What Will 'American Horror Story' Season 7 Be About?

American Horror Story concluded its strange, meta sixth season on Wednesday night, and fans are already speculating about what the seventh season could be about. AHS has already covered a haunted house, an evil asylum, a witches coven, a carnival freak show, a deathly hotel, and a haunted house again, but this time on TV. Here’s what we know about Season 7.

In a call last month, showrunner Ryan Murphy said he wouldn’t keep the plot of the next season a secret the way he did with Roanoke. That means that we should have a much better idea of what to expect from Season 7 come spring than we did before this most recent season around that time.

In that same call, Murphy revealed a couple of other details, including that the seventh season would closely tie into the fourth season, Freak Show. “We will be going back to some Freak Show characters, deeper histories, and mythologies. So we’re sort of still exploring Season 4 in Season 7.” He also said that the season would not be heavily connected to Season 3, Coven. A big part of Roanoke’s plot had to do with witches and “the first supreme,” so it makes sense that maybe AHS would lay off that story beat for a season.

Murphy also said there would be a “big hook” behind Season 7, and that the idea came to him in bed late one night, for whatever that’s worth.

Since Roanoke was, in the loosest way, kind of a retread of Season 1’s haunted house story, it would be interesting if AHS ventured into a horror subgenre that it hasn’t really tackled before. Aliens is the most obvious possibility, since extraterrestrials have lingered around the edges of past seasons without every fully stepping into the spotlight.

If AHS doesn’t go down the alien route, it could also make use of all the creepy red herring plots it teased in the Season 6 promos.