“American Horror Story” Season 6 premiered on Wednesday, so basically that means we’ve been awake since Wednesday.
The first episode of “AHS: My Roanoke Nightmare” introduced us to a documentary-style story about a couple, Shelby and Matt (Sarah Paulson and Cuba Gooding Jr. in the re-enactment, Lily Rabe and André Holland in documentary interviews), possibly being haunted by some evil spirits from the lost Roanoke colony. However, it also left us with a lot of unanswered questions.
If you never want to sleep again either, here are some chilling theories to explain what’s possibly going on:
1. Shelby is a witch and sacrificed her baby’s life for Matt.
Ok, whoa. Thank you, Reddit user SweetBaconTater, for blowing our minds and also for having the username SweetBaconTater.
It is weird that Shelby loses her baby right when Matt seems like he’s going to survive that “knockout game,” right? This Redditor speculates Shelby is a witch and used Vitalum Vitalis, a power we learn about in “AHS: Coven,” to save his life. Vitalum Vitalis allows a person to balance the scales between one life force and another.
Shelby may have given up her baby to save Matt.
2. It’s aliens.
Duh, right? We saw aliens in one of the supposedly fake teasers for Season 6. Now, thanks to Reddit user AmericanDragStory’s fortuitously paused screen, we have more evidence.
“I accidentally paused the titlecard shots from the 6x02 teaser and this looked familiar,” wrote the Redditor. Check out the shot:
Damn. We really didn’t need to see that.
3. Those “fake” teasers weren’t really fake.
We’ve been told “American Horror Story” Season 6 is “My Roanoke Nightmare,” and that only one teaser, “Wind Chimes,” was real. Before the season, The Huffington Post even published a story that supposedly helped someone choose the right theme and win a car, so that’s awesome. But what if we’ve been misled?
The other teasers might not be completely fake. Check out the word “pig” in this one:
We found out during the premiere that a pig man (ManBearPig?) is going to be running around in Season 6. Plus, that hot tub scene with Paulson was a little reminiscent of the teaser where a swamp monster dragged a woman under water.
They’re probably not going to win you a car (sorry), but watch out for elements of the other teasers popping up throughout Season 6.
4. Shelby and Matt aren’t who we think they are.
Reddit user chillaxicon speculates that we have some unreliable narrators in our midst, which is totally possible. Shelby and Matt both have times where they are alone and we need to rely on their word. Are they telling the truth?
“Shelby has been separated twice from the other narrators, so those parts of her story rely on her witness alone,” the Redditor writes. “If Matt is lying, none of the pig threats have happened and he is unaccounted for when shit’s gone down.”
As Bustle points out, the “real-life” Shelby and Matt, Rabe and Holland, are actually much younger than Paulson and Gooding Jr. Yet, the “reenactment” scenes, which feature Paulson and Gooding Jr., are supposedly set a long time before Shelby and Matt give their interviews to the camera. Some things just aren’t adding up.
5. The new season is Billie Dean Howard’s Show.
Billie Dean Howard, the medium Paulson played in Season 1’s “Murder House,” introduces viewers to the Roanoke story in that season by mentioning a successful exorcism that supposedly happened at the colony. We also saw Billie Dean return in “American Horror Story: Hotel,” contacting ghosts for her TV show.
Since this season is told like a “Celebrities Ghost Stories”-style TV show, it’s conceivable, as some fans and outlets speculate, that “My Roanoke Nightmare” is Billie Dean’s new show.
6. They’re all dead.
One of the bummers of the season is that you don’t really fear for Shelby and Matt since they’re giving interviews about what happened. That means they obviously make it, right?
Maybe not.
Reddit user zombie_evelyn has another take on the Billie Dean theory:
Perhaps they are ALL dead and we are not seeing the interviews on actual film, but from [Billie Dean Howard’s] perspective such as when she interviewed John Lowe in Hotel?
That might also explain why the actors in the reenactment are older than the ones giving the interviews. Rabe and Holland are playing dead characters giving interviews. Paulson, possibly as Billie Dean, and Gooding Jr. are reenacting what happened.
Are these scary good? Or maybe they’re just ...
Either way, have fun staying up forever.
“American Horror Story” airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on FX.
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