Thus far Jessica Lange, Zachary Quinto, Evan Peters, Sarah Paulson, Lily Rabe, Adam Levine, Lizzie Brochere, Chloe Sevigny and James Cromwell have all been locked in, with the returning cast playing new roles. “It’s set in an institution for the criminally insane that Jessica Lange’s character runs, which is a really, really, really fun thing to do because you can write all these people locked up in it,” Murphy says of the plot. “And I guess if the first season was about infidelity, the second season is about sanity. What makes someone sane or insane? Sometimes the people you think are insane are actually the most sane of all. It’s fun to write about people who society throws away.” He continues revealing the time period, and how that translates to “real” horror: “I haven’t said this publicly, but the new season is set in the sixties and Chloe Sevigny, for example, plays a character who was put in an asylum because she was a woman who likes sex, so her husband sends her away. At the time, you were able to put people away for that. Another character is institutionalized for being a lesbian. To me, there’s nothing more scary than somebody coming to you and saying they’re going to take you away and put you in a mad house and you have no legal rights and there you shall stay till the end of your days. That is a real horror. Everybody has felt people thinking, “You’re ****ing crazy.” Even somebody saying that to you is scary.”
Another interesting tid-bit reveals that Murphy had the second, and third season already planned! “I actually had the idea first. I knew the first season was about a very contemporary haunted house, and I knew the second season was gonna be — if we were lucky enough to be picked up — about an insane asylum done in a very different way. I pitched it in the very beginning, and FX said, “Good. We hope the first season works ‘cause we love the second season.” I even know what the third season would be. There are very, very many different kinds of haunted houses in our culture. And there are a lot of different social topics that you can weave through that sort of prism.”
