American Horror Story

This sequence is from American Horror Story: Season one.

The sequence itself is a shot going through a creepy looking house, with unsettling music and fast cuts between jars of body parts and animals, bloodied trays with cutting tools, dolls and creepy looking children on photos. When the names of the actors are introduced (00:23 onwards) the music changes and grates, as if a muffled scream through the white noise and the names are introduced through the style of fast cuts and a unnerving typography that is memorable and is now associated with the show itself.

Why does it look this way?

Operative word being: Horror, is being exploited massively for this sequence massively in order to make the audience feel unsettled whilst watching and in the case of the present writer, sick to watch. This helps reinforce the point of what to expect during the show, that it is going to be vulgar and sickening and a lot of the things seen, will be unpleasant. The imagery itself looks gritty, like a lot of horror films would look and were quite desaturated to push forward a feeling of extreme oppression and fear in the audience. This is common within the horror genre, as is the distorted music. This helps set the scene and as mentioned before, prepares the audience for what is to come. Slow moving shots through the house to different rooms are also common in horror films, to build tension. However, just to make things feel uncomfortable, is when the fast cuts are used as the human eye isn't used to seeing slow mixed with fast at the same time, and it is disorientating.

What makes this sequence different from other sequences for modern TV shows, is the lack of graphics in general and the focus on the physical set and the relation that the audience can make with what they see, in a way they couldn't with graphics (as graphics can be disconnecting as they aren't real, where as a physical set is.)