American Horror Story is back, and apparently, so is everyone else. There is something almost funny about watching the opening episodes of American Horror Story: 13 and realizing just how many ghosts Ryan Murphy has managed to drag back into the building. Jessica Lange is back. Sarah Paulson is back. Evan Peters is back. Emma Roberts is back. Angela Bassett is back. Jamie Brewer is back. Frances Conroy is back. Kathy Bates is back. At a certain point, AHS stops feeling like a television season and starts feeling like someone opened the cast list from 2011 and started making phone calls. And honestly?

Jessica Lange's return alone feels slightly unreal. After years of being told, essentially, that Constance Langdon was gone, there she is again. Lange has returned to the world of American Horror Story to revisit four of the characters she played throughout the series, making the season feel less like a conventional anthology installment and more like an elaborate reunion.

Apocalypse already attempted the grand AHS reunion. It gave us the witches, the Murder House, Tate and Violet, Myrtle Snow, and enough callbacks to make a longtime fan feel like they were being rewarded for having watched seven seasons of television. But Apocalypse also had a problem: once the nostalgia wore off, some of the characters felt trapped inside a story that wasn't quite worthy of them.

Season 13 seems to be asking a different question: What happens if we don't simply bring the characters back? What happens if we let the worlds come back with them? The answer, at least six episodes in, is gloriously excessive. The season is filled with little reminders that American Horror Story has always existed as one enormous haunted house. A magazine advertising Roanoke as a vacation destination sits beside a fertility magazine connected to Dr. Hill from Delicate. Paintings bring back imagery from Season 12. Characters and objects from previous seasons keep appearing in the background, sometimes so casually that you almost miss them.

Murphy is not exactly allowing anyone to forget what season we're watching. The premiere is literally called “13,” and the number becomes part of the visual language of the episode. Windows, columns, framing and set pieces repeatedly organize themselves around it. Murphy also directed the premiere, which he co-wrote with Brad Falchuk, bringing the series' creators back into the room for its first episode.

Most importantly, AHS looks like AHS again.

The first episode brings back the sweeping camera movements and fisheye-lens distortion that made early American Horror Story feel so immediately recognizable. There are tracking shots that recall Murder House and Hotel, compositions that feel deliberately theatrical, and a general sense that the camera is once again allowed to have a personality. For years, the show understood that horror could be glamorous. The clothes were part of the horror. The sets were part of the horror. The hair, makeup, lighting, title sequences and camera movements were part of the horror. Murder House, Asylum and Coven were not always subtle, but they were rarely visually boring. Somewhere around Roanoke and Cult, that visual identity began to feel less consistent. The show could still produce incredible images, but there were stretches where the camera felt functional rather than expressive. Apocalypse occasionally disappeared into its own gray digital haze. Later seasons sometimes looked like expensive television without necessarily looking like American Horror Story.

Season 13 seems intentional about fixing that. Is the writing always as good as the production design? No.

At times, the dialogue of Season 13 feels suspiciously close to fan fiction written by someone who knows every AHS Wiki page by heart. Some characters feel less like organic continuations of who they once were and more like heightened versions of themselves, constructed around the things fans remember most.

These characters are not exactly where we left them.

And that might be better.

Apocalypse tried to preserve continuity by literally rewriting it. Violet forgives Tate, the apocalypse happens, the timeline changes, and suddenly the emotional consequences of Murder House become part of a timeline that no longer exists. It was ambitious, occasionally beautiful and occasionally completely insane.

Season 13 feels more willing to play with the characters than to preserve them.

They have become ghosts of their own performances. Jessica Lange can be Constance without Season 1 needing to happen again. Sarah Paulson can return to Cordelia without pretending that Coven never ended. Evan Peters can and talk to Evan Peters and inhabit the strange mythology of AHS again without having to recreate exactly who he was fourteen years ago.

And, most importantly, everyone looks fantastic.

I cannot overstate how important this is.

The clothes are back. The makeup is back. The hair is back. The sets are back. The

cinematic camera movements are back. Maybe most importantly, Evan Peters has been given a better wig. Sometimes television criticism gets too embarrassed to admit that aesthetics matter. But American Horror Story was built on aesthetics. It was always a show where a beautifully dressed woman standing ominously in a hallway could be as important as whatever plot development was happening around her.

That is why Season 13 works best when it stops trying to convince us that it has

something profound to say and simply lets itself be AHS.

Ryan Murphy has also made clear that this is not being treated as the final chapter. The season is being positioned as a celebration of what came before rather than a goodbye, and Murphy has indicated that he still sees a future for the anthology.

That will probably annoy people.

There are already fans asking for Season 13 to be the finale, convinced that there is

nowhere left for the show to go. And maybe there isn't. Thirteen seasons is an absurdly long life for an anthology series built on reinvention. But I don't think AHS: 13 needs to prove that it can still reinvent itself. For once, it seems content to remember itself.

The first twelve seasons left behind a strange collection of witches, ghosts, serial killers, actresses, demons, cult leaders, vampires, monsters and women in excellent coats. Season 13 gathers them together and lets them haunt one another.

Maybe that's what a show this old is supposed to do.

Just come back, open the door, turn the lights on, and ask us if we remember and put Evan Peters back in his wig.

New episodes of FX’s “American Horror Story: 13” air Thursdays at 9:00 pm ET/PT on FX and 9:00 pm PT on Hulu, until the finale on Thursday, October 29.