Mainstream TV viewers often overlook horror, but American Horror Story managed to seduce
an audience all its own.
Here's a look behind the scenes into what it took to bring the beloved anthology series
to the small screen.
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 ghosts, violence,
and a Rubber Man.
What happened?
Who hurt you, Ryan?
In an interview with Elle, Murphy admitted: "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 horror and depravity instead.
American Horror Story also allowed Murphy to right a Glee wrong.
He'd wanted Sarah Paulson to play Emma Pillsbury, the high school guidance counselor eventually
portrayed by Jayma Mays.
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.
"So much pain here.
So much longing and regret."
While occasionally campy and darkly funny, most every season of American Horror Story
gets pretty bleak pretty quickly.
"I mean, just because you've got 30 bodies buried in your crawl space, don't mean you
can't have a really terrific rec room and be a respectable businessman."
Playing murderers, and their victims, can really get under the skin of the actors, so
a few have tried to relieve the tension when possible.
Zachary Quinto took on a major role in Asylum as Oliver Thredson.
Another role he accepted: on-set music therapist, playing his banjo on set to lighten the mood.
Lily Rabe plays guitar in real life, and she'd play to provide "musical breaks" on tough
days too.
"Yeah.
Musical breaks.
It was good.
Zach is better at the banjo than I am at the guitar, for sure."
Jessica Lange, the grande dame of American Horror Story, convinced Ryan Murphy to put
one of these melodic palette cleansers into the show itself.
After a flashback revealed that her Asylum character had once been a singer in a band,
Lange suggested a full-on fantasy musical sequence in the middle of a psychiatric institution,
set to the classic '60s novelty song "The Name Game," if only because, as she told Vulture:
"Everything we do is so grim."
Let's be real: Lots of people are afraid of clowns.
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.
"Oh clown, you're so talented, please release us so we can tell the world."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this subplot upset some real-life clowns.
In 2014, Clowns of America president Glenn Kohlberger said in response to Freak Show:
"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."
Before it was canceled in 2017, Scream Queens, Ryan Murphy's other other show, was the place
where the blood and gore of American Horror Story met the comedy of Glee.
For instance, its first season asked the burning question: How might a cast made up of self-absorbed
sorority girls and dumb frat guys deal with a costumed serial killer roaming their college
campus?
"Good evening, idiot hookers.
I'm very happy to welcome you to hell week here at Kappa House."
It was also laced with references to classic slasher movies, tongue-in-cheek horror movie
tropes, and it even starred Halloween's Jamie Lee Curtis in a major role.
While that may all sound pretty standard for the guy who conjured up the Dead Breakfast
Club, Scream Queens nearly had even more in common with American Horror Story.
Just how much, you ask?
Well, it was almost a spin-off of Coven, the AHS season set at a school for young witches
in New Orleans.
"Surprise, bitch.
I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me."
However, Murphy changed his mind after a lunch with Fox executives, explaining:
"We were talking about things that we loved that were not on the air, things that we loved
growing up, movies that we loved watching."
Once the subject of slasher movies came up, Scream Queens' own unique identity began to
take shape, and while its ride was a short one, it sure was a blast while it lasted.
In the months before the sixth season of American Horror Story premiered in 2016, FX released
more than 20 teasers, each suggesting a totally different theme.
At a Television Critics Association event, FX CEO John Landgraf explained that only one
of them accurately represented the season, while the rest were "misdirects."
Though wildly different, the trailers did share a few things in common: all of them
were creepy, weird, and pretty damn unsettling, perhaps none more so than one that showed
a woman using some hedge clippers to snip wind chimes made from human teeth.
Turns out that was the real trailer, as that imagery figures into American Horror Story:
Roanoke.
In a way, though, all of the fake trailers were "real."
That season of the show explored the notions of "real" and "fake," as the plot centered
in part on a couple who lived in a haunted house near the lost colony of Roanoke, and
a TV show's re-creations of the events they endured at the hands of the ghostly Roanoke
colonists.
In American Horror Story: Hotel, Evan Peters portrayed Mr. March, who turned out to be
arguably the most super evil character in the show's long list of super evil characters.
"I look around, and I see the definition of American success."
Why?
Well, because he trapped, tortured, and killed people in the Hotel Cortez, duh.
It's quite upsetting then that, according to Ryan Murphy in Entertainment Weekly, Mr.
March is based on a real person.
That individual is H.H. Holmes, who, during the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, opened and
ran a "hotel of horrors."
Visitors to the great exposition who tragically chose to stay at Holmes' hotel would find
their rooms soundproof and windowless, all the better for Holmes to take them out via
gassing or other means.
Secret passageways allowed him to remove bodies to the basement without detection, where he'd
destroy the evidence in a furnace.
He was caught in 1894, and executed two years later.