The horror in American Horror Story isn’t very American. While the show has featured plenty of supernatural creatures, its sense of evil comes from within, spawned from the immorality of its characters or their otherwise appalling lack of self-control. The show has more in common with Asian horror — Jigoku (1960) has come to mind often while watching it — that catches sinners in a web of punishment, or European folklore that tried to curb children’s bad behaviour by scaring the shit out of them.

American horror has, by and large, involved relatively innocent people victimized by an “outside” entity — a monster devoid of personality, a relentless psychopath, an oversized, voracious animal. Of the top-rated American horror films on the Internet Movie Database, only The Shining (1980) finds horror in characters’ internal “demons” as opposed to any external threat.

In season one of AHS, the Harmon family was haunted by ghosts, but those ghosts didn’t try to frighten so much as entice them; the season’s most memorable “monsters” — a maid seen as young and beautiful by husband and father Ben (Dylan McDermott) and haggard by everyone else, and the ubiquitous “rubber man” — were sexually charged. Both were devils tempting their victims with forbidden fruit. I wouldn’t call the show religiously moralistic, but it does have a somewhat Biblical sense of consequence concerning promiscuity, and even its ostensibly evil characters are consumed by spiritual guilt. Tate (Evan Peters), described by creator Ryan Murphy as the “true monster” of the story, crucially spent a long time in complete denial about his double crime of murder-suicide.

Season two, as you may know, tells an entirely new story while retaining much of season one’s cast — a sign of good judgment on the producers’ part. Though by the final episode of season one the Harmon family was entirely dead, they could’ve lived on as ghosts, their story dragged out indefinitely. Instead, in the show’s most clever conceit thus far, a potential season two arc involving a new family moving in to the haunted home was plowed through in one episode, getting done what could’ve taken months in only 45 minutes.

Instead of a continuation, this second season of American Horror Story is a counterpoint, a reflection perhaps of what the show has already done. That’s evident from the first two episodes, at least. While there is still an emphasis on deviance and sin, two characters are trapped by sexualized transgressions we as a modern audience may sympathize with. In 1964, an investigative reporter (Lana, played by Sarah Paulson) in a lesbian relationship and a grease monkey (Kit, Peters again) who secretly marries his African-American girlfriend are sent to Briarcliff insane asylum. Lana is wholly innocent, unlawfully trapped by the asylum’s scheming matriarch Sister Jude (Jessica Lange), while Kit is only apparently so — he’s been accused in a series of murders, attributed to a killer with the hilariously dumb moniker “Bloody Face,” but for various reasons the audience is inclined to believe he didn’t do it. So instead of seemingly good people tempted into badness, we have seemingly bad people fighting to defend their goodness.

This comes at a crucial time. By 1964, the influence of the Church on American morality had begun its steady decline, and its ability to dole out violent punishment for transgressions, even to those within its flock, was meeting with staunch opposition. Sister Jude still runs the asylum with some autonomy — the monsignor (Joseph Fiennes) seems like an oblivious dolt, at least initially — but when the secular psychiatrist Dr. Thredson (Zachary Quinto) arrives at Briarcliffe to examine Kit, he quickly takes great issue with Jude's methods and the building’s conditions. Thredson does not appear until episode two, and even then only sparingly — Quinto’s top billing, then, is an indication his character may emerge as a central heroic figure.

Despite the show’s bitter view of theocracy run amok, the influence of science on brutal institutions such as Briarcliffe is given no greater respect. Its representative here, and so far the season’s most frightening character, is Dr. Arden (James Cromwell), a man given his own wing of the asylum to conduct experiments on mental illness. It’s clear almost immediately that he’s up to no good, that he could be a genuine Mengele operating only to satisfy his perversion. Something he has “created” roams the grounds, so far hidden from view. The show casts Cromwell, still best known as the kindly shepherd in Babe (1995) far against type and fully exploits his imposing 6-foot-7 frame.

All this reiterates how in American Horror Story, the supernatural is but a background for true evil: we human beings, and the way the flimsy institutions we create to help one another can crumble at the mercy of a few weak-willed individuals. Last season, it was family and marriage. This year, religion and mental health. Again, there is a moral to these stories, but one that sharply criticizes the actual imposition of one person’s morality on another.

Heady themes aside, American Horror Story is superficially a very entertaining series, filled with all the common pleasures of B-horror filmmaking. I would argue this makes it one of the most important shows on television right now. It’s easy to see that, compared to other dramas in this “Golden Age of TV” — Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Homeland — it lacks an off-putting sense of self-importance. Like its brethren, AHS has deep, resonant themes at its core and a unique approach to genre, but without a whiff or pretension. Unlike Breaking Bad and the series that kicked off the new wave of cable drama, The Sopranos, it’s not afraid to wallow in its own exploitative charm, able to comment on sex and violence while not acting ambivalent about their appeal. I admire that.

American Horror Story: Asylum airs on FX Canada Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET/ 7 p.m. PT