Binge-Worthy 5-Season Anthology Series Is Everything American Horror Story Should Be

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Published Sep 22, 2026, 11:31 AM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While American Horror Story has its moments, one bingeable horror anthology from Shudder is everything that the inconsistent cult series could be. Ever since The Twilight Zone began airing on CBS in the ‘60s, anthology shows have been infamous for one thing, and that’s consistency. Or, rather, a lack of consistency, since even the best anthology shows often have a few episodes, or seasons, that simply don’t work.

The joy of anthology shows comes from their unpredictable nature as, depending on the series, these shows change their story, setting, and main characters either once per season or once per episode. This theoretically means that every season or episode can be a fresh start, but it also inevitably means that, with so many more stories to tell than a conventional series, some of them fall flat.

Traditional network TV shows, like CBS’s NCIS procedural franchise or the many long-running sitcoms that dominate the airwaves, aren’t prized for their constant innovation and ingenuity. Instead, viewers come to these shows for consistency, knowing that even the worst episode will still have appearances from their favorite characters in a familiar setting. Anthology shows like American Horror Story dare to break from this tradition, but some, like Chiller’s Slasher, are better at pulling off this feat.

Sarah (Katie McGrath) and Dylan (Brandon Jay McLaren) on Slasher

Beginning in 2011 with what arguably remains its strongest standalone season, "Murder House," American Horror Story was a dark, R-rated FX horror anthology show from Glee producer Ryan Murphy. The series featured one story per season, reusing existing cast members in new roles each season. While "Murder House" featured plenty of shocking gore, American Horror Story was also notable for including a lot of boundary-pushing content more broadly.

The show was, for better or worse, often genuinely jaw-dropping in terms of shock value. Arriving at a time when The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones were both pushing the limits of what could be depicted on TV, American Horror Story delighted in centering not just explicit violence, but all manner of other disturbing content that was precision engineered to leave viewers wincing, cringing, and watching through their fingertips.

Of course, the problem with trying to get viewers to cringe is that this aim can sometimes prove too successful. As early as its second season, "Asylum," American Horror Story began to gain a reputation for throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. That season alone featured zombies, demonic possession, alien abduction, two masked serial killers, a separate killer dressed as Santa Claus, and Death itself.

At the same time as all of these increasingly zany, far-fetched storylines unfolded, "Asylum" also tried to address sensitive real-life topics like homophobia, religious abuse, malicious institutionalization, the history of Nazi medical experimentation, and ethical issues of misogyny in psychiatry. If that sounds like too much for one campy horror show, that’s because it was. Unfortunately for American Horror Story, a similar series soon came along to show viewers how much smoother this conceit could look.

While Chiller's five-season anthology Slasher is somehow even more violent, disturbing, and depraved than American Horror Story, this isn’t a bad thing for the show as a whole. Like American Horror Story, each season of Slasher explores a different subgenre of horror, i.e. Victorian era period horror, summer camp slashers, small-town murder mystery, etc and each season reuses the same actors playing new characters, alongside some cast newcomers.

Slasher Is Far More Consistent Than American Horror Story Ever Was

Jessica Lange as Constance Langdon in American Horror Story 13

Unlike American Horror Story, however, Slasher has managed to remain consistent across five seasons of the original series and two seasons of its spinoff, Hell Motel. Season 1 of Slasher focuses on Katie McGrath’s Sarah as she returns to her hometown only to find the community in the grip of a vicious serial killer. However, it is not long before the show reveals that this town, with its many dark secrets, is more similar to the titular burg of Twin Peaks than Murder She Wrote’s sleepy hamlet Cabbot Cove.

Season 2 ramps up the darkness of season 1 even further as a group of summer camp counselors are reunited at the resort where they secretly killed their friend years earlier. One of the most shocking and brutal seasons of TV in recent history, “Guilty Party” set the bar high for season 2, only for 2019’s superb “Solstice” to successfully clear it. In an era when many slasher movies were aiming for a lighter, funnier PG-13 feel, "Solstice" provided viewers with an unapologetically dark, grim slasher story as tragic as it was scary.

Even Slasher’s Spinoff Is Stronger Than American Horror Story’s Follow-up

A masked killer in Slasher season 4 Flesh and Blood

Crucially, the reason that Slasher feels so much more consistent than American Horror Story is not just that one show is newer. Around the same time that Totally Killer and the Scream franchise’s return were bringing slasher movies back to the mainstream, American Horror Story: 1984 tried its hand at this particular horror subgenre. However, the resulting outing was a perfect encapsulation of the difference between the two shows.

While Slasher has been remarkably consistent across five seasons, American Horror Story: 1984 needed only a few episodes before the season went off the rails. This pattern has recurred throughout the history of American Horror Story, as the series crams in numerous dubious subplots in every season while Slasher, in contrast, wisely sticks to telling one central story per outing. This difference is also reflected in their respective spinoff shows.

The spinoff American Horror Stories never won over critics or fans, as evidenced by a comparison between its weak Rotten Tomatoes rating and the far stronger reception of Shudder’s Creepshow, another story-per-episode campy horror anthology that started a few months later. While both shows were horror anthologies with a comedic edge that utilized famous guest stars and black comedy, Creepshow was well liked, while American Horror Stories was viewed as derivative and hollow.

In contrast, Slasher’s spinoff, the true crime satire Motel Hell, is an ideal follow-up to the original show. As bloody and brutal as its predecessor but with a more comedic edge and more heightened, campier characters at the core of its gory whodunit story, Slasher’s spinoff proves that the show has outclassed American Horror Story at every turn.