Turning the Trump Era Into a <i>Horror Story</i>
This story contains spoilers through Episode 1 of American Horror Story: Cult.
Your fears are all founded, horror stories always say. The monster really is under the bed. That closet does contain a killer. The glint in your child’s eye is a demon.
Or, as in the case of American Horror Story: Cult—take whatever nightmares, whatever worst-case scenarios, that the election of Donald Trump planted in your mind. They’re all coming true.
The seventh season of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s FX anthology series may mark the first mass-market filmed fiction to tackle the Trump era head-on. Tuesday night’s premiere episode, the show has hit on an intriguing high concept, and its first few episodes are compulsively watchable. As is also often the case, incoherence and overreach threaten to topple a premise already teetering on the edge of exploitation.
