Given the long-running popularity of American Horror Story and its nature as an anthology series, a spinoff always seemed likely. Enter American Horror Stories, a show even more experimental than its predecessor in that every episode tells a different story rather than each season.
Since debuting in 2021, American Horror Stories has produced three seasons and more than 20 episodes of varying degrees of quality. Just like American Horror Story, the stories can be quite hit or miss. But one particular episode stands out above the rest as the most disturbing of them all. I'm referring to the season 2 premiere episode, "Dollhouse," directed by Loni Peristere and written by Manny Coto.
It might not be the bloodiest episode of the bunch, but "Dollhouse" hinges on a doll-obsessed toymaker named Samuel Van Wirt (Denis O'Hare) and his collection of "real" dolls, which involves him encasing women in plastic. It's as disturbing as it sounds.
The end of the episode (SPOILERS!) reveals that Samuel is none other than Spalding, the creepy servant from American Horror Story: Coven who works for the witches. And if you've seen Coven then you know the kind of creepy stuff Spalding gets up to, especially toward the end of the season with Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts).
The living doll trope
American Horror Stories is far from the first horror show or movie to toy with the premise of turning real people into dolls. It crops up often in the genre and even outside of it, with crime shows like Criminal Minds in particular. Several unsubs have the gruesome habit of kidnapping their victims and forcefully turning them into "dolls" in some shape or form, perhaps most notably in the season 8 episode "The Lesson," featuring a serial killer who turns people into marionette puppets.
Even the DCTV series Arrow had a particularly frightening episode with the villainous Dollmaker who kidnaps Laurel Lance and almost succeeds in forcibly turning her into a doll while her father is forced to watch. The horror movie Incident in a Ghost Land also features this trope and is considered extremely disturbing because of it.
In short, if a movie or show includes any kind of villain who likes turning people into dolls or playthings, it ranks as pretty scary and memorably disgusting to its viewers. And it's scarier still if we actually see some of the torture methods playing out on-screen to showcase how these criminals transform their unwilling victims into dolls, like the plastic scene in American Horror Stories.