Episode six opened with text saying that “My Roanoake Nightmare was the television success story of 2015,” garnering “23 million viewers by its finale, topping that week’s airing of Sunday Night Football, Empire, and The Walking Dead,” adding that the network had asked the producer to create a follow-up series. Suddenly we were in the incongruous-feeling environment of Southern California, watching Roanoake’s producer Sid (Cheyenne Jackson) negotiate with studio heads, actors, and the documentary’s subjects to film a new show: Return to Roanoke, a Big Brother-like experiment where Shelby, Matt, and the actors from the original series go back to the house that was now festooned with hidden cameras as the producers would secretly create scares. Sid’s followed by a film crew at all times—“the camera never stops,” he instructs.

This conceit—a show within a show about the making of a show about the previous show within a show—is mind-bendy is all the right ways. The actors, film crew, and viewing audience within American Horror Story don’t seem to believe that Matt and Shelby actually encountered the supernatural. Quickly, though, it starts to appear they were wrong as horrible things start happening on set in North Carolina. Toward the end of episode six, on-screen text tells us that the show from here out is assembled from found footage because all but one member of the cast and crew died during filming. And indeed, episode seven begins with an axe-murder spree felling Sid and his producers—all told from the point of view of the victims’ cameras. But as you watch, you have to keep in mind the possibility that even this layer of action may be staged. Which is a funny thing to wonder about because, of course, it all is staged by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk.

Less abstractly, the premise of Return to Roanoke lets American Horror Story get a lot scarier. The proposition of the first five episodes is flipped: Instead of knowing all the important characters survive, you know that all but one died, reintroducing crucial suspense. And moreover, as the characters begin to live through a “real” version of the nightmare portrayed in the “original” series, Murphy and Falchuk get grimier. No longer are vengeful spirits or crazed locals played by well-lit recognizable actors; the villains are more menacing and, for now, less knowable. The witch once played by Lady Gaga makes only a furtive appearance in the corner of the frame: She’s not mugging to the cameras. Cuba Gooding Jr., speaking as a professional actor, encounters a pool of blood and says he’s played in enough horror films to know it’s not corn syrup. And in an exquisite moment at the end of episode seven, Kathy Bates’s character—Agnes Mary Winstead, an actress who’s gone insane with the belief that she’s been possessed by the ghost she played in My Ronoake Nightmare—comes face to face with the actual ghost she played, who looks even less friendly than Bates ever did in the role.