‘American Horror Story’ Season 5 Theories: Potential New Clue From The ‘Freak Show’ Finale

“Freak Show” may be over but the excitement regarding Season 5 of “American Horror Story” has only just begun! During the final episode of Season 4, series creator Ryan Murphy made sure to tease fans with some subtle clues about what they could potentially expect in the fifth installment.

During the finale Murphy may have tipped his hat – or should we say Top Hat? – to the next season of “AHS” when Massimo (Danny Huston) made his appearance. It was 1960 and Elsa (Jessica Lange) had finally become the big Hollywood star she always wanted to be. However, despite having the career of her dreams, a hunky husband and a pair of adorable cocker spaniels, she still wasn’t satisfied.

Elsa’s insatiable hunger for love worsened when Massimo visited his beloved in her Hollywood pad. He explained that since they last saw each other at the freak show camp (Elsa called upon Massimo to make new hands for Jimmy [Evan Peters]), he had been working in construction, putting his artistic abilities to the test as he created fake building in Nevada so that the government could blow them up with atomic bombs. (Cue the eyebrow raise.)

Our suspicions on Massimo’s past having something to do with Season 5 grew when he revealed that he couldn’t run away with Elsa because he had a lung and bone disease that would kill him within the month. So, does this mean Massimo suffered radiation poisoning from the bombs? If so, that would go hand-in-hand with some Season 5 theories that have been circulating. The theories suggest that the next installment may have something to do with operation Top Hat, “a local field exercise” conducted by the United States Army chemical corps in 1953 that used human subjects in the radiological testing.

If one was to research Nevada Test Site, they would uncover that the bombs tested in Nevada and Utah during the 1950’s were speculated to have caused an increase in cancers (including leukemia, lymphoma, thyroid, breast, melanoma, bone, brain and more) among residents who were in close enough in range to have experienced the fallout downwind from the testing sights. According to Ratical.org, residents of the nearby towns reported that they noticed an “oddly metallic sort of taste in the air,” which was thought to be an effect from the atomic bomb testing.

During the 2015 Television Critics Association winter press tour, FX Networks CEO John Landgraf teased to TVLine that fans should anticipate Season 5 of “AHS” to be “very different.”

“One of the things I love so much about that is that it can be radically, radically reinvented in terms of tone, setting, period, characters, cast,” Landgraf revealed. “I think there’s going to be an unusually large reinvention in between Book 4 and Book 5 relative to, say, between Book 3 [‘Coven’] and 4 [‘Freak Show’].”

The Networks CEO then dished an interesting Season 5 spoiler, teasing that “AHS” may return to telling their chilling story in the present. “That’s my hope, yeah,” he said of Season 5’s timeline occurring in 2015. This led us to theorize that instead of Season 5 reenacting the terrible events that went down in 1950, perhaps viewers would get to see how the atomic bomb testing had effected and shaped the lives of those who endured the bombing.

Sound off in the comments section below with your thoughts and theories for Season 5 of “American Horror Story.”