OK, we’re going to go with bullet points.  If last season’s “Coven” wasn’t exactly your favorite season (ahem), things may be looking up.

Ryan Murphy has said that he wanted a “comedic tone” similar to Coven, but that this season is just getting darker, and it’s going to not be so much in the tone of Coven, but closer to the tone of Asylum! Hey, nightmare time from AHS again!

• Let’s get the bad news out of the way now: There is a 99% chance that Lilly Rabe will not be able to join the cast, as she has a scheduling conflict. Let’s cross our fingers she can at least show up for a cameo.
• Vic Mackey Michael Chiklis will be playing the circus/freak show strongman (that’s pretty much how they looked back in the day, built like bulldogs rather than beefcake).
• His character will be married to Angela Bassett’s character. Ryan Murphy described the character as the strong but sensitive type, who “is written to be quite vulnerable”.
• Kathy Bates will play his ex-wife, and they’ll all have plenty of scenes together… which is great, since Bassett VS. Bates = pure gold. Chiklis will just be the icing on the cake!
• Sarah Paulson will not be playing a character with two heads, but one with a conjoined twin. If you’ve seen photos of people born with a live, conjoined twin, this has the high possibility to become really, really disturbing.*

• 

  American Horror Story Freakshow Horror poster design by Mental Shed Studios. Horror Boom does not own the copyright.

• The production will start shooting S4 in the middle of July. Kathy Bates says she’s starting to have costume fittings, and her character will appear in the portions of the show that take place in the late 1950s.
• In a recent E! Online Spoiler chat, we found out about three new characters currently being cast: “that of the comedic ‘Larry’, ‘Bobby’, an extremely, extremely tall man described as a gentle giant,  and ‘Sammy’, a role which will require prosthetics.” Yikes…
  
• Evan Peters will be playing an as-yet unspecified ‘freak’, whom Jessica Lange’s character has ‘rescued’. Oh, and her character refers to them as “unusuals”,  since let’s face it, no-one likes to be called a freak (even if they are employed in a Freak Show).
• Denis O’Hare will return as “a collector of freaks,” according to Vulture. Of his relationship with Lange’s character, he hinted, “We’ll have lots of scenes with each other, but we’ll be battling.” We’re really glad he’s going to play a live character with a tongue this time around.
• Actors that are definitely “in”, but don’t have specified roles as of yet: Frances Conroy (yes!), Emma Roberts, Jamie Brewer, and Gabourey Sidibe.

• 

  It’s “unusual” that Angela Bassett appears to be aging in reverse!

We have been told that the “big bad”- -glad they have one this season– will be someone (or something) called “The Clown Killer”. What we don’t know yet is if he is a clown that kills people, a killer who targets clowns, or possible a clown who only kills other clowns.

From the Paleyfeat 2014 panel.

*When I was young, I want to say…pffft…maybe 5th grade, my parents let me check out a book from the library titled “Freaks” that was in fact very sympathetic and compassionate. A little too informative for me at that particular age, though. I read about a man (who did work in a freak show) with a conjoined twin that had a head and an arm that hung there limply. The head would sometimes go to sleep and wake up, and it snored. The final sentence has been seared into my brain for decades: “When the head began talking, however, he committed suicide with a shotgun.”  I assumed back then (and still have the strong feeling) that it wasn’t the fact that the head was talking that drove him to kill himself but what the head was saying.