Mainstream entertainment awards often overlook horror, but American Horror
Story is so well made that Emmy voters bestow it with accolades year after year.
But what exactly goes into making the creepy award-winning anthology series?
We shine a light on the untold truth of American Horror Story.
In addition to legendary Oscar winners like Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates,
American Horror Story has made stars out of up-and-comers like Emma Roberts and Evan Peters,
and proved to the world long before A Star is Born that Lady Gaga could act.
It's hard to believe that some performers couldn't or didn't want to be involved with the top-rated
show. Chris Zylka booked a two-episode stint on Asylum as a deaf man, but a few months later,
he exited because he didn't want to have to shave his head, a requirement of the role.
Ryan Murphy has also dutifully pursued a few dream cast members,
albeit unsuccessfully. Among the targets he has revealed: Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Chiklis,
and Reese Witherspoon. Talking about the latter to Entertainment Weekly, Murphy said -
"I wanted her to play something really twisted and f***ed up. But she's always booked."
Neil Patrick Harris and his husband, David Burtka, appeared in Freak Show, although Murphy earlier
pursued the couple for Murder House — he wanted them to portray the bickering pair ultimately
played by Zachary Quinto and Teddy Sears. Harris explained to Rolling Stone why they skipped out on
the part, referring to the couple's roles in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas -
"We had just played ourselves as a couple not getting along. I thought,
'It just seems weird to do that twice, as individual actors to
play a couple that hate each other twice. So I said 'no,' that we shouldn't do it."
The eighth season of American Horror Story, dubbed Apocalypse, tied together characters
from multiple seasons in the ultimate crossover event to face the ultimate evil:
Michael Langdon, the offspring of Satan – the antichrist. In the sixth episode of the story,
"Return to Murder House," viewers learn that Michael realizes his evil abilities in full after
a visit from Anton LaVey and his top lieutenants, who ritually and brutally sacrifice a woman,
remove her beating heart, and give it over to the young embodiment of true evil to feast upon.
It was a deeply upsetting scene for many viewers, but in a different way for the real-life Church
of Satan. Anton LaVey was a real person, who really did found the Church of Satan
and wrote several books espousing the beliefs of the 10,000-strong organization.
Present-day COS leaders objected to the portrayal of the church on American Horror Story, tweeting
about their disapproval in October 2018 and pointing out the inaccuracies in the adaptation.
When Ryan Murphy talked to The Hollywood Reporter regarding
Sarah Paulson's portrayal of Bette and Dot Tattler during the fourth season of
American Horror Story, he couldn't hold back his overwhelming praise, saying -
"It's absolutely the most challenging thing I've ever seen any actor do ever."
It was really terrifying as you might imagine - I didn't know how in the
world we were going to do it and it's a really scary thing to act by yourself.
The dual role found Paulson playing conjoined twins with two heads and one body, living in a
traveling sideshow on American Horror Story: Freak Show. It was also one of the most challenging
things the show's special effects artists ever had to attempt. It required a lot of old-fashioned
trickery, labor, and digital manipulation for Paulson to convincingly play both characters.
First, the effects team took a mold of Paulson's own head
and used it to build two sophisticated prosthetic heads, as Murphy explained -
"So when Sarah is doing her coverage where she's Dot, she has on a fake head to her left,
which is Bette, and it moves. She literally has to do scenes with herself."
Those scenes took as long as 15 hours to shoot, because everything with the Tattlers had to be
filmed for close-up, in medium shots, for effects, and from various angles...twice.
Scream Queens began life as an idea for a standalone AHS spinoff season,
featuring characters from the Coven season of American Horror Story. However,
the show with the same creator and many of the same cast members went the other way,
and inspired a season of American Horror Story.
Scream Queens, like American Horror Story, was an anthology, telling a different story each season,
albeit featuring the same characters. In its first iteration in 2015, a killer ran
wild on a college campus. While the first season of Scream Queens was running on Fox,
co-star Oliver Hudson said on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live that creator Ryan Murphy
had told him that the show, in the event that it was renewed for a second season,
would shift its setting from a university to a summer camp.
That, of course, didn't happen — Fox renewed Scream Queens, and the second season took place in
a hospital. However, four years later, the eighth season of American Horror Story debuted on FX.
A lengthy homage to 1980s slasher movies, the season subtitled 1984 took place primarily at Camp
Redwood — a summer camp. It also starred Billie Lourd, a holdover from the Scream Queens cast.
American Horror Story: Freak Show takes place in Florida among the denizens of one of few remaining
"Cabinet of Curiosities" shows in 1952. A highlight of the season is the recurring
motif of anachronistic music from musicians like Nirvana and David Bowie, meaning characters set
in the show's world of the early '50s sing very famous songs recorded decades later.
Ryan Murphy explained that the songs were carefully selected for Freak Show,
and for good reason, as he explained -
"We decided we only were going to highlight musical artists
who at some point in their career had identified themselves as feeling like
freaks or misfits or outcasts, which our people are going through."
In American Horror Story: Hotel, Evan Peters portrayed Mr. March,
who turned out to be arguably the most purely evil character in the show's long list of
purely evil characters, trapping, torturing, and murdering people in the Hotel Cortez.
"There are places in my murder palace that have sat in cold neglect for far too long.
Put them to good use, old boy."
It's quite upsetting that, according to Ryan Murphy in Entertainment Weekly,
Mr. March is based on a real horrific person.
That individual is H.H. Holmes, who, during the Chicago World's Fair in 1893,
opened and utilized a quote, "hotel of horrors."
World’s Fair visitors, who tragically chose to board at Holmes' hotel, would find their rooms
soundproof and windowless, all the better for Holmes to murder them via gassing or
other means. Secret passageways allowed him to remove bodies without detection to the basement,
where he'd destroy the evidence in a furnace. He was caught in 1894, and executed two years later.
American Horror Story: Hotel took inspiration in part from the ghastly horrors committed by
H.H. Holmes, and seemingly from something more modern and ambiguous as well. The Hotel Cortez
is loosely based on the Cecil Hotel, a structure in the "skid row" area of downtown Los Angeles
that's hosted countless tourists and transients as well as murderers and mysteries. Austrian
serial killer Jack Unterweger resided at the hotel for a while, as did Richard Ramirez,
the murderer known as the Night Stalker. He's even a character in American Horror Story: Hotel.
The one incident that really moved the needle for American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy
was the story of Elisa Lam. As explored in the 2021 Netflix documentary Crime Scene:
The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, Canadian student Lam stayed at the Cecil during a trip to Los
Angeles in 2013... only to disappear. An internet-driven manhunt ensued, especially
after the release of a bizarre surveillance video of Lam acting erratically in a Cecil
Hotel elevator. A few days later, Lam's body was discovered in a rooftop water tank. Murphy summed
up the puzzling circumstances at a Television Critics Association event in August 2015 -
"A girl got in an elevator in a downtown hotel. She was never seen again."
The sinister-sounding, postmodern opening sequence for American Horror Story seems tailor-made for
the show, a combination of spooky, forbidding, and hypnotic musical themes punctuated by jarring
jump-scare sounds. Surprisingly, the bulk of it comes from a 20-year-old class project.
Back in 1998, César Dávila-Irizarry was a sophomore at the University of Puerto Rico.
For a music history class, he created a primitive digital audio track,
using Cool Edit 96 on his Windows 98 computer, stretching, mixing and
combining various sounds with white noise. For example, the song's first dissonant
moment comes from a clip of Dávila-Irizarry dropping wire hangers on a tile floor.
When he was done, Dávila-Irizarry gave it to his friend, Gabriel Diaz,
who went on to work as a video editor on the first season of American Horror Story.
He used Dávila-Irizarry's track as a placeholder, but producers liked it so much
they decided to keep it. For technical and legal reasons, show composer Charlie Clouser
of Nine Inch Nails recreated and spruced it up with Dávila-Irizarry's blessing.
Apart from a couple of appearances as Church of Satan cardinal Samantha Crowe in the Apocalypse
season, actor Naomi Grossman left her mark on the American Horror Story franchise in
the second-season Asylum story. She portrayed Pepper, a woman who suffers from microcephaly,
which means someone having a smaller than normal head. She also possesses many other notable
physical traits, such as large ears, jutting teeth, a mostly shaved pate, and a top-knot.
Grossman is almost unrecognizable as Pepper,
and her physical transformation into the character for each episode of Asylum
was a long and involved process, with Grossman telling Entertainment Weekly -
"The entire process takes about two and a half to three hours,
and that's with two men working the entire time!"
Freckles and veins were drawn on Grossman's skin,
and then came extensive prosthetics, which included -
"a forehead complete with punched-in eyebrows, a nose, ears,
and even a bumpy little spine-piece for my back."
Grossman was also outfitted for a set of false teeth,
which altered the shape of her mouth and face. Grossman additionally revealed
that she couldn't even use one of her eyes thanks to a lens she had to wear.
Songs recorded by Fleetwood Mac, as well as that band's Stevie Nicks,
permeate the soundtracks of multiple American Horror Story seasons.
That's logical, as Nicks has long been associated with witches, dark spirits,
and other spooky stuff that's abundant in the Ryan Murphy horror anthology.
Nicks' bewitching presence is felt most strongly in the third American Horror Story,
subtitled Coven, where Lily Rabe plays a witch who deeply loves Nicks' music even before she finds
out the singer is an actual, practicing witch, too. Nicks makes a cameo late in the season,
and it was tough for American Horror Story producers to make it happen.
Nicks was friendly with AHS creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck, having lent a
hand on a Fleetwood Mac tribute episode of their series Glee. For American Horror Story,
Nicks told the Los Angeles Times that the creators asked if they could use her music again, and when
they explained that her songs were an integral aspect for the lonely character Misty Day,
Nicks acquiesced. When Murphy asked her to appear, she was terrified at first — she had a terrible
time acting in a fourth grade play and had, quote, "vowed to stay away" from acting forever.
"This shawl has danced across the stages of the world
and now it's yours. And good luck with the seven wonders."
Each year, the story, setting, and characters are different,
but the actors remain the same. From the beginning of the American Horror Story anthology concept,
creator Ryan Murphy has utilized a collective of performers, with many of them dutifully
returning for each successive season. However, when it came time to shoot season nine, 1984,
Murphy had to make do without the use of some of his most venerable actors.
For example, Evan Peters starred in eight seasons, then left the show,
citing burnout and an aversion to getting typecast in horror roles. Sarah Paulson
also appeared in each of the first eight tales, and Jessica Lange bowed out after four seasons,
then had a small, role-reprising cameo in the eighth season, which tied several different,
disparate American Horror stories together. It also involved a large number of actors,
which stretched FX's budget, with FX CEO Jon Landgraf telling TheWrap -
"It was a monster in terms of the size of the cast, cost of that cast,"
According to Landgraf, Murphy had to quote,
"clean the slate, start over." When American Horror Story: 1984 debuted,
it boasted a cast composed mostly of new and latter-day arrivals to the franchise.
After the soft reboot of American Horror Story was announced, in the form of an '80s horror
movie-influenced season called 1984, a series fan and video editor named Corey
Vega made a preemptive cut of what he thought the upcoming episodes' opening credit sequence
ought to look like. In short, Vega thought it should look extremely '80s. He put together a
rapid-fire clip montage that included shots of aerobics instructors, neon-colored cars,
moonwalking, and neon graphics. And because it's supposed to be an American Horror Story clip,
lots of blood and gore permeated it all.
The video spread around the internet until it reached a very influential figure:
co-creator and producer Ryan Murphy. Murphy wrote on Instagram that he was such a fan of the edit
that he hired Vega to recreate his video with AHS titles designer Kyle Cooper to use in 1984.
From 2011 to 2019, a new edition of American Horror Story aired every fall on FX. The network
ordered a tenth season in the summer of 2018 — before season eight had aired and before nine
had entered production. But then 2020 came and went without a new Horror, pushed back by FX due
to coronavirus production delays. Creator Ryan Murphy already had a lot on his plate as FX also
ordered a spinoff called American Horror Stories, in which each episode would tell a single story,
and in 2019, he signed a $300 million deal to move his productions to Netflix.
Filming being delayed by many months
even threatened to change the nature of the series, as Murphy told TheWrap -
"A lot of what I was going to shoot was dependent on a very specific moment,
it was a weather-dependent show. I don't know what I'm gonna do next with that show. I don't
know if I'll accelerate another season or wait till next year to shoot this one."
While reports suggested filming would begin in December 2020, filming permits were filed for
a February 2021 shoot in Provincetown, Massachusetts, under the name Pilgrim.
Before American Horror Story debuted in 2011, co-creator Ryan Murphy was best known as one
of the minds behind Glee, a show so happy and positive that it was literally about a
bunch of high school kids gaining self esteem by singing and dancing to familiar pop songs.
Murphy then went directly from his high school musical to a house full of murder,
ghosts, suicide, and a Rubber Man. What happened to Murphy that he could
make such a switch? He later revealed in an interview with Elle, saying -
"I was like, 'I can't write any more nice speeches for these Glee
kids about love and tolerance and togetherness.'"
To that end, he wrote a show about sex, murder, and depravity instead.
As for a more direct trajectory of what inspired Ryan Murphy, best known for teen fare,
to construct an interconnected universe of horrors both supernatural and psychological,
he looked to two old favorites from the 1970s, as Murphy told Interview -
"Like all my TV shows, it's rooted in a childhood obsession. Two actually:
Dark Shadows and a movie called Don't Look Now,"
He was referring to a gothic TV daytime serial about a vampire
named Barnabas Collins and a Donald Sutherland movie about parents in the
throes of grief after the death of a child. He went on to say -
"What I really wanted to do was my version of Dark Shadows, where there are creatures and a
soap opera and sex, because my grandmother used to make me watch Dark Shadows as punishment."
American Horror Story also allowed Ryan Murphy to right a wrong from his days on Glee.
He'd wanted Sarah Paulson to play Emma Pillsbury, the OCD-afflicted high school
guidance counselor eventually portrayed by Jayma Mays, but Paulson was unable because
she was starring in a Broadway play at the time. Murphy finally found a place for Paulson
as medium Billie Dean Howard, the first of many memorable AHS roles she would step into.
A close creative ally to Murphy, Paulson came into the writer-director's inner circle at the
suggestion of American Horror Story mainstay Jessica Lange. Lange and Paulson had acted
together in a 2005 Broadway revival of the Tennessee Williams classic The Glass Menagerie.
In 2011, when development for the first season of American Horror Story was underway,
and Jessica Lange had been cast in the lead role of Constance Langdon,
she approached Murphy with the request to, quote, "find something for Paulson."
Lots of people have a fear of clowns, known as coulrophobia. It must be something about
their frozen, exaggerated, and untrustworthy grins, or how their identity is concealed under
white face paint. American Horror Story aptly exploited those fears in its Freak Show season,
featuring John Carroll Lynch as the monstrous Twisty the Clown, who isn't so much a children's
party entertainer as he is a guy who kills people with scissors and locks kids in an old school bus.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this subplot upset some real-life clowns, as Clowns
of America president Glenn Kohlberger said in response to Freak Show in 2014 -
"Hollywood makes money sensationalizing the norm. They can take any situation no
matter how good or pure and turn it into a nightmare. We do not support
in any way, shape, or form any medium that sensationalizes or adds to coulrophobia."
The protests flared up again in 2017, when American Horror Story: Cult, once again,
featured evil clowns. World Clown Association president Pam Moody told the Detroit Free Press -
"The role of a clown persona, regardless of their style of clowning,
is meant to bring joy and laughter, to bring humor to a hurting world."
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