To think of AHS (2011–present), Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's internationally acclaimed horror anthology television series, is to think of a cultural manifestation with deep and complex political, economic and sociocultural ramifications. Accordingly, these ramifications take explicit shape in the series in terms of the conscious articulation of fear, sexuality and violence. By channeling widespread sociocultural fears and anxieties, AHS explicitly depicts contemporary issues and concerns in terms of the dynamic relationship between horror and desire. Nevertheless, as with the relational boundaries linking horror and desire, the political and sociocultural implications of this cultural manifestation reach far beyond their conscious and explicit deployment. Furthermore, horror and desire designate a complex and dynamic circuit of unconscious tensions and attractions intricately linked to sociocultural intelligibility by which the subject is constituted on individual and collective levels – that is, they designate those intrapsychic and intersubjective dynamics through which subjects come to understand themselves and their relationship to the world. In turn, this relationship between processes of subject constitution and sociocultural intelligibility cannot be detached from the profound political, economic and technological transformations of the last three-to-four decades. And it is in light of this relationship that the ninth season of Murphy and Falchuk's series, AHS: ‘1984’ (2019), becomes a critical tool for the analysis of the contemporary re-articulation of sociocultural intelligibility. With its participation in the current trend of revisiting and rememorizing the social and cultural settings of the 1980s and 1990s, this cultural manifestation provokes a contextual disruption; it slashes apart past and present issues and concerns, providing a critical entry point for the examination of the sociocultural transformation of the last forty years. But how does AHS, and this season in particular, constitute such a relevant slashing tool of sociocultural analysis? And what are the contemporary dynamics and transformations it reveals?

In this chapter, I will address these questions by, first, approaching those elements that, from its particular focus on pop culture and the slasher horror subgenre to the sociopolitical context it portrays, make ‘1984’ stand in a position that differentiates it from other seasons of AHS. Second, I will analyse this season's positioning in relation to sexuality by tackling its narrative deployment in terms of both the sociohistorical contexts it portrays and the political, economic and sociocultural ramifications that derive from its mainstream production and distribution.

Can you put into words your experiences while you sit on a couch and move your eyes smoothly across a piece of paper or a screen, which – as the only sensory input your brain has to process – provides some ink blobs or pixels you have learned to identify as letters after years of training? The following two quotes nicely summarize what I think is essential about this, in terms of evolution, most unnatural daily activity of the mind. They reveal two different aspects or functions that you perhaps are also familiar with. One evokes experiences of immersing oneself in a textual world; the other stirs up emotions and feelings of beauty. Both, the immersive and the aesthetic experiences, so well described in these citations, emerge from an interaction between the contents of the texts they read and the associative semantic networks in their brains.

Throughout this book, I will treat these two aspects apart: immersion, mainly associated with the reading of prose, and aesthetic feelings, most often associated with the reading of poetry. This does not mean, however, that people cannot have aesthetic feelings when reading a novel or immersive experiences during the reception of poetry.

What gets readers to be ‘on loan’ to an author, thinking, feeling, suffering and acting within them? Why did Sappho and Homer know so well how to move, surprise and please their readers so that they want to read on? The first step when trying to predict how readers’ thoughts and feelings are con-trolled by what they read is to analyze the tools of the trade. Since Aristotle's days, uncountable books and articles from numerous scientific disciplines have been devoted to the issue of revealing the secrets of the power of verbal art. My approach is a ‘from simple to complex’ one. In the previous chapter, I talked about textual back- and foreground features that co-determine reading acts. Here, I will show examples of such features, and in Chapters 5 and 6, I will explain how these features can be quantified via current methods of distant reading and computational stylistics. These include novel techniques of machine learning and attempt to answer questions that are of interest to literary scholars and critics, reading psychologists or people working in education or the book industry. Combining quantitative text and reader analyses with my NCPM will allow me to predict effects of these features on reader responses at all levels of psychological enquiry: neuronal, behavioural and experiential.

Simple Text Features, Tropologies, Close, Distant and Middle Reading

My Ph.D. advisor Kevin O’Regan always told me that reading is just visual perception and thus obeys basic laws of pattern recognition. With one crucial difference: unlike most other visual stimuli, such as visual scenes, texts have a clear advantage for quantitative analyses, because they represent highly structured material, just as with the rule-determined languages they are written in. In general, their elements – letters, words, sentences – are compositional: simple units are combined to form larger, more complex ones, thus allowing an ‘infinite use with finite means’ as Wilhelm von Humboldt put it. And many of these units can be quantitatively described and analyzed into even simpler basic features via statistical and computational methods.

In tackling the central question of how writers can act on my sweat glands, limbic system or feelings through stringing together syllables and words, it is useful to have a close look at their verbal toolbox.

A Company Convenes

During the opening, pre-title sequence of ‘Apocalypse’, the US anthology television series American Horror Story (AHS)'s first episode of its eighth season (ironically titled ‘The End’), we see the world all but destroyed by nuclear missiles. Only a select few are able to sequester themselves to a secret underground bunker, Outpost 3, to live out their remaining days under a bizarre rulesbased system that is both demanding and terrifying. On the first evening of their stay, the occupants of Outpost 3 sit down to a Gothic-banquet-inspired dinner where a company of familiar faces is brought together in this eighth act of television horror. Looking around the dinner table, we see actor Sarah Paulson playing the role of Wilhemina Venable, matriarch of the bunker. Up to this point, Paulson had appeared in every season of AHS, each time playing a different character. Evan Peters is also there – playing Mr Gallant (also in his eighth season). Kathy Bates plays Miriam Mead (in her sixth season and sixth role). Adina Porter plays the role of Dinah Stevens and Billie Lourd plays Mallory (both in their fourth season at that time). Leslie Grossman takes on the role of Coco (her second season), while there are AHS newcomers Kyle Allen and Ash Santos playing Timothy and Emily, respectively, Jeffery Bowyer- Chapman and Chad James Buchanan as lovers Andre and Stu, and, most surprisingly of all perhaps, Hollywood veteran Joan Collins playing the role of Mr Gallant's grandmother, Evie Gallant.

While these actors inhabit their characters consistently and singularly within the world of ‘Apocalypse’, the AHS audience who has travelled through its different seasons and stories inevitably frame a perception of each character through the journey of previous roles, generating multifaceted linkages which themselves resonate with the linkages afforded by the richly woven narratological lines that run vertically through the seemingly discrete seasons in the anthology. It is within these matrices of intertextual weaving encompassing actor and character, and character and past-and-future characters, that the AHS company has evolved. And it is also one that carries with it an important legacy from American television that dates back to the early beginnings of serialized drama – one that engages with the social and the political in ways that signal its antecedents both formally and thematically.

The start of every act of reading a story, poem or book is a decision: the decision to go someplace else. This place can be a world we have not been to before and it can lead to forgotten memories or dreams, suppressed desires or emotions or to novel ideas that change one's life. There may be many hidden motivations or explicit reasons leading to this decision. The consequence is always the same: one abandons control of one's mind and lends it – for some time – to a writer. This is a risky business, for one is now loaned out to another who thinks, feels, suffers and acts within one. It is like a blend of two minds or consciousnesses. To a certain extent, reading removes the subject–object division that constitutes all perception. If the conditions are right, readers of verbal art will immerse into that other place, that other reality and forget the world around them. This immersive experience is one of two primary reasons why we buy and read stories and novels; the other being the aesthetic experience often reported when reading lyrics and poetry. A psychiatrist friend of mine once compared immersion with a psychopathological state. And indeed, reading can become an addiction. But even if engaged reading was a mild form of psychosomatic disease, the disease seems often better than the cure: being immune to the immersive and aesthetic effects of reading fiction, being indifferent to or unmoved by the actions or feelings of a protagonist would mean that one misses out on one of the greatest pleasures of the mind; but also, that one lacks empathy, which is fundamental for our social life. Indeed, moving your mind through the text worlds of fiction is good training for both cognitive and social-emotional skills. Both your IQ and EQ can only benefit – if you read the right stuff.

What makes literary reading such a captivating experience despite its rapidity is based on the fact that associative semantic networks are activated in the brain. These put in train thoughts and feelings as well as unconscious motion sequences. Semantic networks is a handy metaphor to describe how our brains organize information about the world in the form of a net of concept nodes linked by connections.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world ensuing from a power struggle between the selfproclaimed Antichrist Michael Langdon (Cody Fern) in season one's ‘Murder House’ (2011) and the witches in season three's ‘Coven’ (2013), ‘Apocalypse’ (2018) is, to date, the odd season out in the American Horror Story universe. Even though some characters have appeared in multiple seasons, the crossover in ‘Apocalypse’ proposes a new approach to the anthology. Popularized by classical series such as The Twilight Zone (Serling, CBS 1959–64), the anthology series format consists of a series of unrelated episodes which, however, rely on the same genre or generic conventions (the horror genre and the fantastic in the case of The Twilight Zone) (Jowett 2017, 9). Before ‘Apocalypse’ aired, AHS concluded each season's storyline with its finale, even though characters from previous seasons sometimes made significant appearances, such as the human Voodoo doll from ‘Coven’ in Queenie's cameo in ‘Hotel’ (FX, 2015). Yet ‘Apocalypse’ directly reprises elements and storylines from ‘Murder House’, ‘Coven’ and ‘Hotel’.

Among the returning characters is New Orleans’ legendary Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett). Based on a historical figure, Laveau was introduced in ‘Coven’, a season which tackles racism through the parallel set up between slavery in the Southern states and the rivalry between white witches and black Voodoo practitioners in the early 2010s (Toulza 2020, 243–60). Characterized by the codes of classic Voodoo zombie films, which tend to simplify this syncretic religion and resort to sensationalistic images that exacerbate its Otherness, Laveau first appears to be an antagonist to the witches in ‘Coven’. Inscribed in what Jason Mittell labels ‘character elaboration’ – a ‘model of change [which] exploits the serial form to gradually reveal aspects of a character over time so that these facets of the character feel new to the audience’ (Mittell 2015, 136) – Marie's character development reveals both her identity and magic to be far more complex than first meets the eye. On the one hand, Laveau can be the antagonist US society has shaped her to be. On the other hand, she becomes a helper in ‘Apocalypse’, while Dinah Stevens (Adina Porter), who has replaced her after her death, sides with the Antichrist. Voodoo's development in ‘Apocalypse’ ultimately strikes as a way for the producers to bring back actress Angela Bassett for fan-pleasing purposes, while Laveau and Stevens’ presence only re-centres whiteness as the norm (Dyer 1997).

Emergence of Modernism in Brazil

Whilst a large part of Brazilian historiography, since its ‘patron’, Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1816–1878), ignores precolonial times and considers the arrival of Europeans in 1500 as the beginning of national history, the chronology of its arts is even more limited. It commonly starts in 1816, when the French Artistic Mission led by Joachim Lebreton (1760–1819), a former director of the Louvre, arrived in Rio de Janeiro to establish the capital's artistic institutions and canons. According to historian Fernando Azevedo, it is with the installation of the Portuguese court in Brazil that, ‘broadly speaking, the history of our culture begins, for, until this time, one cannot find anything, but sporadic manifestations of exceptional figures educated in Portugal and under foreign influence’ (as cited in Williams, 2001, p. 622). Eight years before the arrival of the French Artistic Mission, the Portuguese royal family had moved to Brazil, escorted by the English fleet, fleeing from Napoleonic expansion. Subsequently the capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves (1815–1822), Rio de Janeiro required a cultural apparatus compatible with its new status as the centre of a European monarchy. Portugal's King John VI (1767–1826) revoked the colonial prohibition of printing, and the royal library was brought from Lisbon. Lebreton and his cohort devised a Royal Academy dedicated to visual arts, crafts and architecture. The Academy, which was later transformed into the Imperial School of Fine Arts and finally the National School of Fine Arts (Escola Nacional de Belas Artes – ENBA), would drive the development of Brazilian visual arts, through its salons and prizes. Championed by officialdom for over a hundred years, Brazil's visual arts were still attempting to emulate standards imported from Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Eventually, a nationalist quest to subvert the European influence emanated from the arts establishment, and this became an essential characteristic of Brazilian Modernism, as defining of the movement as the common attributes of universal Modernism listed by Peter Gay in his classic ‘Modernism’: subjectivism or self-scrutiny and the rupture with conventions (2010). The apparent anachronism between breaking with old aesthetics and continuously importing established patterns is explained by Daryle Williams, for whom ‘the Brazilian elite worked to invent a civilised Brazil for Brazilian and international eyes.

Introduction

Since it began in 2011, the multiple and continuing series of American Horror Story (AHS) have explored the diverse motifs, icons and narratives of horror and the popular Gothic. As a major part of this, AHS stands as a fascinating example of performance practice, creating and deploying what can be regarded as its own repertory company or even performance ensemble. In this regard, AHS echoes the old ‘stock system’ of casting that evolved from nineteenth-century theatre to cinema. Pamela Robertson Wojcik explains that this practice would continue throughout classical Hollywood – frequently with the loan and exchange of headline stars – until ‘actors become free agents in the 1960s, (and) the official stock system breaks down’ (Robertson Wojcik 2003, 240). Looked at like this, we detect an echo of popular cinematic horror such as Universal Pictures, indelibly associated with stars such as Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and Lon Chaney Junior in the 1940s; Tod Slaughter and his regular company of actors in the screen adaptations of stage melodramas in Britain in the 1930–40s; British director Pete Walker working with core actors, most notably Sheila Keith, in his 1970s horror movies; and Hammer Films in the 1950–70s which had a stable of core stars – most prominently Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee – and supporting character actors like Michael Ripper (who appeared in more Hammer films than either of the major stars). Although we could draw parallels between AHS and the icons and repertoire of 1930–70s cinematic horror, the sheer range of AHS finds a particularly nuanced and compelling parallel with horror culture beyond the screen. In other words, AHS can be seen as belonging to the rich ensemble tradition of popular horror performance across media, encouraging in its audience playful suspensions of disbelief and equally audacious displays of virtuosity. Thus, AHS is to contemporary television what, for example, the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (1897–1962) was to horror theatre – especially in its 1920s heyday – and programmes such as The Witch's Tale (1931–38) and others were to live horror radio in the 1930–50s. This chapter will explore key features and ramifications of the performance practices of AHS in relation to other repertory and ensemble traditions in the history of popular horror culture. First of all, however, we need to explore AHS as an example of horror television.