«All monsters are human»: the cultural imaginary and the creation of contemporary bestiaries in American Horror Story

Abstract

On November 7, 2011, FX aired American Horror Story (2011 to present). Instead of viewing each season as developing independent plots by breaking the seriality of current television fiction, the show can be considered as a unitary whole, as an aesthetically hybrid cultural product. This paper analyses the concept of Monstrosity in American Horror Story, whose underlying idea is extremely related to contemporary new horror as well as to postmodern horror. Thus, the show makes recourse to the cultural and collective imaginary of terror and fantasy in order to build a constellation of characters dealing with the depiction of a contemporary bestiary.