'American Horror Story' Will Spook Us Again Next Year

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Today in show business news: FX renews its popular horror series, The Rock takes a dubious job, and Ethan Hawke gets mixed up in some orgies.

FX announced today that it has renewed its popular horror anthology series American Horror Story for a fourth season. The current season, called Coven, is earning a tidy 7.7 million viewers a week (when DVR is included), so FX definitely wants to stay in business with creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. So what will next season be? First season was haunted house, second season was spooky asylum with angels/demons/aliens, and now the third is witches and voodoo zombies. What comes after that? Mummies? Nah, I've made that joke before, haven't I? Um... Oh god. You know what comes next. YOU KNOW. It's vampires. Vampyr. The Unsleeping. Blood-sucking fiends. It has to be, right? It's time. It is time for American Horror Story: Hive or whatever they're going to call it. Dammit, it really is. [Entertainment Weekly]

The "Dwayne Johnson" Rock has signed on to star in a movie called SEAL Team 666. No, I didn't hit the "6" key two times too many there. It's "666." As in, "the project follows an elite group of Navy Seals who battle demons and assorted threats and discover that there’s a greater supernatural force bent on destroying the world." Oh great! Terrific. That'll be spectacular. If we learned anything from R.I.P.D. this summer, it's that America is super hungry for supernatural law enforcement action comedies with puns in the titles. Hollywood asked and we answered: More of those, please! So here is SEAL Team 666, just in the nick of time. It's been nearly four months since R.I.P.D.! What did they expect us to do, just sit here and starve? So, good. Thank you, Hollywood. This is perfect. What a perfect idea. [The Hollywood Reporter]

The Weinstein Company has signed a big deal to distribute an as-yet-unfilmed thriller starring Ethan Hawke and directed by Alejandro Amenabar. The movie is called Regression, and Deadline describes it thusly:

Regression ... is set in 1980 in a small Minnesota town where a man is arrested for sexually abusing his daughter. He admits his guilt despite having no memory of it. With the help of a psychologist, he relives the memories and implicates a police officer as his partner in crime. The man’s estranged son and other townspeople are also suddenly able to relive suppressed memories of horrific abuse. At the same time, the local news reports blame a Satanic cult that has been performing rituals of orgies, assault, killing animals and even babies, for years. The officers are alarmed when similar reports come in from all around the country—they believe they’ve uncovered a national and possibly supernatural conspiracy. Is the abuse real, or something else?

Intriguing, right? I mean, it will probably be very silly, but I like the sound of "rituals" and "orgies." Gotta love a good orgy ritual thriller, especially one directed by the guy who did The Others. I don't know. This could be promising. And Ethan Hawke is always at least entertaining. Good get, Weinsteins. Good get indeed. [Deadline]

Done with The Office, Steve Carell is now moving behind the TV camera, making plans to direct a TBS pilot that he and his wife, Nancy Carell (née Walls), wrote together. The show is called Tribeca and is about a group of eccentric crime solvers. The Hollywood Reporter's plot description includes the sentence "These dedicated men and women are more than counter-intuitive; they are nonintuitive," and I'm just not really sure what that means. Beyond that, we know that the show will be single-camera and, of course, will take place in Tribeca, Indiana. No, I'm kidding, it will likely take place in Tribeca in Manhattan, which technically should be stylized as TriBeCa, but what is this, 1997? No, it is not, so we won't. Anyway, this could be fun. Husband and wife teamin' up to put on a show. Let's support this. [The Hollywood Reporter]

HBO is developing a drama (when isn't HBO developing a drama? They are always developing some sort of drama) based on a Scandinavian crime novel. No don't worry, it's not a Dragon Tattoo series, no no. It's based on a book by Norwegian author Jo Nesbø called Headhunters, about "a corporate headhunter who becomes the hunted when his life and marriage are suddenly targeted by an unknown individual." It's supposed to be both grim and funny. Which sounds good for HBO. Well, until they start developing some other drama. HBO is the 10th grade girl of the television world. Always developing drama. [Deadline]

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.