How Dark Magic Will Connect All of 'American Horror Story'

There is a single, specific thread connecting all of American Horror Story characters and plots throughout its six seasons, and that thread is dark magic.

While Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Roanoke has been promised to connect with the show’s fourth season, Freak Show, there are clearly so many more connections to be made.

The popular anthology series has always relied on one idea: The actors will stick around, but their characters and storylines won’t. Ryan Murphy has said that, one day, we’ll see how it’s all connected — jazz hands. For the past five seasons, that promise has seemed relatively empty, but we’ve reached a new era of the AHS Murphy-verse. Things are beginning to make sense, and that thing is magic.

Magic? Yep, magic. The idea of magic has only been outright addressed in the show’s third season, Coven, but with Roanoke mirroring so many seasons past and conjuring up one of America’s ultimate horror stories, it’s time to do some thinking on this. Dark magic is the ultimate spell keeping American Horror Story tied together.

Roanoke has already done some straight-up crazy recall of AHS’s first season, Murder House, focusing on the broken family moving across the country to escape their demons. Shelby and Matt Miller, Roanoke’s focus so far, lost their child in a miscarriage that supposedly resulted from Shelby being shoved to the ground after Matt was beaten half to death by a mysterious gang of men.

But Redditor SweetBaconTator poses that Shelby is actually a witch and used the Vitalum Vitalis spell (previously seen in Coven) to trade her unborn baby’s life for her husband’s. That’s some serious dark magic-type shit right there.

This would mean, of course, that Shelby is a witch. It’s the most obvious “dark magic” connection, but think about other instances throughout the series: vengeful spirits in Murder House, possession and the connection between the occult and religion in Asylum, vampires and (sacrificial?) torture in Hotel, implications for a cursed land-style story in Roanoke. Dark magic is the most overwhelming theme throughout the whole series (if there is one, that is).

What the fuck was Freak Show then, you may ask. Yeah…we don’t know, man. It’s undoubtedly the least magical season of the series so far, but Murphy is promising a connection between Roanoke and Freak Show. Apparently, everyone’s favorite psychopathic man-child Dandy Mott will be making an appearance this season. Maybe Murphy combining Freak Show with Roanoke is his way of connecting the one season of the show that has little to do with the others.

We’ve been promised a “shocking twist” halfway through the season, so maybe we’ll finally get our “here’s how it’s all connected” answers. The season’s first couple of episodes are well on their way to bringing back the dark magic of AHS past. No doubt, we’ll see more connections as Season 6 continues.