American Horror Story: 1984 Is Already Paying Homage to Other Old-School Films

The "threatening phone call" trope is a classic of the horror/slasher genre, and AHS has already used it twice in the premiere: once when Brooke answers the payphone in the middle of the night, and later when Xavier gets a mysterious, creepy voicemail.

The "cursed Summer camp" concept is a direct reference to Friday the 13th, which launched a horror franchise off the story of a boy who supposedly drowned at a negligent summer camp but returns to terrorize a group of teenage counselors years later when they try to reopen the creepy camp.

If the hitchhiker/gas station sequence seemed familiar to you, there's a good reason for that. It's a nearly beat-for-beat re-creation of the setup for the original Texas Chainsaw, in which a group of friends pick up a hitchhiker, are warned by a gas station attendant, and eventually find themselves smack dab in the middle of a murder spree.

Some of the basic elements of the season premiere clearly homage I Know What You Did Last Summer: hitting a man on the road and trying to cover it up, then being stalked by a killer. The fact that a past crime is haunting the young group (although, in AHS, they weren't involved in the earlier killings) also loosely references this film.

Scream, like Black Christmas, features a killer using phone calls to taunt his victims before he strikes.

The escaped-from-the-asylum killer storyline is straight out of Halloween, where one of film's most infamous villains, Michael Myers, does just that. Brooke, who may or may not be getting stalked by one of our newly introduced killers, also appears to be a loose reference to Halloween's protagonist.

OK, so this one isn't technically a horror film, but it is an '80s movie. Mr. Jingles's escape in flashback actually owes something to an unexpected source: the dark comedy Heathers. In that movie, the heroine Veronica pretends to hang herself in order to save her life and escape from JD's influence. In this episode of AHS, Mr. Jingles uses a similar fake-hanging rigging to get the upper hand on an orderly before calmly letting himself and other patients out.