American Horror Story: Behind the Scenes

One great thing about this multimedia era of television shows is that viewers are offered a glimpse into behind the scenes videos on a show's youtube channel. Some shows release a behind the scenes look at every episode throughout a season. This inside look at the making of the season premiere of American Horror Story tells us a bit about the storyboarding and research process that went into making the episode. Vigorous research goes into each season, since each season is a separate chapter and storyline. The creative team must research the time period, topic, and creative influences that they decide to pay homage to. American Horror Story is largely based off of paying homage to classic horror films and stories. Each sequence in a given episode takes extensive research before storyboarding begins. The director, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, chose to open the Coven chapter with a shot of a black horse's eyes as a way to set the tone of the season. They use a separate iris that they place in front of the camera that they close up to focus on a specific character in a crowded scene. Many shots are characterized by crooked angles and wide lenses using a 6 mm lens, which began as a method to appropriately visualize a scene, but grew into a signature aesthetic style of the show. This behind the scenes video teaches about how everyone on the creative team must work together to make the visual elements compliment the elements of the story, and how closely the director and director of photography work together, as shown in the relationship between Alfonso and Michael Goi. 

Can We Talk About American Horror Story

American Horror Story: Coven premiered last wednesday night, the third installment in the groundbreaking, boundary-pushing series. The horror genre is experiencing a boom as of late, and its becoming increasingly more popular among youth, especially with the youth appeal of American Horror Story. The Tate-Violet romance of the first season sent young girls into a frenzy, and now the third series follows a group of teenage witches in a witch boarding school. It sounds like a cliche YA trilogy, but AHS is guaranteed to bring much darker, sexual, and disturbing tones to otherwise cliche stories. 

Horror has been prominent throughout all of Hollywood's history, but it is only now grabbed the attention and profits of all audience niches, for a fraction of the production costs. American Horror Story earned more Emmy nominations than any other show, and nearly every network is following suite with the success of horror as a television genre. A few examples of horror in television: Supernatural, The Walking Dead, Bates Motel, Grimm, Hannibal, Hemlock Grove, and NBC's Dracula premieres this month, and TV version of The Exorcist and American Psycho are in the works, to name only a few. 

One thing (among many) about AHS that stands out is their use of promos and teaser trailers. For all three seasons, the short promos are guaranteed to give you the creeps, and don't offer much about the plot unless you look closely and pick out the clues. They typically only make sense after you've watched the entire season. But their mysteriousness and utter creepiness is what makes them and the show so appealing. It's almost like a game, and I'm sure there are threads on the internet where people pick apart every second of every trailer and discuss theories. 

And here, if you're interested, is the trailer for Dracula: