After what has felt like a very protracted promotional cycle, a trailer has been released for American Horror Story: Cult, providing the clearest glimpse yet into what will likely be a very bad season of television.
The details surrounding what this season will be about have been few and far between, but what we do know doesn’t sound great: It’s going to tackle the 2016 election; two Billy(ie)s will star (Eichner and Lourd), as well as Lena Dunham; the opening credits feature clowns and blood and both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump masks. Adding to my sneaking suspicion that this season will be a train wreck is the extensive and overwrought interactive marketing campaign that involved a website which slowly revealed clues as well as a Facebook Messenger choose-your-own-adventure game which was likely supposed to be frightening but was actually just kind of sad.
What the trailer reveals is really less than encouraging: Sarah Paulson screams in melodramatic horror at the election results; Evan Peters has blue hair and humps a television playing the exact same results in ecstasy; Cheyenne Jackson is a handsome therapist who Paulson visits with complaints of recurring, worsening coulrophobia, or fear of clowns. Billie Lourd is a nanny with evil intentions who hates children but loves clowns. It looks like Murphy took all the news stories about clown sightings before the election, shoved it in a blender with the election itself and produced some sort of schlocky, horror-adjacent commentary on...what? Society’s downfall? The end of democracy? Why Evan Peters should have longer hair all the time because it kind of suits him?
According to Murphy himself, “[Cult is] about illuminating and highlighting people who don’t have a voice in our culture — people who are ignored by the current administration and who are afraid and feel terrorized that their lives are going to be taken away.” Hmm.
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Are you ready for Ryan Murphy’s take on politics? I’m not, but it looks like we don’t have a choice.
