Updated March 21, 2018 3.4K votes 420 voters 40.0K views
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Vote up the homages that hark back to your favorite horror movies.
American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy loves classic horror movies and it shows. There are dozens of classic horror references in AHS, from quick shots and bits of scoring to entire plot lines that borrow heavily from horror's greatest hits.
Horror movie sources in American Horror Story extend from silent films to The Blair Witch Project, but Murphy gives the most love to classics from the 1970s and '80s including The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, and Carrie. He also delves into some more obscure horror movies, with nods to white-eyed witches in New Orleans and psychopathic teen predators in the UK. And of course some motifs, like demonic pregnancies or pig-headed murderers, are so ancient it's hard to even pin down when they first appeared on the scene.
Look back at the times American Horror Story paid homage to old movies and vote up your favorite moments.
Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange takes place in a dystopian future where roving street gangs of sociopathic young men terrorize Britain. Gang leader Alex (played by Malcolm McDowell) is captured and subjected to psychological torture designed to rehabilitate him. His eyelids are held open and he is forced to watch hours of violent movies until the very idea of violence leaves him physically ill.
In Season 2 of American Horror Story, the lesbian journalist Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson) is held in Briarcliff asylum and subjected to a similarly torturous "therapy" supposedly intended to "cure" her of homosexuality. Kit (Evan Peters) is also restrained in similar headgear as the one seen in A Clockwork Orange by the evil Dr. Arden (James Cromwell).
In Roman Polanski's 1968 Rosemary's Baby, Mia Farrow plays Rosemary Woodhouse, a loving if naive young newlywed who moves with her husband Guy into the ominous Bramford Apartments in New York. Her new home quickly turns ominous after she learns the building is the headquarters of a Satanic cult who force Rosemary to carry Satan's baby, the Antichrist. She is raped by a demonic entity whom she initially believes to be her husband. During her pregnancy, Rosemary becomes thin and pale, and she craves raw meat. At last she delivers Adrian, the Devil's son, who is never shown, though it's said he has evil, demonic eyes, "his father's eyes."
In the first season of American Horror Story, dubbed Murder House by fans, Vivien Harmon (Connie Britton) has sex with a man in a rubber suit whom she believes to be her husband. She becomes pregnant with a demon baby so terrifying, her nurse faints after seeing an ultrasound. She starts eating raw organ meats. At last she gives birth to Michael Langdon, who it's hinted is the Antichrist - and is, at best, a kid who murders his nanny as a toddler. (Of course, Michael Langdon is just one of several Antichrist candidates in American Horror Story.)
Ryan Murphy liked the idea of a demonic pregnancy so much he revisited it again in Hotel, when the Countess (Lady Gaga) gave birth to Bartholomew, an evil entity who committed his first murder while still a fetus.
Audiences jumped the first time M. Night Shyamalan panned around an ordinary-looking kid to reveal a gaping head wound in The Sixth Sense (1999). Twelve years later, it was just as shocking when Ryan Murphy pulled the same trick. Murder House's Vivien (Connie Britton) is talking to Nora (Lily Rabe), who appears as a normal, living woman until a camera pan reveals the hole in the back of her head.
Season 5 features the Hotel Cortez which borrows from another ominous hotel, The Overlook from the Stanley Kubrick 1980 film The Shining, based on the book by Stephen King. Kubrick famously used tricks of architecture and interior design to make the hotel's layout disorienting and unnerving. Ryan Murphy borrows some of these same designs for his Hotel, including this familiar carpet pattern.
The twin boys Troy and Bryan who are murdered by the Infantata in Season 1 - and maybe reappear in Roanoke? - may also have been inspired by the Grady sisters who haunt the Overlook. Also hidden in Season 6? A brief glimpse of an ax-wielding Ambrose White (Wes Bentley/Jesse La Flair) pressing his face to a doorframe just like Jack Nicholson in The Shining's "Here's Johnny!" scene.
The very first scene of the American Horror Story series is an homage to horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), when the series premiere establishes the "Murder House" with a low-angle tracking shot reminiscent of the one that reveals the terrifying Sawyer family farm where Leatherface murders and dismembers his victims before turning their body parts into furniture and clothing, including a mask made from a human face.The next shot? A mobile made of bones, another nod to the Sawyer household.
In the following season of AHS, Ryan Murphy paid homage to TTCM again, naming his human-face-wearing serial killer Bloody Face (Zachary Quinto). Roanoke's murderous Polk clan also hearkens back to the Leatherface's cannibal hillbilly family.
AHS: Freak Show, set in 1952, pays homage to Tod Browning's cult classic at every level, starting with the name of the season. In AHS, a collection of good-hearted "freaks" born with various physical disabilities are gawked at by audiences and exploited by freak show owner Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange), but their greatest enemy is Stanley (Denis O'Hare), a con artist who wants to sell their body parts to an anatomy museum. His plot is discovered and the freaks turn him into a freak, too, cutting off his arms and legs.
Stanley might have seen this coming if he'd watched the 1932 Freaks, where Cleopatra, a beautiful, able-bodied trapeze artist, seduces and marries a freak in order to steal his inheritance. Her husband discovers Cleopatra has been poisoning him and the freaks attack her, turning her into "one of them" by mutilating her limbs and covering her in feathers until she is a grotesque "human duck."
