Great art demands pain in the first trailer for American Horror Story: Double Feature

We’ll be honest: We still don’t totally understand the concept for American Horror Story: Double Feature, the latest season of the landmark FX series that has branched out into a hit-and-miss horror show and a prestige drama anthology (and soon sports dramas and romances). We know the name comes from the fact that it will be about two scary things instead of just one scary thing and we know that one of the scary things is mermaid monsters and the other is aliens, but will the two things end up being connected? Will there be some kind of thematic reasoning for it being a “double feature” beyond the idea of doing two kinds of stories instead of one kind of stories?

Thankfully, this trailer for the first part of Double Feature is surprisingly manageable. There’s nothing too nonsensical happening here, and as a matter of fact, it all starts off with some familiar hooks. A writer (Finn Wittrock) moves to a seemingly idyllic coastal town with his wife (Lily Rabe) in hopes of getting past a crushing case of writer’s block (Alan Wake, anyone?), but as he spends more time with the locals (Evan Peters and Frances Conroy) he finds writing easier and easier… and also scarier and scarier. It seems like drinking blood or hurting people makes you more creative, with Finn Wittrock banging his head like a rockstar when his writing is really hitting a groove—a thing all writers have done at least once, let’s be honest—but the thing about spooky supernatural cure-alls is that there’s generally a high price to be paid. It’s all very Stephen King, especially if whatever magic stuff is going on could be read as a metaphor for substance abuse (and, based on this trailer, that seems likely).

American Horror Story: Double Feature will premiere on FX on August 25.