Well, if you weren’t scared of clowns before . . .

Ryan Murphy packed the premiere of American Horror Story: Cult with imagery that will set any coulrophobe’s hair on end. Fans already knew that Sarah Paulson would be playing a Michigan-based lesbian restaurant owner whose phobias start to get the best of her after Donald Trump’s election, and the premiere made good on that promise. Much to the dismay of her wife, Ivy (Alison Pill), Ally starts having some serious anxiety issues—including, it seems, full-blown hallucinations—after Trump’s ascent to the White House. Although Murphy’s political message has its flaws, even in the first episode, he has still created a new, immersive world for longtime diehards to play in—and, perhaps more important, it seems he’s already planting little callback seeds that could later sprout into important story lines. For instance: did you catch an interesting detail about where Hillary Clinton’s campaign sent Billie Lourd’s Winter Anderson?

The premise for this season is, at the moment, a little complicated. For now, the conflict centers around Ally and Kai, the blue-haired, bigoted villain played by Evan Peters. As Ally grows increasingly paralyzed by fear, Kai seems to gain momentum as he attempts to start some kind of local political movement—with him as the leader. Ally is definitely spiraling—as evidenced by her hallucinations of killer clowns in various places, including the grocery store, where she attempts to do battle against them armed only with bottles of rosé. Her therapist prescribes her a mild anti-anxiety medication to counteract her phobias—which also include blood, confined spaces, the dark, particles in the air, and things with holes—but she avoids taking them for a while, until Ivy insists. The couple’s restaurant is in dire financial trouble, partially thanks to Ally’s absenteeism, so they hire a new nanny to watch their son, Oz, as Ally returns to work. (The old one stopped coming to work after the election, Ally reveals. “We don’t know if she went back to Guatemala or was rounded up.”) And who shows up for an interview? Winter Anderson, whose motives are almost certainly duplicitous.

Going into this season, fans have been prepared to see Evan Peters, one of the most prolific members of the Ryan Murphy repertory camp, once again play a magnetic villain. After all, he does it so well! And based on the premiere, it does seem that Peters is definitely in villain mode—at least for now. He’s racist and homophobic, and he seems bent on harnessing people’s post-election fears for his own personal gain. He pleads with the city council not to increase police presence in their suburban Michigan town, but to let the violence and chaos run its course—positioning the few who are not afraid to lead the scared, sheep-like masses. Unsurprisingly, the city council shoots him down, but as he exits, he warns, “There is nothing more dangerous in this world than a humiliated man.” Even so, we’re not convinced Peters will be the one doing all the harm this season—especially since it’s hard to imagine Murphy would reveal his hand so early.

For our money, the one to watch might actually be Winter. Why? Admittedly, it’s a tiny, perhaps inconsequential detail—but this season has obvious ties to Season 4, Freak Show, which took place in Jupiter, Florida and introduced us to Twisty the Clown. So it seems significant that Murphy also slipped in the fact that Winter spent a year campaigning for Team Clinton in Florida

“We gave a year of our lives to this,” she says to a friend on the phone after the election results are announced. “I dropped out of Vassar. Why would they send us to Florida when we should have been in Wisconsin?”

It could easily be a throw-away line, but then again, consider how big of a role Twisty the Clown has played in the season already. Clown imagery abounded in the season’s marketing materials, and Twisty has already made a comeback: he’s one of Oz’s favorite comic characters, it seems, much to Ally’s dismay. (John Carroll Lynch returned in the premiere to act out a scene from Oz’s comic—one that strongly mimics the murder Twisty committed in the Season 4 premiere.) The last time we saw the “real” Twisty, he was ascending to a dream-like freak heaven. Are the murderous clowns Ally sees carrying on his legacy?

It seems very likely that the band of killer clowns is not entirely in Ally’s head: Oz saw them, too, as Winter was babysitting him. According to Oz’s account, she took him outside to prove that there was nothing there—and hoisted him up to look through a window, when he saw a couple of neighbors getting killed by a band of terrifying clowns. Winter claims that he’s being “imaginative,” and that in fact they only went outside after the police had arrived. His mothers reveal that their son often has night terrors, during which he does not realize he is asleep. One of the victims was a city council member who shot down Kai’s police proposal. The detective working the dead-neighbor case says it seemed like a murder-suicide. Perhaps relevant: the two were also at Ally and Ivy’s house on election night, and got in a huge fight because one of them didn’t make it to the polls in time to cast a vote.

The point? This could all be in Ally and Oz’s heads, but it seems unlikely. If the clowns are real, the next question is who might be leading them—and to what end. That’s where Winter comes in.

Winter has, in some fashion, pledged herself to Kai, engaging in a cult-like ritual in which they link pinkies and he asks her a series of personal questions, which she must answer honestly. (As one eagle-eyed Redditor notes, she’s also styled to look a lot like a Manson girl—which is funny, since her Scream Queens character was also a Manson descendant.) Although Winter might have tethered herself to Kai, we have to wonder whether she’s the one pulling the strings behind the clowns—and if, in the end, she might be this season’s true villain. The clowns went after Ally before Winter or Kai met her, but it seems far from coincidental that Winter happened to be watching Oz when they showed up on the family’s street.

It’s too early to say that Winter is the group’s leader, but it seems pretty likely that there’s at least some connection—and that it might get stronger as the season progresses. Then again, it’s always ill advised to try and predict Ryan Murphy’s next move, so perhaps for now we’ll just focus on getting the clowns out of our brains before it’s time to sleep.