With each passing season of American Horror Story, Ryan Murphy & Co. are finding different ways to connect back to previous years, both through its creepster characters and settings, and Season 7 will bring back everybody's favorite rubber-chicken swinging maniac: Twisty the Clown. See for yourself.
Ladies, gentlemen, children of all ages! Come one, come all! You don't see this kind of thing every day, you know? Twisty the Clown is an American icon, and he deserves all of your attention. As Twisty himself would say, "[sound of drool falling out of jawless maw]." The fact that we're seeing Twisty on an E.C. Comics-esque cover is quite intriguing, considering the Instagram image itself is of a video monitor, so the comic will likely appear within Season 7, as opposed to being used for teaser promos.
American Horror Story fans know that the formerly suicidal Twisty the Clown was one of the signature elements of the Freak Show season a few years back. As portrayed by John Carroll Lynch at his most hauntingly intense, Twisty was at the heart of some of the season's most brutal and jarring sequences, particularly one that hearkened back to the film Zodiac (in which Lynch plays a suspect). Shockingly, considering all of the promotional pushes that focused on the killer clown aspect, American Horror Story: Freak Show killed Twisty off early in the season, sending him off into the weirdo abyss with Wes Bentley's two-faced Edward Mordrake.
But how will he be used in his return? Ryan Murphy had previously hinted at Season 7 tying back to Season 4, and the Mott family history is always worth returning to. But Twisty seemed less likely, considering he's a serial killer clown who "died" in the 1950s. But if he then became a legend whose story was told in gnarly comic book form, then he could easily live on through the generations within American Horror Story's world. And maybe not just in comic book form.
There could legitimately be a Twisty the Clown movie that comes up in this universe. This isn't at all a stretch, considering Ryan Murphy produced the 2014 horror The Town That Dreaded Sundown, which was a meta-remake of a 1970s slasher flick (itself based on a real-world killer) that was set in a world where both the original Phantom Killer and the original film exist. Then we'd get a scene where the REAL Twisty the Clown would appear back in our reality while a theater full of people are watching his movie, and of course everybody thinks it's a marking stunt, and then boom, everybody is dead.
Or maybe something else will happen, possibly involving a gross-looking elephant. The season kicks off on Election Night, and while there's an easy joke to make about there being lots of clowns out on Election Night, the joke most certainly isn't about sadistic murderers. So will Twisty be doing any voting? We'll have to wait and see.
With casting announcements coming slow and steady, American Horror Story Season 7 will hit FX at some point this fall, likely in September. Until we get something more concrete on that, head to our summer premiere schedule to see what the small screen has to offer in the coming months.
