Deconstruction of Opening Credits: American Horror Story

Deconstruction of American Horror Story: Hotel Opening Credits

American Horror Story is a TV show produced by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, it consists of five series which are all set in different periods of time. American Horror Story: Hotel is the fifth and most recent series.

The opening credits give a glimpse to what the series is going to be like, there is lots of blood, including people scrubbing blood of the floor, people and children crawling out of beds, children standing in corridors and monsters coming out from the bed. All of this is shown through fast paced cuts which add to the intensity of the short clips. The music used is parallel to the sinister and disjointed short clips in the credits.

Genre

The genre is horror and erotic thriller, which is shown explicitly in the credits through blood as well as women wearing revealing clothes. The wallpaper style background behind the text as well as the colour of the text is red which adds to the common use of blood.

 

Text

The text is in a unique font and it is specific to AHS so it can be easily identified even out of context. It is called 'Rennie Macintosh' and suits the genre of horror because it is quite ominous and abnormal.

As well as the actor's names, the Ten Commandments are written, in the same font, which gives an indication to viewers about the 'Ten Commandments Killer', who is a part of the plot. This implies that there is a religious aspect to the series.

Lighting

There is a lot of flickering and lights flashing but apart from that the lighting is dark or dimly lit. The flickering adds effect to the disturbing scenes shown in the opening credits.

Location

The location adds to the eeriness of the credits, it is obviously old fashioned which gives indications of what year it is set in. The location of the hotel is shown explicitly through shots of people in the corridor that are filmed through the peep hole in the hotel door.

Music

The music is slow and eerie with lots of mechanical noises that stay the same throughout the whole credits until a part of the credits where there is a girl with loads of lipstick on her face and the music gets louder and more dramatic.


These opening credits are very detailed and contains a lot of different scenes, it would be very hard to create opening credits that are like this because they are very expensive and time consuming, and due to the fact that we are only students it is practically impossible to create something of this scale.