American Horror Story: Asylum introduced the audience to the Bloody Face killer, one of the scariest villains in the series, but a fan theory suggests that the real Bloody Face killer was none other than Lana Winters – here’s why. The horror genre has been going through a great run in recent years, both on the big screen and TV, and the latter has been home to one of the most popular TV shows of the decade: American Horror Story, an anthology series created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk.
American Horror Story premiered on FX in 2011 with the season retroactively titled Murder House, which as the title says, was all about a haunted house and the ghosts that live there. As American Horror Story is an anthology series, each season has had a completely different story, theme, and setting, though it has also created its own connected universe thanks to characters that have appeared in different seasons, and Murder House was followed by what many considered the show’s strongest season: Asylum. American Horror Story season 2 took viewers back to 1964 to visit the fictional mental institution Briarcliff Manor, intercutting with events from that year and the present day. Asylum’s themes were sanity and abuse (physical, mental, and emotional), and saw the main characters dealing with different threats, such as demonic possession, abuse of power, aliens, and a serial killer known as Bloody Face.
Bloody Face was a serial killer whose reign of terror began in the early 1960s, and at the beginning of AHS: Asylum, viewers are led to believe that Kit Walker (Evan Peters) is the Bloody Face killer but he chose to forget, and so he’s taken to Briarcliff. This leads journalist Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson) to infiltrate Briarcliff to get all the information on Bloody Face under the excuse of doing a story on the asylum’s bakery. It’s through Lana that the audience learns who the real Bloody Face was: Dr. Oliver Thredson (Zachary Quinto). However, a fan theory suggests that Lana was the real Bloody Face, as she’s an unreliable narrator.
Lana Winters wasn’t the most honest person out there, starting with how she lied to enter Briarcliff, which in turn led to her being locked up there for real. Lana wouldn’t hesitate to lie to get the story she wanted, so with that in mind, a Reddit user suggests Lana was the real Bloody Face killer, and she made up the story about Oliver Thredson. In addition to being a liar and even showing some guilt during a book signing, and as she’s proven to be an unreliable narrator, her accounts of her encounter with Bloody Face shouldn’t be fully believed, so the author of the theory uses the scene where she calls the cops and kills Thredson as proof. Lana was putting herself in danger, but the author explains she called the cops to frame Thredson, and the aliens, demonic possessions, and more are details she made up to hide the truth.
Although the theory has many flaws, the idea of Lana Winters being the real Bloody Face would make Asylum even better, as going to that length to get a good story and manipulate people to get what she wanted was on-brand with Lana and make her a real threat, and American Horror Story left viewers wondering about her when she shot her son (who took on the mantle of Bloody Face). Perhaps Lana allowed herself to be locked in Briarcliff so the police wouldn’t catch her and there she met the perfect person to frame for everything she did: Oliver Thredson. Lana being Bloody Face also fits with the theme of memory and how you can’t trust anyone, though by making her the killer, the rest of the subplots would also change. Ultimately, it’s up to every American Horror Story fan to decide if Lana Winters could have been the real Bloody Face or if it really was Oliver Thredson.
