At this stage in his career, Ryan Murphy finds himself with two cruising speeds: real life stories (Feud, Halston, American Crime Story, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story) and horror (Ratched, American Horror Story). So you can imagine the absolute joy he must have felt when he first read Reeves Wiedeman’s 2018 New York Magazine article entitled The Watcher.
The article told the story of the Broaddus family who, upon buying the home of their dreams in Westfield, New Jersey, found themselves plagued by sinister letters from an unknown correspondent (called, you guessed it, The Watcher) who informed the family that their every move was being monitored. The letters, full of deliberately unsettling passages (“I am in charge of 657 Boulevard. It is not in charge of me. I will fend off its bad things and wait for it to become good again. It will not punish me. I will rise again”) seemed to be an attempt to spook the family into leaving the area.
Which, you have to admit, is an automatic Murphy slam-dunk. A real life story that reads like an overbaked horror novel? He must have been waiting for this his entire life. Forget that the story had already been made into a movie – 2016’s Lifetime film The Watcher (“Overall not a bad movie to kill time on a Sunday afternoon”, reads a typical Rotten Tomatoes user review) – this had Murphy written all over it. Imagine if Anna Delvey dabbled in cannibalism, or the people from WeCrashed were secretly werewolves. That’s the level of synergy we’re talking about here.
