Photo: FX

Just like last season of American Horror Story, Asylum is pretty committed to honoring its roots, throwing out as many horror-movie references as there are inmates in Briarwood. Even the least seasoned thriller fan probably caught last week’s homage to Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, for example. But let’s see if we can’t figure out some of the others, weaving in a little bit of non-horror allusion where appropriate. Did we miss anything?

Crab-walking on the stairs in the opening sequence: The Exorcist (rerelease edition)

The very first shot of the first episode, crosses hanging in the woods: The Blair Witch Project

An abandoned mental hospital where murders take place: The Frighteners; Session 9

A male mental patient’s flinging of his sperm at the face of a female passerby: Silence of the Lambs

A hospital that doesn’t make you better; treatment by a stern woman: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Bloody Face: Leather Face in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Bloody Face’s extracurricular skin crafts: Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs

Alien abduction and experimentation: Fire in the Sky; The X-Files

Jed, the possessed farm boy, and his sexual taunting of Sister Jude: The Exorcist

Sister Mary Eunice’s taunting of Sister Jude about her hit-and-run past: I Know What You Did Last Summer

The sexual behavior of Sister Mary Eunice (offering herself to Dr. Arden): The Devils

Sister Jude going to a bar and picking up a strange man to sleep with: Killer Nun

Shelly is punished for being promiscuous by getting her hair cut off: The Magdalene Sisters



Shelly is punished for being promiscuous by getting her legs cut off: Boxing Helena

Kit is probed and tortured by Dr. Arden: A Clockwork Orange

Dr. Arden is creating “creatures” of unspecified origin: Frankenstein, for now

Dr. Arden is both a mad doctor and a Nazi: Marathon Man

Pepper, the microcephaly patient (referred to as a “pinhead”) who seems innocent but is actually dangerous — and is now missing: Freaks



Jessica Lange’s Academy Award–nominated role, in which she played someone who was institutionalized, given electroshock therapy, and lobotomized: Frances