American Horror Story and Cult Television: Narratives, Histories and Discourses

By Richard Hand

Over the course of ten seasons since 2011, the television series American Horror Story (AHS), created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, has continued to push the boundaries of the televisual form in new and exciting ways. Emerging in a context which has seen a boom in popularity for horror series on television, AHS has distinguished itself from its ‘rivals’ such as The Walking Dead, Bates Motel or Penny Dreadful through its diverse strategies and storylines, which have seen it explore archetypal narratives of horror culture as well as engage with real historical events. Utilising a repertory company model for its casting, the show has challenged issues around contemporary politics, heteronormativity, violence on the screen and disability, to name but a few. This new collection of essays approaches the AHS anthology series from a variety of critical perspectives within the broader field of television studies and its transections with other disciplines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781785279355

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Richard J. Hand and Mark O’Thomas

Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy – the co-creators and showrunners of American Horror Story (AHS) since its inception in 2011 on the FX cable network – have been pioneering and prolific figures in the production of ‘Quality Television.’ From medical drama Nip/Tuck (2003–10) to the high school drama Glee (2009–15), Falchuk and Murphy have become key figures in the landscape of American television production. Some themes and settings recur in their work: the high school melodrama of Glee is echoed in the satirical world of high school politics in The Politician (2019–20). Heightened glamour and character-driven melodrama can be found in Pose (2018–21), about the 1980–90s drag scene in New York City, similar to the qualities that imbued Feud (2017) and its vivid exploration of the camp folklore surrounding Bette Davis and Joan Crawford during the filming of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich 1962). This fascination with the myths, intrigue and glamour of a long-gone Hollywood is also evident in the aptly titled Hollywood (2020), an idealised reimagining – an ‘alternate history’ – that reclaims ‘real’ figures such as Rock Hudson and others and strives to liberate them from the systemic homophobia and racism of the era. Hollywood had a divided reception – some critics taking exception to what they saw as its naïve alt-historicization – but the work unmistakably reveals numerous tropes that pervade the Falchuk and Murphy universe, such as their recurrent use of favourite actors and their trademark displays of sexuality, sexual politics and sexiness.

Feud and Hollywood’s animation of genuine characters from history is most profoundly developed in the American Crime Story (2016 onwards) series strand, which has dramatized, true stories such as the O. J. Simpson trial, the murder of Gianni Versace, the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal and the rise and fall of the Studio 54 club in the 1970s. When it comes to horror – and it must be said that some of the scenes and narratives in American Crime Story can be as horrifying as anything in AHS – series such as Scream Queens (2015–16) stand as deliriously comedic counterpoints to AHS. In many respects, Scream Queens can be seen as being positioned in the territory between Glee, The Politician, Pose and AHS: a profound satire of youth culture, school/college life and its brutal prejudices, vendettas and hierarchies. Consistently high camp and glamorous, Scream Queens is inventively gruesome in its sustained pastiche of the slasher genre if not horror more widely.

In their prolific track record of Quality Television, however, AHS stands at the fore of Falchuk and Murphy’s success and reputation. The achievements of AHS are multiple: it can be innovative while adhering to classic conventions of Gothic and horror; it can be satirical and ‘real world’ while being escapist and fantastical; it can be audacious and provocative while being ironic and entertaining. It is testament to the achievement of AHS that it can have such popular appeal and be richly stimulating in a context of academic inquiry. But after more than a decade of quality televisual output, we have to ask, ‘Is horror inexhaustible?’

As far back as 2016, the women’s media platform ENTITY posed the question: ‘Has American Horror Story run out of ideas?’¹ At this point in time, the anthology series was about to embark on its sixth season (‘Roanoke’) and the idea that the series might sustain itself for four future seasons or more, in addition to its spawning of single-story spinoffs (under the American Horror Stories moniker), might have seemed a little farfetched. AHS has certainly proved to be a successful venture for Falchuk and Murphy since its inception in 2011; its ability to both adapt to contemporary contexts (such as the Trump election), self-cannibalise plot lines and characters, and recycle them, has formed an important part of its continued success and ever-growing fan base. This consistent performance – over some eleven years by 2022 – has delivered the highest ratings figures of all of the FX network output, along with several hundred significant industry nominations or wins, including Emmy Awards and Golden Globes.

The unparalleled success of AHS, its ability to not only reinvent the anthology series television genre, but also to push the boundaries of, and even reinvent, the horror genre itself, is evinced by the growing critical discourse encircling its opus. This new volume, which explores the AHS phenomenon in multiple ways and diverse voices, thus forms part of a growing body of work that is responding to the output of screenwriters, executive producers and showrunners Murphy and Falchuk, that has been on our television screens over recent decades.

Clearly, the past few years have been exceptional by any measure. The COVID-19 pandemic closed down entertainment production in the short term and sequestered populations across the globe to their homes during multiple and prolonged periods of lockdown. What at first was hoped to be a temporary blip took more than two years to begin to subside – a moment that coincided with a new war in Europe when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a rise in fossil fuel energy prices, and all-too-quickly forgotten commitments that had been made in Glasgow during the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) gathering in early November 2021. Ideas of ecological Armageddon, nuclear war, and the impact of viruses had not previously escaped the thematic threads of the AHS back catalogue. ‘Hotel’ (season five) reconciled the idea of a virus with vampires (one could now say presciently, given the theory that the coronavirus (COVID-19) originated from a bat), while ‘Apocalypse’ (season nine) evoked the final days of a planet that had successfully destroyed itself. Having already explored these two core themes and coming back with a tenth season in 2022, a habitual question returns: what might AHS have left in its plot armoury to sustain itself for another ten or more episodes? And so, it was with much trepidation and expectation that the arrival of its tenth season in 2021 – AHS: ‘Double Feature’ – emerged into the homes of its global audience, many of whom had been, were in, or were heading to a state of government-enforced lockdown due to the prolonged existence of the pandemic.

The title ‘Double Feature’ evokes the social experience of cinema-going: a tradition from a lost epoch of movie-theatre experience with a particular resonance regarding popular genres such as science fiction and horror. Particularly associated with youth culture (groups or couples seeking an entertaining, protracted and value-for-money evening away from their homes), it is a concept that continues to be imbued with nostalgia for movie theatres or drive-in venues as a social space and site of ritual and pleasure. AHS’s promise of a double feature, however, transpired to be a little misleading as the new season, in fact, effectively truncated the ten-episode length of a usual season into two. Nevertheless, ‘Double Feature’ fulfilled its nomenclature inasmuch as it gave its viewers a Gothic storyline of vampires and followed it with a narrative of Science Fiction paranoia. Six episodes (subtitled ‘Red Tide’) were devoted to a vampires-on-sea story with the added ingredient of opioid addiction thrown in for good measure, and the remaining four (subtitled ‘Death Valley’) focused on a sci-fi tale of alien abduction, inspired by the infamous Area 51 (a United States Air Force facility located in the Nevada desert, which has been the subject of conspiracy theories for many years) played out against the political events in the US during the late 1950s onwards.

As mentioned above, the AHS universe had already explored vampires in its fifth season, ‘Hotel’, where a direct causal relationship was established between their existence and that of a virus. The vampires in ‘Hotel’, known as The Afflicted, are infected and, as a result, are granted eternal youth and immortality but remain dependent on human blood in order to function fully (a plotline not so far away from Guillermo del Toro’s own vampire/virus FX series, The Strain (2014–17)). In ‘Red Tide’, the traditional blood-sucking vampire trope is adapted once more, but this time it moves away from the Los Angeles downtown hotel to the seaside setting of the East Coast where Cape Cod’s Provincetown provides the backdrop to proceedings. Here the conventional vampire narrative is reworked again in a rather convoluted rendering, whereupon a black pill is taken that will either foster creativity in the talented (as long as they satiate a newfound thirst for the red stuff), or leave those citizens who are bereft of real artistic talent to a life of wandering around in a zombie-like, hairless, demented state hunting for one simple pleasure – the consumption of human blood. ‘Death Valley’, meanwhile, picks up the earlier and hitherto unresolved subplot of AHS season two’s ‘Asylum’ when Kit Walker (Evan Peters) and his wife Alma (Britne Oldford) are abducted by aliens. Like the earlier segments of ‘Death Valley’, ‘Asylum’ takes place during the Eisenhower era of 1950s US politics and sets out to resolve the many questions about what the aliens’ motive had been in kidnapping Kit and Alma in a plotline that also ‘explains’ the development of microwaves and what really happened in Area 51.

If ‘Double Feature’ paid homage to a nostalgic tradition in movie-going, another part of the franchise released in the same year alluded to a classic televisual form of horror, science fiction and dark fantasy. The two series of American Horror Stories (2021–22) explored the television anthology series with self-contained (or two-part) episodes that can be seen as paying homage to classic works of anthologised television from Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62) and The Twilight Zone (1959–64) onwards. Although there were allusions to the central AHS canon (indeed, the first two episodes of the series – ‘Rubber(wo)Man’ part 1 and 2 – were set in the original AHS ‘Murder House’), the creators of AHS strove to develop standalone narratives. This permitted stories that unfurled in the concision of a 40-minute to 50-minute episode and would not have worked in a longer story arc. For example, tales such as ‘Drive In’ (a cursed movie wreaks havoc when discovered and screened), ‘The Naughty List’ (a group of social media influencers face a backlash after uploading a sickening video), and ‘Ba’al’ (a women who is willing to do anything to become pregnant), were constructed to work as horror fables in the self-contained anthology tradition: gruesome morality tales in which people’s recklessness, vanity or expedience is established, then punished. As such, American Horror Stories can be seen as following the tradition of the television series Tales from the Crypt (1989–96) – albeit with no ‘character host’ – or an adult-themed version of the children’s show Goosebumps (1995–98) and its various imitators. At the same time, American Horror Stories clearly strove to place itself alongside contemporaneous examples of the horror and dark fantasy anthology that had emerged on television: the acclaimed Black Mirror (2011–19) – particularly evident in the ‘Game Over’ episode of American Horror Stories – and the Jordan Peele-produced The Twilight Zone (2019–20) which adapted Rod Serling’s supremely significant television format into a very contemporary zeitgeist.

Taken together, ‘Double Feature’ and American Horror Stories are series that can be seen to acknowledge different traditions of popular horror, from movie-going to anthologised television. Both series encapsulate the universe of AHS and its ingenious modus operandi: they are works that are nostalgic and well-versed, that can treat classic horror conventions and themes with ironic knowingness while deploying them with consummate skill. AHS is firmly in the tradition of Gothic storytelling and the ‘poetics’ of popular horror but simultaneously challenges both the genre and the television medium.

In this collection, we present a range of diverse scholarship which responds to the narratives, histories and discourses of AHS in ways that open up new thinking within the Television Studies field. AHS cannot be entirely divorced from its production processes, and it is the history of television horror production, its roots in radio and the theatre, and its genesis within the broader corpus of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, that provide the central theme of Section 1 of this volume: ‘Industries/Contexts/Consumption.’ Richard J. Hand’s chapter situates AHS within the context of popular Gothic horror where he draws on the theatrical antecedents of early horror radio which lay in the Parisian Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. AHS is highly adaptive and readily embraces a rich variety of disciplines and sources and, as Hand’s chapter attests, in doing so it exhibits a high degree of communality with those sources in its accentuation of actor virtuosity and its harnessing of a loyal fanbase. Mark O’Thomas’s chapter picks up the theme of the horror ensemble cast and explores this in relation to the genesis of the anthology television series through television’s so-called ‘Golden Age’ and beyond into the resurgence of the anthology television series in the twenty-first century. Bringing in a political dimension, the relationship between casting the establishment of a regular ensemble and the politics of a declining phase of liberalism is explored in ways that point towards those later chapters in the collection that focus on issues in AHS such as gender, otherness and identity.

Section 2 of this collection, ‘Intertexts and Referents: Gothic, Voodoo, Witches’, probes deep into the AHS universe and its predilection for magic and the magical. Adam Herron and Ben Nicholson’s chapter – ‘ Who’s the Baddest Witch in Town?: Female Agency and Monstrosity in American Horror Story: Coven ’ – takes the third season of the anthology series and the first to be shot on location. Herron and Nicholson draw on television studies, adaptation studies and a range of other critical discourses in their multi-methodological approach, but their primary focus is to fully explore the ways in which ‘Coven’ adapts the figure of the witch from its historical contexts dating back to the Early Modern period. Taking on Helen Greig’s notion of ‘public history’, the scholars uncover questions around historical authenticity as well as the role that historical methods might play in the production, show-running and episode-writing processes. In ‘ I Know Your Body: Trauma and the Frankenstein Myth in Coven ’, Catherine Pugh’s take on the third season is arrived at from an altogether different position – one that centres on the relationship of the body with gender, disability and in particular the Frankenstein myth. Pugh is particularly interested in the ways in which the character of Kyle and his storyline both follows and subverts the Frankenstein narrative and from here how the archetype of the blind seer interacts with Frankenstein, in its treatment of issues of trauma, abuse and disability.

American Horror Story’s second season, ‘Asylum’, in some ways was a pre-cursor for exploring issues of the body, disability, and indeed race, which surfaced once more in third season ‘Coven’ and fourth season ‘Freak Show.’ However, Richard and LMK Sheppard’s chapter – ‘Shadows Close to Our Daily Paths: Madness, The Gothic Edifice and the Referential in American Horror Story’s Asylum ’ – approaches the second season by building on much of critical discourse around institutions and madness, and most notably the seminal work of Michel Foucault. Locating ‘Asylum’ within the televisual genre of Neo-Gothic Televisual Fiction, they see ‘Asylum’, and Briarcliff Manor in particular, as a place where the battle between the rational and irrationality is staged. This is significant in that Sheppard’s analysis leads us to a point where the specificity of the medium of television itself is understood to play a role in problematising narratives of reason and madness alongside paratextual features of ‘Asylum’ such as diegetic music.

Mikaël Toulza’s chapter – ‘(De)Complexifying Voodoo in Coven and Apocalypse ’ – has both seasons three and eight in its sights in its critical examination of the Voodoo trope within the AHS anthology. Indeed, it is the intersections between the two seasons that is a concern for Toulza although his tracking of Angela Bassett’s character Marie Laveau, and her narratological engagement with Voodoo as a counter to racism, is highly revealing. The treatment of race, racism and identity politics, so often the site of critical discourse for Murphy’s opus, once more surfaces here where Toulza points towards the particular US political contexts in 2013 and 2018 when the respective seasons were aired as one way of accounting for the profound differences within which they interact with Voodoo.

Section 3, ‘Society, Politics, Space’, seeks to account for the collisions and resonances between cultural and spatial phenomena within three seasons of AHS: ‘1984’, ‘Murder House’, and ‘Hotel.’ In ‘Desiring Horror and Desirable Retro Slashers: 1984 and the Transformation of Sociocultural Intelligibility’, Alvaro Lopez examines ‘1984’ (Season Nine) – the AHS homage to the slasher movies of the 1980s such as the Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Slumber Party movie franchises and perhaps most notably Sleepaway Camp (1983). Lopez finds ‘1984’ a fitting space in which to explore the ‘contemporary rearticulation of sociocultural intelligibility’ where it appears to metaphorically slash between the then and the now in order to better position our perspectives of sociocultural change.

In ‘Hospitality and the dead in American Horror Story: Murder House and American Horror Story: Hotel ’, Beth Michael-Fox challenges received ideas around the bleakness of AHS and in particular ‘Murder House’ and ‘Hotel’ in her excavation of notions of death and what it means to reject the living/dead binary. Taking as her point of departure Derrida’s notion of a kind of unqualified and unconditional hospitality, Michael-Fox documents how this hospitality provides a locus for the dead to be also (un)dead – a space that is particularly alluring to mothers who are thus allowed to continue to live alongside their children.

Our final, and largest, section is titled ‘Gender/Otherness’, an area for which AHS has become renowned both within the television industry and outside it within popular cultural critical discourse: namely, how the anthology series negotiates, challenges and provokes notions of gender and otherness. In ‘A Feminist and Queer Approach to American Horror Story’s Homonormative and US Nationalist Values in the ‘Asylum’ and ‘Cult’ Seasons’, Daniel Berjano argues that AHS is both innovative and ambiguous in its exploration of contemporary issues: normative and romantic love; individualism and modern human ontology; notions of gendered, racist and ableist evil; the protagonism of (white) women, and the abundance of depictions of murder, violence and abuse. Berjano takes into consideration the phenomenal transformation of media technology, production and consumption since the rise of the internet, as well as drawing on feminist and queer theory. Specifically, Berjano builds on the work of Teresa de Lauretis to frame AHS as a substantial ‘technology of gender’, which utilises race and nationality by its audiovisual compliance with ‘queernormativity.’

In ‘Scaring with Otherness: American Horror Story and the Other Identity’, Özgür Çalışkan explores a concept that has become core to Horror Studies: the notion of the Other. Through a reading of recent analyses of ‘Otherness’ and theories of identity in theoretical studies of the horror genre, Çalışkan conducts a systematic overview of various series of AHS, analysing specific characters and exploring the ramifications of this in regard to the audiences of television horror and its contemporary cultural contexts.

‘ Bitchcraft: Adolescent Femininity and Fourth-Wave Feminism in Television Horror’, focuses on adolescent viewership and representation where Miranda Corcoran explores the portrayal of teenage girls in television horror. After surveying the evolution of young women in supernatural television programming from the 1990s and early 2000s, including aspirational, powerful yet glamorous figures such as Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Corcoran examines the teen witches in AHS: ‘Coven’ and ‘Apocalypse.’ Arguing that these characters represent a radical break with pre-millennial representations of supernaturally-powered young women, Corcoran locates the influence of emergent fourth-wave feminism and its focus on issues related to the body, reproductive justice and consent. The teenage witches of AHS are not so much glamorous and aspirational figures than projections of the contemporary concerns harboured by a newly politicised generation of young women.

In ‘ Cut me and I Bleed Dior: The Dark Side of Glamour in American Horror Story’, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Emiliano Aguilar explore a feature that characterises AHS: glamour. Whether in the series’ design, style and archetypes or in the virtuoso performances of Jessica Lange, Lady Gaga or Joan Collins, AHS consistently thrills its audience with ‘glamour.’ However, the chapter reminds us that the roots of the word and concept of glamour are deeply rooted in witchcraft and the occult. Seen like this, we realise that the flipside of glamour is horror and in AHS, an inherently Gothic form of glamour ‘anaesthetizes and aestheticizes horror and the inequalities of life.’

In the final essay in this collection, ‘American Horror Story: Murder House and Female Reproductive Biology: A Haunted History’, Michele Trépanier provides a detailed analysis of AHS’s landmark opening series. Trépanier locates AHS within the American Gothic genre and explores its innovative use of the haunted house trope, namely the incorporation of historical myths about the womb to create horror and articulate cultural critique. Trépanier argues that ‘Murder House’ is self-conscious of its position within the tradition of the American haunted house tale and uses the medium of the television series to juxtapose conventions of literature, screen and pornography with historical and cultural discourses surrounding American gender and identity politics. Through a dialectic established between the erotic and horrific, ‘Murder House’ is seen as pushing the boundaries of the trope of the haunted house story and articulating a critique of the American family system.

The essays in this new collection all serve to indicate the multifarious ways in which AHS resonates with contemporary critical theories, televisual and theatrical history, and the very notion of what horror means in the twenty-first century. They offer different and diverse perspectives on the anthology horror series and point towards potential new routes for further analysis and critical investigation as AHS continues to grow and proliferate in its various offshoots and spinoffs. We hope that this addition to the critical discourse will provide new insights and make an important contribution to television studies extending beyond the immediate world of AHS and its associated worlds.

Works

‘Has American Horror Story Run out of Ideas?’ ENTITY (Mag), 2016, https://www.entitymag.com/american-horror-story-run-ideas/.

Note

¹"Has American Horror Story Run Out Of Ideas?," ENTITY (Mag), 2016, https://www.entitymag.com/american-horror-story-run-ideas/.

SECTION 1

INDUSTRIES/CONTEXTS/CONSUMPTION

Chapter 1

‘I’M REALLY NOT TRYING TO BE CHEESY IN THIS MOUSTACHE TWISTY WAY, BUT IT GETS REALLY BAD. THINGS THAT YOU CAN’T EVEN REALLY IMAGINE…’ (SARAH PAULSON): AMERICAN HORROR STORY AND THE HORROR ENSEMBLE PARADIGM

Richard J. Hand

Introduction

Since it began in 2011, the multiple and continuing series of American Horror Story (AHS) have explored the diverse motifs, icons and narratives of horror and the popular Gothic. As a major part of this, AHS stands as a fascinating example of performance practice, creating and deploying what can be regarded as its own repertory company or even performance ensemble. In this regard, AHS echoes the old ‘stock system’ of casting that evolved from nineteenth-century theatre to cinema. Pamela Robertson Wojcik explains that this practice would continue throughout classical Hollywood – frequently with the loan and exchange of headline stars – until ‘actors become free agents in the 1960s, (and) the official stock system breaks down’ (Robertson Wojcik 2003, 240). Looked at like this, we detect an echo of popular cinematic horror such as Universal Pictures, indelibly associated with stars such as Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and Lon Chaney Junior in the 1940s; Tod Slaughter and his regular company of actors in the screen adaptations of stage melodramas in Britain in the 1930–40s; British director Pete Walker working with core actors, most notably Sheila Keith, in his 1970s horror movies; and Hammer Films in the 1950–70s which had a stable of core stars – most prominently Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee – and supporting character actors like Michael Ripper (who appeared in more Hammer films than either of the major stars). Although we could draw parallels between AHS and the icons and repertoire of 1930–70s cinematic horror, the sheer range of AHS finds a particularly nuanced and compelling parallel with horror culture beyond the screen. In other words, AHS can be seen as belonging to the rich ensemble tradition of popular horror performance across media, encouraging in its audience playful suspensions of disbelief and equally audacious displays of virtuosity. Thus, AHS is to contemporary television what, for example, the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (1897–1962) was to horror theatre – especially in its 1920s heyday – and programmes such as The Witch’s Tale (1931–38) and others were to live horror radio in the 1930–50s. This chapter will explore key features and ramifications of the performance practices of AHS in relation to other repertory and ensemble traditions in the history of popular horror culture. First of all, however, we need to explore AHS as an example of horror television.

AHS is a landmark television series as significant as the achievements of The Twilight Zone (1959–64), MASH (1972–83), or Friends (1994–2004). Moreover, AHS is an example of horror television, a genre which has always had a presence, whether in sitcoms like The Munsters (1964–66), anthology series including Tales from the Crypt (1989–96) or children’s shows such as Goosebumps (1995–98). However, in the contemporary era, horror has made a considerable impact on ‘quality television’, arguably building on the achievement and popularity that the neo-Gothic and dark fantasy worlds of The X-Files (1993–2002) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) demonstrated. In the last decade, quality television horror has enjoyed exceptional appeal, especially because the record-breaking audience figures for the pilot episode of The Walking Dead (2010–22) proved that the genre need not be niche or a gamble but could command mainstream acceptance and popularity. In addition, the steady growth in the uptake of subscription-based streaming services in the twenty-first century has created an ideal forum for consumption, allowing viewers to ‘watchlist’ and/or ‘binge-watch’. Television horror is a particularly popular genre in this context, with numerous examples of series, serials and anthology programmes proving popular and easy to access, with shows like AHS featuring on both Disney+ and Netflix.

In the majority of contemporary horror television works, adaptation is not just a recurrent but a primary process. Typically, we find series that locate inspiration in the pages of fiction. This can be from contemporary sources: the epic, dystopic story world of the aforementioned The Walking Dead is adapted from Robert Kirkman’s comic book series (2003–19); and the vampire pandemic dystopia The Strain (2014–17), produced by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, is based on their own co-authored trilogy of Gothic novels (2009–11). The adaptive source for horror television can also be found in classic fiction: Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (2020) is based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel, with the follow-up The Haunting of Bly Manor (1898) adapting Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898), while the neo-Gothic narratives of Penny Dreadful (2014–16) pay homage and pastiche to multiple literary and cultural antecedents. Film can also be an inspiration: Alongside crime series like Fargo (2014 onwards) – based on the film Fargo (Joel Coen 1996) – horror has a particularly important place in this phenomenon with, for example, the complex adaptive strategies in Bates Motel (2013–17) allowing a radical updating and reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); Scream: The TV Series (2015–19) as an expansion and update of the successful franchise established with Scream (Wes Craven 1996); and Ash vs Evil Dead (2016–18) presenting a return to the exploits of Ash (Bruce Campbell) several decades after the universe was inaugurated with The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi 1981).

In contrast to all these examples, however, AHS is not centrally an adaptation. That is not to say that AHS does not use adaptative strategies: rather, it uses various intertextual techniques of adaptation, appropriation and allusion in creating its original, complex and comprehensive storyworlds. As a generic series, AHS is an especially rich bricolage, exploring the motifs, narratives and taxonomy of popular horror: from traditional Gothic tropes of ghosts and possession to ‘traditional’ – or at least post-Enlightenment – anxiety about clowns to apparently newly emerged fears such as trypophobia (the aversion to irregular clusters of holes). Classic horror narratives are reworked, and imagery is animated in the programme through complex approaches to strategies of reconstruction, imitation and homage. Despite wearing its generic credentials on its sleeve – ‘Horror’ in the very title – not only does AHS span the widest generic array of horror narratives (from the supernatural to the slasher), it also frequently crosses genres, interpolating fact-based contexts and subplots, deploying the strategies of speculative fiction, political satire, and even comedy amidst its Gothic homage and horror intertextuality. A key part of this extraordinary narrative versatility is the virtuosity of its performers and the unpredictability of who its core actors will play from series to series or who might feature as a guest or star cameo.

Ironically, AHS’s bricolage can make the programme seem less of an example of a horror show than an example of telefantasy. Following Catherine Johnson (2005), we might argue that shows like Twin Peaks (1990–91) or the aforementioned The X Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer reveal telefantasy’s ‘tendency towards generic hybridity or self-reflexivity’ (Johnson 2015, 57). Above all, we might consider an episode such as Buffy’s ‘Once More, with Feeling’ (2001) in which the characters are cursed by a demon who turns their lives into a musical. This one-off episode is commonly known as ‘The Buffy Musical’ and acquired a cult status (a subcult within the cult that Buffy already commanded). Amy Bauer signals the adroit techniques deployed in the episode – an ‘intertextual richness’ – that authentically play with the ‘fans’ devotion to and knowledge of both the show’s history and cultural references to the American musical’ (Bauer 2010, 209–10). In a similar way, AHS as telefantasy can be seen to be assured and comprehensive in its hybridization. Indeed, this is emphatic in ‘The Name Game’ song and dance sequence in AHS: ‘Asylum’ (episode 10) which simultaneously alludes to musical theatre, 1960s novelty songs and Buffy’s ‘Once More, with Feeling’.

Telefantasy captures a wide range of hybridised science-fiction, fantasy and horror programmes that speak to the shared representational strategies, tendencies and pleasures that can be found across an array of different programmes all concerned with representing the unreal. A strategy of self-reflexivity means