American Horror Story: Freak Show is the nutty horror drama we needed this Halloween

2014's TV landscape has been littered with horror dramas — but not all scares are created equal. FX's vampire thriller The Strain was too draggy to build up any kind of sustained atmosphere. Netflix's Hemlock Grove was an absolute mess. The zombies on AMC's The Walking Dead's stopped being scary when the main characters got so good at killing them. NBC's Hannibal and Showtime's Penny Dreadful were terrific — but both shows are on hiatus until 2015.

What can a horror fan watch this Halloween season? Arriving tonight (and just in time): FX's campy, nutty American Horror Story: Freak Show. The latest iteration of the series is set in 1952, following the last gasp of a freak show in Jupiter, Florida as its various performers attempt to survive in an intolerant society that attacks them when it isn't laughing at them.

And what a bunch of misfits it is: there's a bearded woman (Kathy Bates), a "lobster boy" with a side business in stimulating bored housewives (Evan Peters), and a two-headed woman (Sarah Paulson, playing both heads). And in what appears to be a total coincidence, Jupiter is also being terrorized by a homicidal clown (John Carroll Lynch), who performs cheesy routines for his victims before bashing their heads in with his juggling pins or stabbing them with a rusty pair of scissors.

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In case it wasn't clear from that description: American Horror Story: Freak Show is absolutely bonkers — creepy, bloody, and occasionally very funny. The new season offers a welcome return to the more-is-more horror of Asylum, which counted mutant cannibals, alien abductions, and a murderous Santa Claus among its many, many gonzo subplots. I wouldn't want to spoil the joy of discovering Freak Show's flourishes for yourself, but the first two episodes take a few similarly deranged detours, with the promise of many more in the episodes to come.

As a series, American Horror Story falls into the grand tradition of older, episodic anthology shows like The Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt, with a series structure that denies viewers the comfort of familiarity. Every year, there is a new American Horror Story, which makes every season a complete package — and, in theory, makes every character expendable. It's a show that can kill off every single character at the end of a season without flinching, confident that the next season comes with a reset button.

Freak Show, with its tight-knit family of performers, is a particularly apt premise for the series, which has built itself on a seasoned troupe of actors who play a new role every season. Paulson, in particular, has never been better; her conjoined sisters, Bette and Dot, are a technical marvel that would fall completely flat if her dual performances didn't sell the effect. Jessica Lange has a blast chewing the scenery as the vamping German ex-pat who runs the show. Other actors, like Kathy Bates, are underutilized in the early episodes — but that only speaks to the unusually collaborative nature of American Horror Story, which is willing to let even its biggest names linger in the background until the story requires their services.

At this point, American Horror Story is so uniquely elastic that it's almost predictable in its unpredictability. At a time when period dramas like Mad Men obsessively avoid even the smallest of anachronisms, American Horror Story thinks nothing of having a character belt out a David Bowie anthem decades before the song was actually written. It's an undeniably messy approach to storytelling, and it doesn't always work. But it's also, in its own way, the purest distillation of horror: a shot straight to the id, more concerned with nightmarish imagery than a coherent plot. At the end of tonight's premiere, it's obvious that American Horror Story: Freak Show still has plenty of surprises left to reveal — and horror fans won't want to miss any of them.