Ryan Murphy Is Having a Very Happy Halloween

Naomi Watts, the 54-year-old star of “The Watcher,” said she was grateful to be a part of the club. “It doesn’t matter to him that we’re not at the tippy top this second,” she said. “He knows and recognizes that we’ve had great moments and we’ve proved ourselves as artists.”

Ms. Watts will also be playing the socialite Babe Paley in Mr. Murphy’s next installment of “Feud,” set for next year, about the cafe society battle royale that resulted when Truman Capote wrote a book, “Answered Prayers,” dishing about his swans and they dropped him like a hot tiara. Tom Hollander will play Capote, with Diane Lane as Slim Keith, Demi Moore as Ann Woodward, Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill and Chloë Sevigny as C.Z. Guest.

Mr. Murphy used to get upset when his style was called “camp.” “I thought that was a way to pigeonhole gay people: ‘You didn’t write a drama. You wrote a camp drama,’” he said. “Now, I’m like, if you want to call it camp, yes, maybe ‘American Horror Story’ is camp. I don’t think it is, but if you want to, OK, I get it.”

“The rule of my career has been: The more specific you are, the more universal you can become,” he said. “I also don’t think that all gay stories have to be happy stories. There was a moment on Netflix where they removed the L.G.B.T.Q. tag from ‘Dahmer,’ and I didn’t like it and I asked why they did that and they said because people were upset because it was an upsetting story. I was, like, ‘Well, yeah.’ But it was a story of a gay man and more importantly, his gay victims.”

He said he is most proud of an episode about one of Dahmer’s victims, a charming Black deaf man named Tony Hughes. “There’s a five-minute scene of three gay deaf men at a pizza parlor talking in sign language about dating, gay life and how hard is it for them,” he said. “I could not believe that I was getting the gift of putting it on television.”

Why did he think it became such a big cultural phenomenon, with Jeffrey Dahmer Halloween costumes trending to the point that eBay banned them?