10 Most Disturbing American Horror Story Episodes
When it comes to the unsettling, this series does it best. Do you have what it takes?
With a name like American Horror Story, no one goes into this series expecting a barrel of laughs. Instead, we are greeted with some of the bloodiest, freakiest, and most twisted scenes ever put to the small screen.
This cultural icon of a horror series, created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, explores a vast array of different time-periods and sub-genres from season to season. Consequently, viewers are spoiled for choice when it comes to the gruesome and disturbing. Want to watch a family be psychologically tortured by ghosts in a murder house? You got it. The violent spree of a mass-murdering clown more your speed? Lucky you, because they have that too.
American Horror Story prides itself on those hard-to-watch moments that send hearts racing and hairs raising. As such, many episodes feature such unsettling content, that you would not be blamed for admitting defeat and popping on your favourite episode of Peppa Pig to decompress.
If you don’t have the stomach for experiencing these episodes first-hand, or are just in for a casual stroll down repressed-memory lane, read on and learn of the ten most disturbing episodes in all of American Horror Story history.
10. “Welcome To Briarcliff” – Season 2, Episode 1
How does a series
begin to pick up the pieces after such a shocking first season? If your answer
was “with Maroon 5’s Adam Levine,” then you’re correct… unfortunately. In all
seriousness, the first episode of American Horror Story’s second season packs a serious punch
with some truly awful displays of horror, straight off the bat.
At the beginning of the episode, we meet Leo (Levine) and Teresa, a pair of newly-weds who, for whatever godforsaken reason, have decided to spend their honeymoon in the wreckage of Briarcliff Asylum. Things take a sharp turn for the worse when Leo promptly gets his arm ripped off by an unseen creature.
Flashing back to 1964, we meet Kit Walker, on whom tragedy befalls almost immediately. Aliens abduct Kit's wife, causing him to get committed to Briarcliff; police suspect Kit to be the infamous ‘Bloody Face Killer’ after finding his wife's body cut to pieces. But wait! As if that wasn’t enough, we also meet Lana Winters, a reporter who had come to Briarcliff to investigate. Horror soon strikes in the asylum when Lana blacks out, waking up to find herself strapped to a prison bed.
Needless to say, this episode crams in a tonne of unsettling nightmarish moments to set a phenomenally abysmal tone for the rest of the season.