“American Horror Story: Cult brings a lot of things to mind. We learned there were gonna be clowns and phobias addressed. The three main phobias are coulrophobia, [fear of clowns], hemophobia [fear of blood], and trypophobia, which is this fear of irregularly shaped holes that you would find in coral, stuff like that. We were given the first two or three scripts, and in one of them, you learn that the neighbors keep bees. We immediately knew that was a symbol for a cult. Bees have a hive mentality. A cult has a hive mentality. There’s a leader. There’s the queen. There’s the woman who has the trypophobia texture to her skin. She has bee eyes, and she has these manipulative hands coming up over her head, and that represents the cult leader and manipulation and control of the people in his cult. There’s the image of the woman wearing that mask with the holes in it. The holes are all hexagons, so that again pulls from the hive, but it also pulls from trypophobia and bees, the anonymity of the hive mind. You’re giving up your individuality.”