CULTURE

American Horror Story Season 7 Will Use the 2016 Election as a Catalyst for Horror to Come

While some took the news to mean that American Horror Story would dramatize the election’s key moments, creator Ryan Murphy revealed that is incorrect.

by Karen Brill

March 2, 2017

NBC News

In what began as an extremely obvious punchline, it was announced that American Horror Story‘s seventh season will deal with the 2016 election. But while some took the news to mean that American Horror Story would dramatize the election’s key moments, creator Ryan Murphy revealed that is incorrect.

Talking to E! News, Murphy explained, “I think people literally think Sarah Paulson is playing Hillary Clinton…and I wanted to clarify that that is not true. Horror Story is always about allegory, so the election is allegory.” Indeed, the season won’t even deal so much with the election itself as its aftermath. “It’s our jumping-off point. It is about the election we just went through and what happened on that night and the fallout of that night, which to many people, from all sides of the camps, is a horror story. And you know, that show is always so fun when it’s about the zeitgeist and what we’re doing now,” Murphy says.

As for whether anybody has been cast as Hillary Clinton or President Donald Trump for whatever part the former candidates will play, Murphy says it’s premature: “No, not yet. We’re halfway through the writing and not yet. But it’s really, really fun. It starts on election night is all I’ll say. … It’s very scary that night for many people.”

Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters are the only members of the Murphyverse and, indeed, the only actors at all who are known to take part in the upcoming mayhem. Meanwhile, Clinton will likely get more significant coverage in a different Murphy project, the prospective fourth season of American Crime Story that plans to focus heavily on the Linda Tripp aspect of the Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton affair. No word on if he may end up using the same casting choice for both, but while Crime Story is definitely grounded in the real world, Horror Story is anything but.

In any event, American Horror Story has already been renewed for seasons eight and nine, because the story of America certainly has enough horror to go around.