The AHS season 6 premiere airs tonight on FX and its about time we give credit to the most frustrating ad campaign in history.

Loose lips sink ships and luckily for Ryan Murphy and the team behind the AHS season 6 premiere they have years of experience literally sewing people’s lips shut. Ok, not literally, but the special effects team certainly does a nice job making those stitches look real.

Call it frustrating and ridiculous, I certainly have, but there is one word that must apply to the ad campaign that FX unleashed ahead of the AHS season 6 premiere — genius.

As a writer covering the show going into tonight’s premiere with no confirmed cast, no theme, and the knowledge that the past few months spent writing about previews that will likely have nothing to do with the current season deflated my enthusiasm.

But if I took a step back from the trenches, all the previews AHS threw this summer looked less like bombs and more like an inviting fireworks display.

The Hollywood Reporter released a fascinating interview with FX’s Stephanie Gibbons, the woman behind the red herring ad campaign for AHS season 6.

Gibbons explained that this year’s ad campaign would lean on two things, “Desire to know, the curiosity to find out what you don’t know; and perhaps more importantly, the notion of how powerful withholding is to the human psyche.” Answer: it’s pretty powerful.

Well before John Landgraf, president of FX, announced at the TCA presentation that only one of the 24 trailers was real each trailer was immediately subjected to the following analysis– Look at X! What does X mean? How does X link to the past seasons of AHS. Not for nothing, but by trailer number 5 what little enthusiasm I could muster was depleted.

That, however, fed right into Gibbon’s second point. Withholding information elicited an emotional response, one, which for me, was frustration. A large majority of the AHS audience still wanted more. And more they got.

And so, Gibbons and the creative team at FX ran the gambit of horror genres for the remainder of the ad campaign without seeing a single second of the premiere. You name it, they touched on it. Aliens, cornfields, children, surgical disasters, bugs, hands reaching out under stairs, The Mist, even a campy 50s swamp monster.

Gibbons did have her own fears about the campaign, worrying that this type of marketing would frustrate more than entice. But she focused on the core AHS psyche rather than the few outliers, who, like me, would tune in regardless.

“For people that like our programming, it’s not for everyone, but it’s for a lot of someones who want that type of satisfaction and experience of the new and the different, and the untried and the unknown. So for us, it’s playing to the unknown and the thrill of wanting. Marketing is inherently about building desire so that’s what we’ve set out to pursue,” said Gibbons to THR.

This is only the beginning of AHS season 6’s mystery. From what I have gathered the season is less about a following a theme and more about the experience of being present in the mystery. We’re not looking for the next “freak” in Freak Show or waiting for the reveal of the 10 Commandments Killer.

Instead we are asked to take this season chapter by chapter.

Gibbon’s job of concealing the initial reveal may be over as of 10:00 p.m. tonight, but her team’s work is far from over this year. “This season has a lot of ongoing mystery, so we will definitely make our ongoing promotion of this season less didactic and less explicit than it has been in previous seasons,” Gibbons revealed.

If you ever watched Mad Men, I anticipate the “Next week on AHS” promos to look a lot like those did.

I did more than my fair share of complaining this season already, but I will offer credit where it is due. The AHS and FX team managed to give us everything and nothing at the same time with a bold gamble. It will be interesting to see if it pays off in the ratings.

Going into tonight’s premiere we do have some idea of what we are going to get. The anthology will include actors who have been involved before and some who are joining in from the Ryan Murphy School of Actors Who Want to Try Something Different (i.e. Cuba Gooding Jr., Sarah Paulson, Lady Gaga).

Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

AHS season 6, “Chapter 1” airs tonight at 10:00 p.m. ET on FX.