If you have not seen “American Horror Story,” or “The Sentinel” but want to with an open mind–or just hate spoilers–read no further.

I have been watching the first season of Ryan Murphy’s and Brad Falchuk’s “American Horror Story” recently, and while I have been enjoying it–despite its tendency to be very emotionally overwrought–I have come to notice how (at least up the the sixth episode, which is all that I have seen so far) AHS is not only unoriginal but in many was a copy of Michael Winner’s superior 1977 film “The Sentinel.”

In “American Horror Story” we have a house that is treated as if it were alive (though other than characters referring to it this way, there has been no manifestation of this, unlike in a film like “Burnt Offerings,” where the house was–literally–alive, and fed on the deaths of its inhabitants) and the people that lived there having a tendency to die in generally unpleasant ways, and eventually made their way back.

“The Sentinel,” uses a similar concept, though the house itself is less important than the fact that it happens to be where the place where the entrance to Hell lies (I hate when that happens).

It’s seems different when it’s spelled out, though if you have seen both it and “American Horror Story,” not so much.

In both AHS and “The Sentinel” the residences in question are filled with the dead (as I mentioned earlier) but with a difference:  They are individuals that have committed certain crimes (generally of a violent nature) that puts them on their path to the fiery gates.

The pregnancy storyline introduced in “American Horror Story” doesn’t have a parallel in “The Sentinel” that I can recall, nor does it have an unfaithful husband, though those subplots are (so far, I emphasize) don’t seem to be as crucial as the point of a house where the inhabitants have committed acts that have doomed them to revisit the place of their worldly downfall.

I have not finished viewing AHS (though will soon), but in “The Sentinel” the dead returning had to do with an effort to drive a woman who had been appointed (cursed?) as the next Sentinel (the person who guarded against Satan attempting to enter our world) into killing herself, which would be a mortal sin and set Satan free.

I don’t know.  Perhaps the ‘rubber man’ from “American Horror Story” will move the series toward more marginal ground, though so far its unoriginality is startling.

Though I should mention that an important difference between the two is that Winner’s film has a young Christopher Walken, and there’s no way that you can copy that.