SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN?T WATCHED AMERICAN HORROR STORY!
By now many of you watched the first episode of FX?s new shock-a-palooza and have many questions. (Be sure to check out my colleague Jeff Jensen?s recap.) Who is Rubber Man? What the hell is in that basement? How fabulous is Jessica Lange? Thankfully, co-creator Ryan Murphy, who conceived the show alongside Brad Falchuk, talked to EW exclusively about the wild first hour and what?s in store for next week?s episode.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This is the complete opposite of Glee. Did you and Brad want to do something more akin to Nip/Tuck?
RYAN MURPHY: Well, we were working on this before Glee. I can only speak about me but I like to do the opposite of what I've just done. So we're doing some squeaky clean, sweet, optimistic, non-cynical piece, I wanted to do something that sorta tapped into the different side of my personality. I've always obviously been drawn to darker things. But this is really about our love for horror particularly which we felt as children and references from our pop culture youth. But more than that, I like to create stuff just because I'm interested, like, "I wanna watch a show about this." There was a shortage of creature-baby-in-the-basement-shows on TV [laughs]. I wanted to see it!
You directed the pilot. Do you have a favorite moment or sequence?
My favorite sequence is we call it, "When the infantata attacks." I loved [the moment when Violet's bully is attacked in the basement] for several reasons. I loved the design of that creature. I love the influence on it. When we designed it, it was sort of a pastiche of different ideas. The mouth of it, which you see for two brief milliseconds, is based on a leech mouth, a picture of a leech mouth I found. I have a lot of reference books. There was a picture I was obsessed with of a child with progeria which is that aging quickly [disorder]. The gown our costume designer Lou and I worked on really closely is sorta closely modeled on the Lindbergh baby.
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