'American Horror Story: 1984’ Will Be the Shortest Season Yet

The sun just came up on the living and undead camp counselors at Camp Redwood on American Horror Story: 1984, but there is still a lot of story left. The resident serial killers seemingly left the camp for Los Angeles, but you can still expect plenty more carnage once they arrive at their next destination. 

And because there are still some stragglers who were left behind at camp on account of their ghostly status, there will likely be more murder and bloodshed there before the season has concluded.

Unfortunately for longtime American Horror Story fans, 1984 is the shortest season yet. It’s unclear if the next few seasons will follow suit or if this was just a one-off for the sake of not drawing out the story longer than is necessary. 

However, it’s still disappointing for fans who might have psyched themselves up for a standard 10 or 13 episode season. 

Sometimes, there is no real rhyme or reason to why different seasons are longer or shorter than others. But American Horror Story: 1984 is only nine episodes long, making it shorter than any of the previous seasons. The final episode will air on Nov. 13 and mark the end of the nostalgic slasher season.

There’s no denying that fans have missed some of the key American Horror Story cast members this season. Both Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters are both noticeably absent for the first time ever — and it’s possible that AHS co-creator Ryan Murphy thought it best to give fans a shorter season since some of the usual cast members were absent this time around.

As a whole, looking at Season 9 as an example, the American Horror Story seasons are getting shorter. The series started out with 12 episodes in Season 1, followed by three seasons which were 13 episodes each. After that, the seasons were either 10 or 11 episodes long. Now that 1984 is confirmed to span nine episodes, it could mean an unfortunate pattern.

Even if some American Horror Story fans didn't know for sure how long 1984 is, they seemed to know it couldn’t last as long as previous seasons. Thanks to the majority of the cast being killed off in the first few episodes, most fans on Twitter could see the end wouldn't be far away.

“Is this going to be a short season?” one fan tweeted. "There’s not that many people to horrifically murder or torture left.”

Another tweeted during the Oct. 9 episode that “Half the cast could die tonight."

Luckily, there has been no confirmation that American Horror Story seasons will remain at nine episodes or even shorter moving forward. 

But fans do have AHS Season 10 to look forward to, which could be the anthology series' last. 

"It comes down to whether Ryan and his collaborators, like (showrunner) Tim Minear, could come up with stories that they are excited about," FX Network CEO John Landgraf told Deadline earlier this year. 

Watch American Horror Story: 1984 on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. EST on FX.