Super-Natural: Television Singing, the Special Guest Star and Stevie Nicks in American Horror Story

American Horror Story (2011–) is a series-length anthology horror show. Created by superstar producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk and featuring a range of recognisable A-list stars and familiar television actors, the series is glossy, expensive, exaggerated, and often deliberately controversial. Part of AHS’s over-the-top aesthetic is its extensive and attention-grabbing soundtrack, which combines classic horror tropes with notable ‘musical moments’ that feature a range of pre-existing tracks.
Additionally, moments of vocal performance are used to create standout sequences that act deliberately to change the pace and mood of individual episodes, providing an often-literal stage for the playing out of the series’ complex registers of star and character identification.

This chapter focuses on three ‘guest star’ episodes of AHS that include vocal performances by singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks. These scenes deliberately disrupt and destabilise narrative flow, but in ways that challenge our understanding of more conventional musical moments. They are simultaneously over-enhanced and naturalised, and can be read as both inside and out of AHS’s heavily constructed, self- consciously complex ‘reality’. It is not only the star presence of Nicks that facilitates this stand-out strangeness, but more specifically her musical voice: even in a series saturated with visual, narrative and sonic excess, singing retains a special, elevated aura of signification.