'American Horror Story' Sets Second Season Subtitle

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Adam Levine on the "American Horror Story" set

The second season of FX's American Horror Story has gotten a subtitle.

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Returning in October, the anthology will be called American Horror Story: Asylum and explore sanity and real-life horrors in 1964.

"When we launched the show last year, we kept quiet about the closed-ended nature of the show because we didn’t want to tip off the audience that the characters were not going to survive,” co-creator and executive producer Ryan Murphy said in a statement announcing the news Tuesday. "Now that it has been established that each year is a closed-ended story, the time seemed right to reveal what we’re calling the new installment."

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"We picked Asylum because it not only describes the setting -- an insane asylum run by Jessica Lange's character which was formerly a tuberculosis ward -- but also signifies a place of haven for the unloved and the unwanted," he continued. "This year's theme is about sanity and tackling real-life horrors."

Lange will return to play a nun in the second season of AHS, and be joined by Season 1 stars Sarah Paulson, Lily Rabe, Evan Peters and Zachary Quinto, as well as new faces James Cromwell, Joseph Fiennes, Adam Levine, Chloe Sevigny, Clea Duvall and Jenna Dewan, among others.

Murphy, meanwhile, has been busy since joining Twitter this week and posted an image of Levine on the set, seen here. 

Murphy revealed in December that the series would take on an anthology format after the main characters from Season 1 -- played by Connie Britton, Dylan McDermott and Taissa Farmiga -- all perished and were trapped in the haunted mansion at the center of its first year.

The series will be set at an East Coast mental institution for the criminally insane in the 1960s and feature the cast portraying completely different characters from their Season 1 roles.

Season 2 of American Horror Story: Asylum will return in October. An exact date has not yet been determined.  

AHS' first season collected 17 Emmy nominations earlier this month, tied with AMC's Mad Men for the lead.

Email: Lesley.Goldberg@thr.com; Twitter: @Snoodit