American Horror Story: Season 3 - Cinematography Compared to Other Seasons

American Horror story is a horror-centric drama series created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, formerly of Glee fame. Each season centers around different story lines and settings while largely maintaining the same principal cast, with characters having similar personalities and motives between the seasons.


American Horror Story: Coven is the third and most recent season of the show, and it centers around witches that survived the Salem Witch Trials and what they are doing in modern day America. While the plot is frightening and driving, the cinematography, in my opinion, is what sets this series apart from the other two. The first season, subtitled Murder House, was indeed frightening, cut relies on little more than slow camera movements to help build up suspense. I did not see anything revolutionary in how Season 1 was shot, and looked like every other drama/horror series out at the time, dark and contrasty. The screenshot below shows a piece of the opening of season 1:

Case in point, nothing special to be seen; it's the same as any other shot of a car on the highway. Similarly, the only cinematic techniques seen during dialogue is shallow depth of field on the actors. Commonly, there are not many aesthetically pleasing aspects seen in Season 1. This following frame shows this:

Now jump to Seasons 2 and 3: Asylum and Coven. With a new cinematographer and new production runners, new decisions were made. With portions of Seasons 2 and 3 taking place in the past, with almost all of Season 2 taking place in the 1960s, actual 35mm film was used for any retro scenes! This decision was used to make the older scenes feel older and grainy, and it definitely paid off. Take a look at this screenshot from Season 2:

Blown-out bright colors? Check. Sharp yet grainy visuals? Check. Washed out color pallet? Check. Film makes the older sequences of American Horror Story stand out greatly.

Now with Season 3, the same changes made to Season 2 are quite apparently, but now an even bigger emphasis was put on the cinematography itself, with more intriguing framings being used instead of the typical symmetry commonly found in Season 1. Here is a picture from Season 3 during the beginning:

Strange, asymmetrical framing and stark color differences with a bizarre color pallet? American Horror Story: Coven stands out the most from the other two.