10 Best American Horror Story Characters

While Sarah Paulson was dedicated as Cordelia Foxx, there’s no character in American Horror Story who’s ever been as resolute as Lana Winters. In the show’s second season, Asylum, Winters is put through some of the show’s most abject horror, but still manages to come out the other side.

Giving herself a grisly coat hanger abortion is particularly uncomfortable to watch, especially on a rewatch knowing she’s ultimately unsuccessful. Her experience changes her, beginning her arc as ambitious but naive. By the end, her ambition is as fierce as ever, but that wide-eyed naivety has been replaced by a cold core.

She’s emblematic of a lot of Asylum’s core themes, and so ties the season together. As a lesbian career woman trying to expose those in power, she makes herself a target. After she’s (wrongfully) committed to Briarcliff, she becomes a focal point for the torture mental patients used to suffer in asylums.

While the Bloody Face killings, Nazi scientists and demon apparitions give the show that AHS flair, Asylum was always about the horror of humans in asylums. And in Lana Winters, the show has the perfect vehicle to tell that story.