It's become an annual tradition for FX and Hulu to celebrate “Huluween” with the release of a new series American horror stories Episodes, the anthology series from Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk that tells stories in the spooky and gory way their series does American horror story has been doing this since 2011. As with most anthologies, the results are a little uneven, but this new batch of episodes opens with one that makes us think this group could be among the series' best.

Opening shot: In a modern house we see a man at his laptop working on a script.

The essentials: Daniel Hausman-Burger (Michael Imperioli) is an award-winning screenwriter, but has lived in seclusion since the disappearance of his ten-year-old son Roman (Matthew Eby). His manager Aaron (David Pittu) stops by the house to find out where Daniel is emotionally, and Daniel tells him that Roman's disappearance has left him so numb that the only way he can interact with the real world is by working on his current script.

But then Daniel goes through a door and finds himself in an empty, brightly lit supermarket. As the lights flicker and the PA system makes chirping announcements, he sees a boy who sounds like Roman but is wearing a strange mask. Suddenly the masked child goes into a back room and blood seeps out from the bottom of the door. Then Daniel suddenly finds himself back in his house.

Some time later he receives a call from Aaron; he meets his ex-wife Riva (Natalie Gold) and Aaron at a restaurant; Riva gives him the bad news that Roman's body has been found. He was found last week, but for some reason no one has been able to contact Daniel. When Daniel goes through a door to get some air, he finds himself in a dingy hallway, with holes in the wall that he climbs through and masked people chasing him down increasingly narrow hallways. Then he is back in his house.

Daniel wonders what this frightening, otherworldly but very real world is like. He finds a YouTube video from a man named Eli (Matthew Maher) who has experienced a liminal space like this, which looks mundane but feels like it's between the living world and the “other side,” whatever that may mean. Daniel sends Eli an email and tells him he wants to talk, and the two meet – in the visiting room of a correctional facility where Eli is currently serving a sentence that has a lot to do with why he experienced these liminal spaces in the first place .

What shows will it remind you of? As we said at the start of season three a year ago: American horror stories are essentially more condensed but just as bloody versions of American horror story Seasons.