This is not your typical season of American Horror Story. By this point, the fans usually know what the subtitle for the next run will be and are analyzing a series of promos and teaser images to figure out what might befall the characters next in the Ryan Murphy anthology. Instead, FX has been keeping things a mystery, a move that’s becoming increasingly frustrating with each new teaser.
The latest, released today, is a play on the classic horror film Creature From the Black Lagoon and Murphy’s other horror series, Scream Queens: an amphibian monster is shown pulling a woman shouting about her sorority into the water before cliche harp music plays to emphasis the love forming between monster and victim. It’s a tone we don’t normally see from American Horror Story. Scream Queens? Yes, but not from something that has been routinely creepy and borderline sadistic.
It’s so out of character that one would assume it’s a phony. In fact, John Landgraf, CEO of FX, told reporters during TCA that many of these teasers are misdirects, a method employed to keep the season 6 theme a mystery. Among the ones already released are scenes of a demonic baby, a Stranger Things-esque monster, a house befitting Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a spider-eyed lady, a crippling alien abduction, and a wind chime of teeth.
Langraf explained Murphy and his team “went out and made many more trailers than you’ve actually seen for hypothetical seasons of American Horror Story. Different genres, different places. I think they’re really fun and funny and beautifully, artfully made…and a lot of them are accurate. The others are all misdirects.”
Part of the fun of American Horror Story has been the act of solving the theme for each season, and the teasers were big parts of that. Some (including myself) would argue that they’ve been more enjoyable than the seasons themselves, especially when it comes to Asylum and Coven. From a marketing standpoint, I understand why FX wanted to change things up. From a fan standpoint, I’m losing interest — fast.
See more American Horror Story teasers below.
