As one of showrunner Ryan Murphy’s muses, American Horror Story star Sarah Paulson has appeared as numerous characters on the anthology series — many of whom were killed off, and some of whom were even resurrected. Beginning in 2011, American Horror Story is, as the title implies, a horror anthology series from Glee creator/genre television powerhouse Ryan Murphy. However, despite boasting an ensemble cast as impressive as that of Murphy’s horror-comedy series Scream Queens, American Horror Story is nowhere near as light-hearted as that later slasher show.
With a new (but often interconnected) premise every season, American Horror Story plays its creepy campfire tales straight. Here, the characters take the scares and gore seriously and the campy extremes of the plots provide comic relief. Future Ratched star Sarah Paulson is a regular fixture in American Horror Story’s rotating cast, appearing in many seasons of the series. The frequent Murphy collaborator is a veteran when it comes to balancing the show’s unique blend of scares and silliness, racking up as many roles on the show as Evan Peters and Kathy Bates.
However, just because Paulson is a favorite of Murphy’s doesn’t mean the actor has an easy time of it when she appears on American Horror Story. The series is infamously ruthless and no amount of fame can save its star from grisly fates, as proven by the decision to off guest star Neil Patrick Harris during his American Horror Story cameo. Paulson has a better survival rate than a lot of her co-stars, but many of her American Horror Story characters have been killed off — although not all of them stayed that way. All told, Paulson has played eight characters throughout the eight seasons of the anthology that she appeared in, and of those eight, a total of four were killed, although one of those four was later resurrected thanks to some timeline shifting antics. So who were they, how did they die, and which one made it back to life?
Sally—Hotel
In what must be a record for the gory anthology horror, Paulson’s characters survived the first four seasons of American Horror Story before her first canon death. Although Bette and Dot of "Freakshow" and Lana Winters of "Asylum" had their brushes with death, it was not until season 5’s The Shining-inspired haunted hotel story that a Paulson character was actually killed off. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer character, with Sally being by far Paulson’s most reprehensible role on the show to date. Although she is introduced as a ghostly drug addict, viewers don’t have much of a chance to feel sorry for Sally before discovering she was a serial killer during her depraved, short life. Sally sics the addiction demon on fellow addicts and leaves them to a gruesome fate some viewers found too disturbing even for American Horror Story’s heightened horror before viewers learn that Sally died in 1994, murdered by Iris by being shoved out of an open window.
Audrey Tindall
As if making up for lost time, Paulson’s second character to be killed off on American Horror Story came hot on the heels of her first. A trippy meta-horror that deconstructed the true crime genre, season 6’s "Roanoke" opened with a few episodes of Paulson paying Shelby Miller, a woman who moves into a dilapidated mansion in the titular infamous abandoned colony and soon finds herself the victim of a haunting alongside her husband. Only that is not quite true as, in a clever meta-twist, Paulson is revealed in episode 4 to actually be playing actor Audrey Tindall, who is herself portraying Shelby (played by fellow series mainstay Lily Rabe) in a television show re-enacting her true-life haunting experience.
It’s a nifty reversal of expectations that makes "Roanoke" one of American Horror Story’s trippier outings, and Paulson manages to convince both as a terrified victim and a portentous actor. Unfortunately, the worst monsters of American Horror Story tend to be human, as proven when a chaotic melee in the supposedly haunted mansion leads confused police to shoot and kill Audrey. It’s the most blackly comic and unexpected of Paulson’s character deaths, and the abrupt shock is almost as surprising as the realization that viewers were watching a show-within-a-show for the season’s first three episodes.
Wilhemina Venable
Presumably to account for the sin of surviving season seven’s "Cult", Paulson didn’t waste a moment ensuring that her character in season 8’s "Apocalypse" was killed off swiftly. A few episodes into this grim post-apocalyptic tale, the series took a seismic shift when Wilhemina Venable, Paulson’s stern outpost leader, killed off most of the cast members. Venable was a Nurse Ratched-esque stern disciplinarian who was never above exiling the survivors in her outpost if they betrayed any of her many rules, but she crossed the line when she poisoned much of the cast to try and ensure that newcomer Michael Langdon would bring her to a safe haven he promised. Unfortunately for Venables, Langdon was the literal Antichrist, and in a case of instant karmic retribution, she was killed off soon after committing her mass murder.
Cordelia Goode
The last character played by Paulson has the impressive accolade of being both her only character to return from the dead and her most heroic role yet. Cordelia Goode, who was previously seen in season 3’s "Coven", returned for the latter half of season 8’s "Apocalypse". The character was by now the Supreme of her coven and sacrificed her life to allow Mallory Mongomery to ascend to her place. The fake-out death was soon undone, however, when it was revealed that Mallory successfully traveled back in time and undid the upcoming apocalypse by killing Michael Langdon back when he was a defenseless human by hitting him with her car. It’s a brutally anticlimactic end to a character whose evil had been hyped up since season 1, but this timeline reversal did at least provide Paulson’s Goode with a revival by the end of season 8, making Cordelia her first and last resurrected role on American Horror Story.