The following contains spoilers for American Horror Stories Season 2, Episode 7, "Necro," now streaming on Hulu.
Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have taken unhealthy relationships to new levels with their latest season of American Horror Stories. In Season 2’s "Necro," the love story that develops between Sam (Madison Iseman) and Charlie (Cameron Cowperthwaite) is very reminiscent of another fan favorite, albeit abusive relationship from sister show American Horror Story. Murphy and Falchuk created American Horror Story as an anthology series that first aired in 2011. Each season is a standalone storyline with several actors returning for multiple seasons as brand-new characters, though there have been notable exceptions featuring crossover characters like Season 8’s Apocalypse.
The show has been so successful that a spin-off, American Horror Stories, premiered last year on Hulu. While the show is an anthology series like its predecessor, each individual episode is a self-contained storyline. Murder House, the debut season of American Horror Story, introduced audiences to ill-fated lovers Tate (Evan Peters) and Violet (Taissa Farmiga). The romance seems to unfold as organically between Tate and Violet as Sam and Charlie from American Horror Stories, but both also take very disturbing turns. The series’ creators proved once again that no subject is too taboo for them to cover with "Necro."
Sam and Charlie’s entire love story only has less than an hour to unfold, compared to the 12 episodes, or around eight hours, of Tate and Violet’s. Sam is a mortician and already dating lawyer Jesse when she meets Charlie at work, but the two bond over their shared interest in death and the macabre. They swap stories about funeral rites in different cultures and their reverence for the deceased. Then Charlie does the unthinkable. He fakes his own death to recreate for Sam the experience he had brushing up to death, all in a deranged attempt to "free" her. But then Sam also does the unthinkable by having sex with what she thinks is his dead body.
The story just gets wilder from there and has a lot of parallels to the manipulation and abuse present between Tate and Violet, despite audiences' tendency to romanticize their relationship. Tate and Violet seem like any other teenage love story at first, growing closer to each other while they feel like outsiders to everyone else. Sam and Charlie’s connection develops similarly but to a more sinister degree. After Sam rejects him, Charlie tries to "save" her one last time by crashing her wedding with a tape of their unmentionable affair. Sam loses everything and, facing complete alienation, buys a gun and shoots Charlie while he’s working at a grave site. In one of the most twisted albeit inventive murder-suicide scenes ever, she joins him in the grave for sex before starting up the machine that buries them alive.
It could be argued that Sam and Charlie found their own tragic version of a fairytale ending, but the same can’t be said for Tate and Violet. Tate’s murderous past and dark secrets start to come to light but Violet sticks by his side. Eventually, she can’t ignore the truth about his violent ways and leaves him. And since her suicide attempt turned out to be a surprise success, she has been dead and confined to the house for eternity, just like Tate.
The creators of the American Story franchise Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have shown over and over again that they are not afraid to push boundaries and no subject is off limits -- for better or worse. They continue to drive the horror in AHS to new heights with their creative storytelling, and fans cannot get enough.
American Horror Stories and American Horror Story are currently streaming on Hulu.