Just like each season before it, American Horror Story: 1984 drew inspiration from a real-life story, this one being of the serial killer Richard Ramirez, AKA The Night Stalker. Ryan Murphy’s anthology horror series premiered back in 2011 and installed this strategy from the get-go.
Season one of the show, dubbed American Horror Story: Murder House, drew its inspiration from various murder houses. Murphy and his team have found a way, over the show’s nine-season span, to incorporate these horrific news stories with all sorts of campy gore and horror. The concept has worked well, as each season seems to gain more star power than the last.
The show finds horror in the unexpected. Sources of inspiration have ranged from real conjoined twins to the Trump administration. With American Horror Story: 1984, Murphy decided to stick with a more conventional source of terror — a serial killer.
AHS: 1984 - The True Story Of Richard Ramirez
The Night Stalker — AKA Richard Ramirez — is loosely based on a real killer of the same name. Ramirez wreaked terror on LA in the 1980s. He was known to break into homes, rob his victims, rape them, and sometimes even kill them. American Horror Story accurately portrayed many aspects of Ramirez’s background correctly. But, understandably, the show took a few liberties of its own when it came to crafting the fictional Ramirez.
As the title states, this season of American Horror Story takes place in the year 1984. Ramirez was not active until the following year. In 1985, he had only killed two people, which is far less murders than he is portrayed to have committed during the show’s season. Just as with the show, Ramirez was nicknamed “The Night Stalker” in real life. But sources point to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner as the origin point of the nickname. That means that the LA citizens within the universe of American Horror Story: 1984 should not have been aware of this nickname. As was portrayed on the show, Ramirez was also a Satanist in real life.
Riding on Ramirez’s real-life Satanism, American Horror Story included a storyline about him actually being resurrected by Satan. Things like demons and all things that go bump in the night are par for the course for American Horror Story. But the really impressive thing about this seemingly invincible anthology series is how it manages to tie in grounded stories to its fantastical horror. The story set the stage for this particular real-life news story way back in American Horror Story: Hotel. However, American Horror Story ended up rewriting its own history a bit to commit to its style of connecting each season. It’s frustrating when shows forsake the logic laid down in previous seasons, but American Horror Story’s knack for dropping hints for future stories within its current season never fails to delight audiences. Who knows what easter eggs for upcoming seasons have been dropped within the story of Richard Ramirez.
More: AHS: 1984 Ending Explained (In Detail)
