American Horror Story has been bringing all kinds of creepy craziness to the small screen since the first season kicked off back in 2011. The anthology series is set to return in September for Season 7, which will be called American Horror Story: Cult. Longtime fans can look forward to familiar faces like Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters. The first trailer for the new season revealed Peters as another creepy character, as he'll play a blue-haired man named Kai who seems more than a little bit off his rocker. As it turns out, Peters will play other characters in Cult as well. We'll see Evan Peters as no fewer than six cult leaders.
At a screening of the first three episodes of the new season, showrunner Ryan Murphy spilled some details of what's to come. He revealed that Evan Peters will play six cult leaders from real life throughout the new batch of episodes. Among those six will be Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Jim Jones. Ryan Murphy is clearly swinging for the fences when it comes to infamous cult leaders.
Interestingly, Ryan Murphy has been trying to work Charles Manson into American Horror Story for a while now. Collider reports that Murphy was looking into incorporating Manson into Season 7 now that we're only a couple of years away from the 50th anniversary of the Manson family's 1969 murder of Sharon Tate and four others. Murphy was struggling to find a way to put a fresh twist on the Manson story; the heat of the 2016 presidential election and the powerful public personas that emerged out of the campaigns inspired Murphy to incorporate Manson as an example of an individual who rises from a group and inspires others by sheer force of personality.
Ryan Murphy elaborated on how American Horror Story: Cult will touch on so many legendary cult leaders in a single season, saying this:
We examine how those people rise to power and why people followed them, when we can look at what happened and they're all such idiots. But for some reason, there was something going on in the culture, at that time, where people were so disenfranchised that they were like, 'I'm going to follow you, Charles Manson, and I'm going to do whatever you say.'
It sounds like Season 7 is going to show why certain manias that seem preposterous in hindsight can feel all too real and all too terrifying when events are still unfolding. Of course, one of the big terrifying events of Cult seems to be an invasion of evil clowns, and a clown invasion being terrifying is something that will never seem preposterous. We'll have to wait and see how Evan Peters will fit into the story, as original character Kai as well as the six historical cult leaders.
Luckily, we don't have to wait too much longer to get some answers. American Horror Story: Cult will debut on Tuesday, September 5 at 10 p.m. ET on FX. For your other viewing options now and in the coming weeks, take a look at our fall TV premiere schedule.
