American Horror Story: Freak Show’ Begins Wednesday

American Horror Story: Freak Show The fourth season of this series begins Wednesday night .

Which is harder, making a regular television series or making what amounts to a new 13-hour horror movie every year from scratch? Based on the first two episodes of “American Horror Story: Freak Show,” the fourth season of this anthologized creepfest from FX, it looks as if starting over might be more of a challenge.

“Freak Show,” which begins on Wednesday night, still has the high style we’ve grown to expect from the “Horror Story” creators, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, who wrote the season premiere (directed by Mr. Murphy). And it still has plenty of clever touches in word and picture — a nice one in the premiere comes when a nurse vomits into a perfectly retro avocado green trash can.

But it’s not particularly scary, and doesn’t even feel that creepy or freakish, despite the sideshow setting and the obvious attempt to emulate one of the eeriest of American movies, Tod Browning’s “Freaks,” from 1932. Actually, as the show has moved season by season from haunted house to insane asylum to witches’ coven to freak show, it’s felt a little less scary every time, which might just be familiarity (deepened by the largely repeating cast).

Jessica Lange plays the impresario of a traveling carnival that’s going broke in “American Horror Story: Freak Show,”.

“Freak Show” also has more distractions from the basic scary story: a movie metaphor, in which the sideshow performers dream of being stars and form their own shadow version of a Hollywood studio pecking order; and a social metaphor, more direct than in past seasons and particularly appropriate to the 1950s Florida setting, in which the freaks are the misunderstood outsiders abhorred by normal Americans.

Anchoring the show, as usual, is the wonderful Jessica Lange, combining astringency and seduction as Elsa Mars, impresario of a traveling carnival that’s going broke. (Pushing the movie-biz parallel, the bearded lady laments the effects of television on the sideshow business: “Thanks to Red Skelton and Lucille Ball, folks are getting their jollies at home now.”)

Elsa, like several of Ms. Lange’s earlier “American Horror Story” characters, is a semi-benevolent go-between — twisted, maybe even murderous, but shrewdly trying to broker some kind of coexistence for the real psychos and the everyday simpletons they prey on. As “Freak Show” begins, she’s tracking down and recruiting a new ingénue for her show, a two-headed woman played by Sarah Paulson.

This character — an angry head and a star-struck head, able to snipe at each other silently (in voice-over) — is certainly attention-grabbing, and the visual effects are impressively seamless. The show has fun with the device, as when the left head takes a puff on a cigarette, and the right head blows out the smoke. (When Ms. Paulson is in motion, we usually just see one head at a time, jammed against the edge of the frame.)

Other returning cast members include Evan Peters as a man with flipper like hands; Angela Bassett as a three-breasted woman; and Kathy Bates as the bearded lady, whose accent wanders around the Southern states, periodically landing on something vaguely Appalachian. Naomi Grossman reprises her “American Horror Story: Asylum” role as a microcephalic (even then a quotation of the “Freaks” film) and the two-foot-tall Jyoti Amge plays a two-foot-tall woman.

Sex as a subject of fear and horror has an even stronger role in “Freak Show” than in previous “American Horror Story” seasons, perhaps another nod to the ’50s. A homicidal clown (John Carroll Lynch) sets upon a couple enjoying some alfresco togetherness, while Mr. Peters’s character is hired for Tupperware-style parties, where his long, hooked fingers are the star attraction. Elsa blackmails a reluctant performer with a black-and-white stag film of an opium-fueled sideshow orgy. At times, the season feels like Mr. Murphy and Mr. Falchuk’s answer to “Masters of Sex.”

Not all these ideas work or have their intended impact. The scene of unsatisfied suburban women gathering for a little sideshow stimulation is particularly silly. But you can always count on Ms. Lange, wielding a smoky German accent and murmuring, “I’ve had a long and complicated love affair with show business myself, you know,” or singing a wacko Weimar cabaret version of “Life on Mars,” to bring things back to — not earth, exactly, but someplace recognizably human.