Inside 10 Years of ‘American Horror Story’s Opening Credits With Title Designer Kyle Cooper

In an era where streaming services actively encourage viewers to “Skip Intro,” American Horror Story remains one of the few television series whose viewers would never even dare to fast-forward. Dissecting this stylized minute of television, full of graphic imagery and jarring industrial riffs, has become a sport in and of itself; early on in each new season, fans actively predict how these new sequences may hint at what’s to come. Yet American Horror Story‘s credits have always been far more than just a fun gimmick: they serve as a self-contained and insightful reflection on every season. (They’ve been nominated for three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Main Title Design, too.)

The past 10 years of nightmare-inducing title sequences have all been thanks to one man: title designer Kyle Cooper. Tied to the 10th anniversary of American Horror Story —the show premiered on October 5, 2011, three whole presidencies ago — Decider spoke to the Prologue Films co-founder about what went into creating the most disturbing credits sequence ever to air on television. Cooper also revealed some of his personal favorite spooky moments, and explained why Season 10’s Double Feature posed an extra challenge for him and his team.

MURDER HOUSE AND MACKINTOSH

It was Murder House that started it all. Before Cooper began working on the treatment, he first met with series co-creator and executive producer Ryan Murphy and executive producer Alexis Martin Woodall about what the first season of this horror anthology series was going to be about. That conversation set the tone for the collaboration that was to come, a marriage that combined Cooper’s love of disturbing imagery with Murphy’s carefully guiding hand.

“Ryan Murphy invited me to the set where they were shooting Murder House in the first season,” Cooper recalled. “I sat in his car, and he had a DVD with a lot of great music. He was thinking about what great music would go with the title, and then we walked around inside the house, and he was telling me about all the things that, in the story, happened in that house. I began to think about all the little kids on the walls. All the little pictures or portraits of little family members that have sat idly by and watched all this chaos that’s gone on, you know? So that’s where the idea for the first one was from. I had all these antique photographs of kids watching, as if their eyes were pinned open, just watching the madness that takes place in the house.”

This first opening title sequence showcased Cooper’s preference for practical effects over CGI, a choice that has come to define both Cooper’s work and AHS as a whole. “When I first started doing it, I was shooting in Super 16 mm, and it was very grainy. The first one, I remember the first one I shot in the basement of this Mary Pickford stage. I found this nasty. old basement, and I was running around the basement with a handheld Super 16 camera,” Cooper said. “I don’t know, I just always like some of the accidents that happen.”

This first collaboration also led to the series’ iconic font. According to Cooper, executive producer Alexis Martin Woodall often credits him and Ryan Murphy for creating the visual language of the show. With its skinny, flourished letters and recognizable dots and spacing, the show’s logo is an edited variation of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Font.

“It’s great that we picked a font and we made a logo with the font, and it survived this whole time. I’m kind of proud of that, actually,” Cooper said.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS, COMPRESSED

When Cooper first started working on the opening titles for the first season of AHS, which later came to be known as Murder House, he was given all the scripts for the season. As the years have gone on, AHS‘ notoriously fast-paced and secretive shooting schedule hasn’t always allowed for that level of preparation. It isn’t unusual for Cooper to start working on an opening sequence with little more than two to three scripts and no principal photography for reference. Creating a new opening sequence from start to finish requires the EPs explaining what they want to do for a new season, Cooper and his team filming the sequences that will flash before viewers’ eyes, completing a first cut, and editing the sequence. Altogether, this process can take anywhere from six weeks to three months. But no matter what, the process starts with a conversation with Murphy and Woodall.

“I’m pretty hazy on the dates, but I have an internal clock. I know around the time they’re gonna come, you know, Alexis [Martin] Woodall is gonna call and ask for a new season, tell me what the new season is,” Cooper said. “I always have to show Ryan and Alexis a look book, like a style guide. I find a lot of images that are disturbing to me and what I think the show is about, and I get a brief. So they give me a verbal brief, and I go away and I show them my pictures, and they usually say ‘Go shoot it.'”

Over the years, the three have developed their own language of sorts. Cooper knows that he can push the limits when it comes to the disturbing imagery he wants to use, and Woodall and Murphy trust his instincts. “They let me do my own thing, and they let me run the shoots that I have, but they’re very involved,” Cooper said. “Ryan thinks about it a lot. He has all kinds of references, himself, of things he thinks could be in the title. In the beginning, in the first few years he would give me a lot to go on. Then maybe he just began to trust me a little bit more. But he still has very specific opinions, and I’ll just get a call saying, you know, ‘Lose the’ whatever it is. ‘Get rid of that.’ ‘Don’t do that.’ They give me notes.”

Cooper’s own distinct flourishes have even inadvertently influenced fan speculation. “Sometimes there’s things that I just think are bizarre and disturbing that aren’t even in the show and sometimes they make their way in. We’ve done some things in the titles that I know were not gonna be in the show proper, but we invented them. We gave them life in the titles,” Cooper noted.

“If you read what people write about it, they imply all these meanings to things that I’ve done,” Cooper continued. “Like, in the first one, I found an army suit, and I was sitting in a chair with a pair of shears, and I was stabbing the chair with these shears. And I read somewhere that that meant something, that somebody was gonna get murdered with the shears in the next episode or something. So people study the main titles, and then they come up with all these theories about what each thing is a clue for. Sometimes it’s not a clue for anything. Sometimes it’s just something that we shot.”

PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES

If an AHS opening title is truly terrifying or cinematically innovative, chances are it’s going to be one of Cooper’s favorites. “The first one is one of my favorite ones, and I like Hotel because of some of the production methodologies we used that I thought were clever. We were shooting through little eye holes in hotel room doors, and that was kind of fun.”

Season 5’s Hotel also contained a scene Cooper was sure FX’s censors wouldn’t approve. “There were these older women there. One was supposed to be, like, a witch or these like spirits that haunt the rooms in the hotel. We had nudity in it, and I hadn’t done that before. They let that go by,” Cooper said.

Season 4 also contained a similar boundary-pushing scene. When asked about scenes he was surprised FX allowed, Cooper said, “In Freak Show, it was stop motion. We had these stop-motion characters, and there was one guy kind of standing in a circus cage that had a third leg. The placement of his third leg was a little risqué, I guess.”

Then there was the devil in Season 3’s Coven. “I don’t think they used it, but I made a 3D model of a dead devil that was just standing in the woods in the middle of the Coven thing,” Cooper revealed. “I designed all these devils, and I printed them with a 3D printer for something else I was doing. But I made one specifically and just put him in the woods with the witches, and nobody said anything. They’re really great clients, you know? I really enjoy working with Ryan Murphy and Alexis because they would just let me do that. It has nothing to do with the show, per se, unless it somehow, they rationalized it later. But I was glad they let me scoot it in.”

DOUBLE FEATURE, DOUBLE CREDITS

All of these challenges were doubled this year when Season 10 required not one but two opening credits sequences. It’s a unique two-for-one season that feels fitting for the anthology series’ 10th anniversary. The first six episodes of Double Feature, titled Red Tide, tell the story of a group of artists in Provincetown who can only create their best work by taking a pill that turns them into vampire-inspired monsters. That’s followed by the four-episode Death Valley, a decades-spanning saga about aliens and extraterrestrial impregnation.

“We did the last one for Red Tide, and then they changed the story in mid-stream,” Cooper said. “I didn’t know that they were gonna do two. I was completely surprised. But I’m really happy we did it because I really like what we did for this second version.”

It was important to Cooper that the credits for this season’s two stories look distinctive from each other while remaining frightening. For Red Tide, that meant incorporating a lot of meat and blood imagery to mirror the vampiric focus on the story. “Because they had to eat blood, they had to eat the meat, we started shooting this meat, and then it just got carried away,” Cooper said.

By contrast, the alien-skewed Death Valley is more focused on looking otherworldly. This alien effect was partially achieved by filming squids. The titles also point to another major theme of this new story: impregnation. “There’s a tip of the hat to infants that were in (Murder House). I had some formaldehyde babies in the first one we ever did, and there’s some babies in this one,” Cooper revealed. “I have some strange babies that are kind of hybrid babies that represent the alien experimentation.”

While working on Death Valley‘s opening titles, Cooper had to consult with Woodall to refine an eye-related Easter egg hiding in the credits. “I have this second line of defense. If I miss something, if I get carried away, if I try to put too much in, if I put something in that’s not scary or whatever, I really trust Alexis’s and Ryan’s opinion,” Cooper explained.

But overall the designer is proud of his black-and-white creation. “[Death Valley] is dark. It’s one of my favorite ones,” Cooper revealed.

All of this hard work and care reflects Cooper’s core philosophy when it comes to his craft. According to Cooper, a title sequence should never be compared to the project it’s introducing. Instead, the two should always be complementary. “It’s like you’re comparing apples to oranges. You’re comparing a one-minute sequence to an entire show with actors, and they’re two different things,” Cooper said. “The reality is too many times in my career doing film titles, a newspaper writer, someone, will review a movie and say that the main titles are better than the movie in order to insult the movie. It doesn’t really get me any business to have someone say that. So I would rather keep them as two separate things.”

“When you have the right title sequence it dovetails perfectly into the movie. It begins the movie, it acts as the beginning of the movie and it draws you in. And you’re sitting in the theater and there’s nowhere else you’d rather be than in this theater, right now, watching this move,” Cooper explained. As an example, Cooper pointed to one of his best known opening titles, those to David Fincher’s Se7en. “It is the beginning of the movie. They have a scene or two prior, but when that thing kicks off, it’s like all hell breaks loose, and suddenly you’re in it. There’s so many people making main titles now, and so many of them are good. But the best ones just draw you in, and they shouldn’t be judged independently of the total package that they are supposed to be at the beginning. It’s like saying the front end of my car is nicer than the tail end of my car.”

The season finale of American Horror Story: Double Feature premieres on FX tonight, Wednesday October 20, at 10/9c p.m. It will be available on FX on Hulu the following morning.

Where to stream American Horror Story: Double Feature