Patton Oswalt moved gingerly as he eased onto a sofa on the Brooklyn set of “The Heart, She Holler.” He was slowed, perhaps, by fatigue after a full morning of shooting this show, a Southern gothic horror-comedy. Or maybe it was the bloody rabbit’s foot sticking out of his chest.

“They told me to be alternately freaked out and amused by this,” he said, considering the appendage.

That bit of direction could extend to the whole of “The Heart, She Holler.” Entering its second season in Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup, this twisted soap opera spoof piles jokes upon jokes in the service of one of the most demented sagas on TV. Narrative pillars include incest, amputations, demonic possession and fratricidal plotting, all of it doused in cartoonish sprays of blood and viscera.

“We’re trying to soak the inside of people’s screens,” said Vernon Chatman, one of the creators of the show.

Oswalt added, “If you like fluids, you’ll like this new season.”

This comic and writer has lately been burnishing his acting bona fides in films like “Young Adult” and cable dramas like “Justified” and “The Newsroom.” Here he’s an idiot man-child and mayor in a Pete Rose mop and hideous teeth, clashing with the rest of the appalling Heartshe family in a struggle for control of the titular “holler” (backwoods parlance for “hollow”; the title’s word play lends a literary grandiosity to the gruesome proceedings.)

Other stars include Heather Lawless as Hambrosia Heartshe, a paranormally inclined “Carrie” stand-in, and the veteran comic actress Amy Sedaris as Hurshe (pronounced like the chocolate), a vile, promiscuous Heartshe sibling with terrible teeth of her own. (Sedaris replaces Kristen Schaal, who originated the role but was unavailable for the second season.)

After starting as a miniseries in 2011, “The Heart, She Holler” achieves a sort of manifest destiny when it will unfold over 20 consecutive weeknights that began Monday. The schedule, composed of the first six 15-minute episodes followed by 14 new ones, is intended to enhance the daytime drama parallels.

“If you watch a soap opera, you want to keep coming back to it,” said Mike Lazzo, the Cartoon Network executive in charge of Adult Swim. “This is a soap opera bent out of shape.”

The show, with its quasi-serial structure, is a bit of a departure in format, if not in tone, for the programming block. It’s silly, gory and scatological but in arch and inventive fashion, lampooning TV’s crassest indulgences by wallowing in them. In this, it continues the channel’s high-low, avant-trash tradition embodied by series like “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and “Eagleheart.”

“We’re interested in smart, stupid things,” Lazzo said.

The dialogue on “The Heart, She Holler” buries bathroom humor in mock-Southern prolixity, and the show’s best gags achieve a sort of poetic absurdity that is equal parts Dada and Looney Tunes.

The Heartshe patriarch, Hoss, appears almost exclusively via videotape within the show, and when he fires a pistol, the bullet blasts out of the television. In one inspired sequence from the first season, Hambrosia inadvertently uses her telekinetic powers to cut off a man’s hands, sending bloody geysers shooting from the stumps. The hands return from the grave to first haunt, then seduce her; Hambrosia’s husband (played by Joseph Sikora) comes home to find his wife enjoying cigarettes in bed with the ghost hands, which he shoots in a cuckolded rage.

“It’s really funny to finish a scene and to be eating lunch and then have the actors ask, ‘What was that all about?’” Chatman said. “And then when you actually have an answer, that’s what’s upsetting.”

There is almost always an answer — a well-considered one, even — despite the loopy, freewheeling sensibility. Everyone associated with “The Heart, She Holler,” from Lazzo on down, remarks on the clear, if ghastly, vision Chatman and his partner, John Lee, have for what Oswalt described as the show’s “red-state surrealism.”

The producers, both 40, each grew up on the West Coast — Chatman in Oregon, Lee in California — and first met as students at San Francisco State University. They jointly oversee the series along with Alyson Levy, Lee’s wife, write all of the scripts together and direct all of the episodes together; there is very little improvising on set.

“We are to blame” for what ends up on screen, Lee said.

“The Heart, She Holler” sprang from their desire to work with “actual humans,” Lee said, after dealing mostly with children and animated characters in previous efforts.

The partners, who in conversation don’t finish each other’s sentences so much as escalate one another’s tangents, also shared a fascination with what they perceive as the unsettling underbelly of corn-pone culture.

Chatman: “It’s supposed to be the most simple, down-home, folksy Americana, but there’s always this chilling, creepy side.”

Lee: “These quirky truisms you see at, like, a Cracker Barrel. It’s frightening. Have you been there?”

Chatman: “I mean, the biscuits are good. That’s basically what you can say about America, actually: The biscuits are good, but the horror, the horror.”