It’s the rare :15 teaser that actually offers replay value, but I’ll be damned if I haven’t watched the first teaser released for “Coven,” the witchcraft-themed third season of “American Horror Story” premiering October 9, about 20 times now.

Titled “Detention,” the spot emerged at the beginning of August, and five other related teasers have come out since – but while all are sufficiently unsettling, “Detention” is a masterpiece of scary promo-making. And scary is not easy to do. As “AHS” itself has proven at times, the line between horror and unintentional comedy is awfully slim, and the creation of something that truly chills the bone is an artistic achievement worthy of further discussion.

First, another look:

The best horror genre entries don’t say or show too much, understanding that the viewer’s imagination is far more capable of scaring itself than anything that appears onscreen. With only 15 seconds to work with, “Detention” ignites the imagination with shocking effectiveness, giving the briefest glimpse of an almost maddeningly eerie scene before cutting out, leaving the viewer’s brain to pick up the pieces. Fear happens in that place where the brain is forced to struggle to make sense of something unknown.

But what gives a scene that quality? For “AHS” promos in general, FX tries to achieve it by twisting “what appears to be normal circumstances,” said John Varvi, SVP of on-air promotions at FX, “but not in a way that someone’s going to jump out and poke at you with a knife.”

In “Detention,” this subtle approach manifests first from the spot’s title. Detention, a punishment that involves sitting quietly in a boring room somewhere, is one of the most mundane/normal things that can happen to a kid. And the school-girls who appear in the above spot also seem like otherwise normal kids … except, of course for the fact they are floating in the air with their faces against the wall. But it’s important to note that they’re not screaming, or bleeding, or poking each other with knives.

“It’s not designed to be a roomful of super models,” said Varvi. “These are representative of school girls that go to school and end up in detention.”

In whatever world this strange detention exists is close enough to our own reality that our brains have no choice but to try and make sense of it. Thus, fear ensues.

Varvi said that the process of curating what details will be included in a spot like this “begins and ends with Ryan Murphy,” who drops by FX at the beginning of each summer with a “buffet of themes and plot points and characters and settings” for the coming season. Each new season of “AHS” is entirely different from the season before. When creating the first round of teasers, the promo team has “no talent and is lucky if we’ve seen the first script,” said Varvi. But they do have Murphy’s ideas, and he gives them interpretative flexibility.

Eventually, FX’s campaign for Season 3 will release more than 20 teasers. The early ones, such as “Detention,” and also “Staircase” (seen below), with no episodic footage or talent to work with, are almost entirely suggestive, adding to that feeling of the unknown, while also lending them a dreamlike quality that only makes them creepier. It helps, says Varvi, that the spots are real, and not the product of motion graphics. Both “Detention” and “Staircase” were shot on a set, and the women in both are actually hanging in the air from hidden cables.

In “Detention,” the rolling camera creates the illusion of sneaking past a room we shouldn’t be privy to, peeking in, while “Staircase” creates a montage of disorienting perspectives on the woman’s free-float to create subtle unease and tension. (For one extreme low angle, the FX team had to build a ceiling above the dangling woman so the shot would match the others.)

“Those aren’t still frames,” said Varvi. “She’s hanging there and it’s live action. What’s creepy is if it looks like a still frame, but your brain knows it’s not a still frame.”

What’s also creepy is the awareness that “Coven” is in reference to witchery, and that these images are depicting a deeply unsettling side of witchcraft many of us haven’t considered before. Here, as in all things, Varvi and his team simply “try and be representative of what ‘American Horror Story’ is in our marketing. We try to avoid hyperbole and we try to avoid promising things that aren’t there. The easiest thing to do is the truth.”

Note: In the most recently released “Coven” teaser, it appears that Varvi’s team finally got to use some show talent, including Angela Bassett, Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates. But while this spot is much more lavish than the earlier ones, it still benefits from the careful cultivation and pitch-perfect placement of details such as the witches floating above the front door and the weird half-man/half-bovine thing on the porch. Once can only hope the season itself is as strong as these promos are.

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