For those about to rock, we rebuke you!
The very real nightmare of adolescence collides with a hellacious 40-year-old conspiracy theory in Hysteria!, Peacock‘s chilling dramedy that plays like My-So-Called Life meets the Salem Witch Trials. Set in a Midwestern suburb amid the late-‘80s “Satanic Panic” that had parents convinced hard rock was a force of evil, the chaos kicks off after a high-school football star goes missing.
Seizing on the town’s sudden paranoia about cult culture, teen outcast Dylan (Emjay Anthony) and his only pals (Chiara Aurelia, Kezii Curtis) make a play for popularity by adding a Satanic slant to their struggling heavy metal band. But instead of just drawing a crowd with their pentagrams and songs about the devil, they draw the suspicion of a no-nonsense cop (Bruce Campbell), a zealous church lady (Anna Camp), and Dylan’s freaked-out mom (Julie Bowen) who all begin to fear that the kids may not actually be alright… especially after even more occult-tinged crimes occur.
So it is worth the time? Hell yeah! The just-dropped series has an 86% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and we’ve already found at least five reasons you should add Hysteria! to your Halloween must-watch list.
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What’s past is prologue.
“A couple of years ago when I first started writing this and working on it, I think I was feeling the way a lot of other people were feeling,” says show creator Matthew Kane Brown of the “uneasiness” caused by the rise of alternative facts and fake news. “Things we used to consider facts and what we’d agreed upon as reality was now being challenged… Everyone’s reality started shifting just a little bit, and that didn’t sit well with me.”
Turns out, the shift eerily reflects the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, which Kane admits “is a much more fun and vibrant time to talk about all of these things than today. You get to sit back and enjoy heavy metal, horror movies, John Hughes stuff, all of that.”
Mark Hill / Peacock
“America’s Mom” gets nasty.
Far from her gig on Modern Family, Julie Bowen goes dark and demented after things in Happy Hollow take a horrifying turn. “We think she’s just a normal mom with a rebellious teenage son in the eighties, and by the end of the first episode, you realize that she is maybe completely out of her mind,” says Bowen of her Linda Campbell. “We are not sure what’s actually happening. She’s let in all these ideas about Satanism and the occult… Linda has lost the plot, and that’s what happens when you’re in a little information bubble in the ’80s.”
As her son Dylan finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into the worst high-school clique ever, Linda begins to show signs of being under some not-so-great influences as well.
Mark Hill / Peacock
Anna Camp is pitch-perfect.
Between the perfectly coiffed hair, buttoned-up attire, and Bible-backed dismissal of anyone not on a righteous path, Camp’s Tracey Whitehead is the quintessential suburban Puritan. But — plot twist! — she’s not entirely off-base with her rantings about demonic activity.
“The whole town kind of thinks of her as this kooky church lady, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface,” Camp agrees. Indeed, we learn several episodes in why Tracey is so sure that evil exists among us. “[We see] what’s driving Tracey to act the way she is and to do the things that she’s doing. And you get to see that she’s actually carrying a lot of shame, and she’s really used religion as this protective armor.”
Mark Hill / Peacock
Family drama can be scarier than Satan.
Midway through the first season, Tracey tries to have a come-to-Jesus moment with rebellious daughter Faith (a terrific Nikki Hahn), who is still recovering from a traumatic abduction that opens the series. In a taut dinner-table showdown, the two women lay it all out and forever alter their familial dynamic.
“That was a really big turning point [for] Faith, standing her ground and finding her individuality and using her voice and finally voicing these cracks in the foundation that she’s noticing,” says Hahn. “That was such a great scene to film and great writing. It is almost like a chess game and our director for that episode was wonderful.” Unfortunately, the fallout of their face-off inspires Tracey to act on her worst instincts, all in the name of “saving” her kid.
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Bruce Campbell kills it as the straight guy!
“Iconic” barely honors the man who has mastered the art of blood-soaked sarcasm and chronic insouciance, but here, the Evil Dead alum is playing quite possibly his most normal role ever. And he’s fantastic nay heroic as Happy Hollow’s logical and reliable Police Chief Bainbridge. So it makes sense that Campbell has the same take on the media-fueled hysteria that surrounded kids getting into heavy-metal music back in the day. “The problem is, they made the problems for themselves by doing that. I think a lot of kids did it out of rebellion,” he notes. “But I’ve been reading up on it all, and it took so many resources away from actual problems that kids were having. They were like, ‘No, no, no. We got to make sure the kid’s not possessed first!’”
So is Bruce a head-banger? Far from it. “It’s angry music,” he notes. “It is music that you think Satan would’ve written if he sat down on a lunch break and went, ‘I’m going to write a number-one hit.’ Like Katy Perry, but instead of Katy Perry, it’s Satan.”
Hysteria!, Available now, Peacock
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