Ariana Grande Will Star In American Horror Story Season 13
Just when you thought things couldn't get more wicked.
American Horror Story is cooking up something extra wicked for its cursed 13th season. The anthology horror series fittingly announced its comeback on Halloween of 2025, revealing a truly attention-grabbing cast that already has superfans theorizing about the new story. The most popular guess is that Season 13 will bring back the franchise’s fan-favorite witches with a strong connection to Season 3’s Coven.
FX picked up Season 13 at the start of 2020, but it’s taken a while to get the new story off the ground. American Horror Story: Delicate wrapped up the franchise’s twelfth season in early 2024, and then there was over a year and a half of silence about what was coming next. Creator Ryan Murphy finally delivered what the AHS fans had been waiting for on Oct. 31, 2025, posting the first details of the still-mysterious 13th season.
And the ominous casting announcement may have been a lot more telling than casual observers realized. Not only did it tease a premiere date, it may have also subtly hinted at a spellbinding theme for Season 13. Here are all the details.
Ariana Grande Is Back In The Murphy-Verse
The AHS Season 13 casting announcement revealed a ton of returning favorites — and one AHS newcomer. Ariana Grande is flying into the franchise for the first time, after having previously worked on Murphy’s campy slasher series Scream Queens.
The rest of the cast is like reading an AHS superfan’s ultimate wish list: Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates, Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd, Gabourey Sidibe, Leslie Grossman, and Jessica Lange.
The Casting Suggests A Return To Coven
Once the cast was announced, fans were immediately convinced Season 13 would be strongly connected to Season 3. The only announced cast members that did not star in Coven (aside from Grande) are Lourd and Grossman — but their Apocalypse characters Mallory and Coco were revealed to be secret members of the coven in Season 8. As for Grande, she obviously has a very coven-friendly connection since she’s recently played the witch Glinda in Wicked.
Additionally, the casting video ended with Coven’s most iconic quote: “Surprise, b*tch. Bet you thought you'd seen the last of me.” Fans also recalled how Murphy previously promised the Coven witches would return in a future season back in 2018, after their first resurrections in Apocalypse.
Season 13’s Premiere Date Is Spookily Perfect
The casting video ended with the promise that Season 13 will reveal itself to fans on Halloween 2026.
