Ryan Murphy has revealed the highly anticipated thirteenth season of American Horror Story will be subtitled 13, while also confirming the latest instalment will be a crossover featuring characters from every past season.

“Everybody thinks it’s a Coven season, and it’s not,” he told Entertainment Tonight at the NYC premiere of his new series The Shards. “It’s all the seasons.”

Unfolding over 13 episodes — marking the longest season since Freak Show finished airing in 2015 — American Horror Story: 13 will be a crossover event “like The Avengers”, according to Ryan Murphy. The showrunner revealed characters from previous seasons “all come together to defeat the ultimate evil.”

“Sarah Paulson is playing six or seven roles,” Ryan Murphy told ET about his long-time female lead’s return to American Horror Story after five years. “Jessica Lange is playing all four of her iconic characters. Evan Peters is playing five characters.”

Lange’s return was a particular surprise for the show’s devoted fanbase. Once the series’ flagship star for the first four seasons, the Oscar-winning actress had long maintained that she would not return to American Horror Story after a special guest appearance in 2018’s Apocalypse, but Murphy explained the crossover framework of AHS: 13 changed her mind while also persuading several other actors. “As soon as I pitched it to them — many of them had said no over the years — they were like, ‘Well, okay, we’ve gotta come back for that.’ I pitched Jessica Lange; she was like, ‘Oh shit, now I have to do it.’”

Paulson has been spotted alongside Gabourey Sidibe, Emma Roberts, and Frances Conroy reprising their roles as the witches from Coven this month. Meanwhile, Jessica Lange was photographed by Murphy playing who appears to be her Season 1 character, Constance Langdon.

Since premiering in 2011, American Horror Story has become a cultural phenomenon that has helped popularise queer representation, graphic horror on television, and the format of an anthology series with a recurring troupe of actors that tells a new story each season.

Murphy’s revealed the new details while promoting his adaptation of The Shards, the best-selling novel by American Psycho writer Bret Easton Ellis. The series will premiere on FX on August 5th in the US and August 6th on Disney+ in the UK. AHS stars Wes Bentley and Kaia Gerber both feature in the serial killer thriller.

AHS returns on September 24th, with Murphy revealing to The Wrap that the new season will premiere with three episodes the first week, followed by three additional episodes the following week.