American Horror Story: 10 Things Freak Show Must Do Better Than Its Predecessors

9. Put The HORROR In American Horror Story

Simply put, the end of Coven was not frightening by any means, and the last few episodes would not have been out of place in a teen drama about witches. But all you need to do is to skip back a year to Asylum and there was a mad Nazi doctor cutting the legs off of poor Chloë Sevingy. Murder House had jars of foetuses in a basement. Even just the credits for the first two years were hard to watch. While Coven was an excellent series, it was a diet version of American Horror Story. It didn't look that way from the start as there were scenes of torture and an immortal Minotaur running around. But for some reason about two thirds in the series just stopped being scary €“ right about the time that the witch hunters got involved. People being shot isn't frightening in a horror context anymore €“ otherwise you'd have to call 24 a horror series too. So to the writers: remember the Horror part of American Horror Story and try to scare the pants off us. The forthcoming season is called Freak Show and so immediately harks more back to Asylum €“ which hopefully means that it'll be far scarier than Coven ended up being. Plus there's bound to be clowns €“ and anyone who's seen Stephen King's IT will already have a deep ingrained fear of clowns.