As we collectively round the corner out of a stressful summer into spooky season, you may find yourself turning more and more to the ghouls and goosebumps in your spare time. Or maybe you always watch horror but Halloween gives you an excuse to talk about it more openly and have your obsessions reinforced by marketing and mainstream media. Either way, it’s a good time to talk about American Horror Story, particularly what’s coming next for the show.
It always helps to remain hopeful when focusing on the future, especially when that future features campy, bloody disasters. So what’s next for AHS? While FX has confirmed that there will be a Season 11 of American Horror Story (as well as a 12 and 13), most of the details of the next installment are still opaque. That being said, since American Horror Story Season 10 is being billed as Double Feature, it’s almost like having another mini-season in between but with more pinned down information to speculate over and give color to predictions. For this forecast, then, we’ll look at both the details we know about the second part of Season 10, as well as the little bits of information we have about Season 11.
If you’ve been watching the episodes of the first part of Season 10, Red Tide, then you’re already well aware of the show’s lavish interpretation of the vampire as a figure representing a kind of artistic cannibalism. In Red Tide, the ability to produce great artwork requires the actual blood of those in society who are seen as expendable. This is a particularly resonate horror during the age of COVID-19 as we reckon with loss on a large, nearly incomprehensible scale and attempt to continue to make personal meaning within this devastation. While Red Tide has doubtlessly kept fans occupied with existential dread, let’s take a look at what is coming next for the anthology franchise.
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What is Season 10 Part 2 (Death Valley) About?
Titled Death Valley, the second half of season 10 promises an elaboration of the gothic, societal critiques the show always delivers. In the trailer for the complete Double Feature, we get glimpses of the monstrosity that’s coming, blended into familiar sequences from Red Tide.
Mainly, we know it involves aliens.
It’s unclear the exact form these creatures will take and given American Horror Story’s history with re-inventing tropes to engage with historical trauma and contemporary issues in one fell swoop, it’s really impossible to take what we do know at face value. But that’s part of the fun of AHS. The trailer leans into pretty heavy government-conspiracy vibes with dramatic walks down darkened hallways, a president that looks very Joe Biden-ey, and dialogue that suggests a kind of morphing of humanity with another, unknown species. (A species that, by the way, seems quite angry.) This presents a new flavor for American Horror Story, a show that has made a point of spanning across multiple subgenres but has not been particularly interested in sci-fi, but for a few side plots in Asylum and Apocalypse.
A few things remain to be seen. For one, we don’t know how, exactly, the second installment will connect back to the first one. Additionally, we don’t know how a television show about aliens will land now, post-2020, when the ongoing joke has been that news of confirmed UFOs was greeted with widespread indifference due to preoccupation with… well… all of 2020. In this way, it seems fitting that the addendum to the season about fascist vampires will take us into ‘oh yeah, there’s aliens’ territory.
Who Will Star in Death Valley?
As always, show creator Ryan Murphy will be recycling some of his favorite actors to feature in the cast of Death Valley. We can expect some familiar faces, including Sarah Paulson, Lily Rabe, Cody Fern, Leslie Grossman, and Angelica Ross. While Paulson, Rabe, Grossman, and Ross are all also featured in the first half of the season, it’s not yet clear if their new roles will have anything to do with their current characters. As we’ve seen before, American Horror Story has no qualms with giving the same actress different hair, clothes, and camera angles and completely changing her personality from one frame to the next. It speaks to the show’s elastic use of familiar horror tropes, as well as its diversions from expected scripts, that audiences can easily follow these changes. Everything feels very theatrical, like you are watching stage actors pull off wigs and run back on stage. This also creates a communal feeling among otherwise alienated TV viewers, especially as we all reckon with the isolating effects of the pandemic.
However, even as the show continually spins new roles for familiar cast members, it’s also invested in expanding, striking a balance between a sense of communal identity while also not turning that community into an exclusive or static crew. To this end, Death Valley will introduce Neal McDonough, Kaia Gerber, Nico Greetham, Rachel Hilson, and Rebecca Dayan to the American Horror Story universe. You will most likely recognize McDonough from his portrayal of Lynn “Buck” Compton on Band of Brothers, as well as roles in Suits, The Flash, and The 100. Hilson will be familiar to fans of This Is Us as she portrayed Beth Clarke. In addition to her upcoming role in Season 10, Gerber also recently appeared in the AHS spinoff American Horror Stories as Ruby, a character with ties to the Murder House.
When Will Death Valley Come Out?
If you’ve been following along with Red Tide, then you know that FX is releasing one episode per week. The outline we’re expecting is for the first six episodes to fall under the narrative of Red Tide, while the final four episodes shift gears into Death Valley. Since the first episode of Red Tide aired on August 25th, we can make a rough estimate that the show will switch to the new arc around the end of September. This creates a landing pad for Death Valley that will bring us right up to Halloween. Hopefully, at some point along that journey, we will also get some more breadcrumbs about what to expect from the next season.
Okay, But What About Season 11? When Does It Come Out?
Look, FX announced that there would be three more seasons of American Horror Story in January of 2020. While based on the calendar this was only a year and a half ago, that year and a half saw massive changes and delays across Hollywood, and the filming schedule of American Horror Story was not immune from disruption.
The Double Feature season was supposed to air in 2020 but got pushed back to 2021, and now it’s here and it really does feel like time collapsed. As far as how production times will go moving forward, there hasn’t been any clear indication of a firm release date for Season 11. Chances are, this won’t come until the Double Feature season is further underway. In the meantime, it’s probably best to think about Death Valley as its own installment, a little abbreviated gift for waiting so long since 1984.
What Will Season 11 Be About?
Again, we don’t know. But if Red Tide taught us one thing, it’s that we shouldn’t rule out particular monsters or tropes just because they’ve already been addressed on the show. If you thought vampires were going to disappear from AHS after Hotel, then you probably spun a whole different path of explanations for the weird behavior in Provincetown.
So looking forward, all bets are off. We could see a monster we’ve seen before. We could see something entirely new. Whatever it is, it will definitely be messy and chaotic and heavy on allegory.
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