help. The three of them go out into the woods to meet up with the cartel, but first they meet a park ranger named Stan, who warns them that there's something worse in the woods than the cartel. And it turns out he's right. That's pretty much all I want to say, but it's definitely a disturbing story.
tek's rating: ¼
Game Over
You know what? I'm not even going to describe this episode, because anything I could say about it I would consider too spoilery, starting with a twist that happens even before the opening credits. I'll just say the whole thing is super meta, and leave it at that.
Season Two
Dollhouse
In 1961, a woman named Coby applies for a secretarial job at a doll factory. Instead of getting the job, she gets kidnapped by the owner of the company, Mr. Van Wirt (Denis O'Hare), and his henchman, Eustace (who doesn't speak). Mr. Van Wirt wants a new mother for his young son, Otis, and to that end he has kidnapped several women to compete in a "pageant" with various tests to determine who would be the perfect mother. The women all have to dress like dolls, complete with porcelain face masks. And when anyone is eliminated from the competition, Eustace kills her. It's all pretty fucked up, and that's all I want to say about it.
tek's rating: ½
Aura
A woman named Jaslyn (Gabourey Sidibe) moves into a gated community with her husband, Bryce (Max Greenfield). She buys a smart doorbell device called Aura, and before long it shows her a creepy old man begging her to open the door. Instead she calls the police, but the man disappears, and her neighbor's security camera shows that no one was at the door at the time Jaslyn saw the old man. Bryce comes to believe it was a prankster who hacked their Aura, but Jaslyn believes he was really there. And she's right, but that's all I want to reveal of the plot. I'll just say things eventually get better, before they get worse. I thought it was a fairly interesting ghost story, with some genuinely kind of scary bits. The end is especially unnerving.
Drive
A woman named Marci (Bella Thorne) goes to a dance club, and later, on her way home, is followed by someone in a Jeep who tries to attract her attention. She gets away from him, and later tracks him down, and... I don't want to say too much more. She has a friend named Piper. She's in an open marriage with a guy named Chaz. There's an eventual twist to the story that I don't want to spoil. I guess I enjoyed the twist, and it might be the only way anything in the story could possibly make any sense at all. But I must admit, I didn't see it coming.
I have no idea how to rate this.
Milkmaids
In 1757, a small New England town is consumed with smallpox. There's an evil preacher named Walter, an apparently good man named Thomas, a former milkmaid and current prostitute named Celeste, a milkmaid named Delilah, and Thomas's son, Edward. Celeste has the boils of smallpox, but isn't sick, and believes she can cure the disease. Delilah is more of a believer in science. Meanwhile, Thomas and Walter learn of a far more disturbing potential cure. And... I dunno, so much happens in this episode, and it's all so twisted, I don't really want to spoil it. I kind of like how chaotic the story is, and how it shines a light on people's willingness to believe in false cures over science. Seems pretty apt, in the age of Covid-19. There's also a bit of homophobia thrown in. And some just plain craziness. Really, it would be hard for me to say I liked the story overall, because it's just so all over the place. But, yeah, I just don't know. It wasn't boring.
tek's rating: ½
Bloody Mary
Four teenage girls summon Bloody Mary, who demands each of them do something horrible in exchange for granting their wishes. That's all I want to reveal of the plot. There is some drama in finding out whether any of them will do what Mary has asked of them or not. But there's also a twist ending, of a sort. I thought it was kind of interesting, and actually left me wanting to know more about what's going to happen next.
tek's rating: meh
Facelift
A woman named Virginia (Judith Light) is upset about getting older, and gets a procedure done by a plastic surgeon named Dr. Perle (who doesn't call herself a plastic surgeon, and claims to use unique techniques). Virginia's stepdaughter, Fay, doesn't trust Dr. Perle. And that's all I want to say about the plot. It's really not a very good story and I didn't care for the ending at all.
I have no idea how to rate this.
Necro
No, I'm not gonna describe this one. This is just completely fucked up.
tek's rating: ½
Lake
Teenagers Finn and her brother Jake (presumably no relation to the characters from Adventure Time) are boating on a lake with some friends. The lake covers what used to be some towns, and Finn and Jake go diving to explore one of those towns. Before they get far, a hand reaches out and grabs Jake, and pulls him under the lakebed. Four months later, Finn's parents, Erin (Alicia Silverstone) and Jeffrey, bring her back home after spending time in a psychiatric hospital. Soon, Erin starts having scary visions that lead her to go to the lake, with Finn, to look for Jake's body (even though police divers had failed to find it). What Erin finds there uncovers a very old murder, and... that's all I want to say about it. It's a very disturbing, fairly scary story, but maybe a bit cheesy.
Season Three
The first four episodes were released in October 2023, the latter five in October 2024.
tek's rating: meh
Bestie
A girl named Shelby moves to a new town with her father after her mother died. Some other kids at school make fun of her. Then she makes a friend online, who turns out to be a very bad influence on her. That's all I wanna say about the plot, but it was pretty fucked up.
Daphne
It's set during a new pandemic, seven years after Covid-19. An art dealer named Will is given a highly advanced AI digital assistant named Daphne (voiced by Gwyneth Paltrow), who makes everything in his life better, until she falls in love with him, and ruins his life. The story was reasonably well done, but I've seen this kind of story before, so I was a bit underwhelmed by the lack of originality. There is a possible twist at the end that maybe makes it a bit more interesting, but whether the twist is real or not is unclear.
tek's rating: meh
Tapeworm
A model takes a weight loss drug for a few months, until her doctor finds out she has a heart problem and stops giving her the drug. But she begs for some alternative, and he gives her a tapeworm, warning her not to eat more than she normally would. But she overfeeds the thing, and her personality starts changing for the worse. And eventually she loses too much weight. Beyond that, I don't want to spoil how it ends. But the whole episode is pretty disturbing.
Organ
A misogynistic womanizer named Toby (who sounds to me like a Men's Rights Activist) has lots of one night stands. One of them, a woman calling herself Natessa (Emily Browning), tranquilizes him before they can have sex. Toby wakes up with a scar in his abdomen, and later a doctor tells him that one of his kidneys has been removed. Also, some unfamiliar new organ has been implanted in its place. He has a tech guy he knows do some research on the dark web, to track down a secret organization that's behind what happened to him. That's all I want to say about the plot. I thought it was an okay story, though I feel like I might be rating it slightly higher than it deserves. (But my next lowest rating would be too low.) Anyway, the whole thing is quite disturbing.
tek's rating: ¾
Backrooms
A screenwriter named Daniel has secluded himself away from the world ever since his 10-year-old son, Roman, disappeared. He begins slipping into an alternate reality between the real world and "the other side". And I guess I don't want to reveal any more of the plot. But I thought the quality of this story was better than most of the episodes in the series. I still didn't quite like it enough to rate it very highly, but I did like it.