American Horror Story is known for taking on terrifying myths and legends that haunt the country’s psyche, like the Salem Witch Trials and the spirits of New Orleans. But this fall, they’ll be taking on an all-too-real spooky story: the 2016 Presidential election.
Show creator Ryan Murphy told Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live that when considering which horror story to tell in the show’s seventh season, there was really only one option.
The show won’t begin shooting until June, so Murphy was light on details, but the six month delay will certainly give the show’s writers plenty to work with as President Trump navigates his first term in office.
“I don’t have a title, but the season that we begin shooting in June is going to be about the election that we just went through. I think that will be interesting for a lot of people,” Murphy said.
He hasn’t decided who to cast as Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or whether the two will even be intimately involved in the show’s storyline. Possibilities include Kathy Bates and Lady Gaga, either of whom would probably do a spectacular job as an orange-hued devilish incarnation.
The series, which is renewed through its ninth season, stars Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters, along with a revolving cast that includes Gaga and Bates, Emma Roberts, and Jessica Lange. Muprhy has hinted that most of the seasons tie together and that the actors making repeat appearances, like Paulson and Peters, play related characters who interact across American history.
If American Horror Story stays true to the 2016 campaign narrative, it will actually be the second project in the genre to take on the election. The Purge: Election Year featured a Congressional candidate bent on eliminating a yearly “legal murder” spree used Donald Trump’s already-copyrighted 2020 Presidential tagline, “Keep America Great.”