Satanic Panic Horror Series Hysteria! Makes an Ideal Halloween Binge

In the 1980s, as Reagan reigned and the liberation movements of the previous two decades waned, respectable society lost its collective mind. Rumors of satanic cults spreading across the country were amplified by TV news personalities like Geraldo Rivera and treated as serious threats by the FBI. Daycare providers got dragged into absurd, widely publicized court cases alleging ritualistic child abuse. Such innocuous forms of teenage rebellion as heavy metal fandom or Dungeons & Dragons could get a kid branded a cultist—if not a murderer. This yearslong wave of mass hysteria came to be known as the satanic panic. The witch hunt had no basis in real occult violence. And yet, as Hugh Downs noted in a silly 1985 20/20 segment called “The Devil Worshippers”: “there is no question that something is going on out there.”

What exactly that something turned out to be is the central preoccupation of Hysteria!, a fun, insightful, and occasionally scary coming-of-age horror series that premieres Oct. 18 on Peacock. Set in a small Michigan town called Happy Hollow—where, as one character puts it, “you’re either one or the other”—in the late ’80s, the story opens with a masked assailant bursting into a bedroom where two teens are about to hook up. As the quiet residential neighborhood slumbers, Faith (Nikki Hahn) and Ryan (Brandon Butler) fight for their lives like the horny kids in Halloween. While both vanish that night, only Ryan, a star quarterback, gets the breathless attention of the local news media. Rumor has it that satanists are to blame.

Several rungs down the Happy Hollow adolescent social ladder, three of the couple’s outcast peers struggle to attract an audience for their metal band, Dethkrunch. Frontwoman Jordy (Chiara Aurelia, a standout) conceals her loyalty and level-headedness behind a goth exterior. Spud (Kezii Curtis), the drummer, is the kind of chatty amateur cultural critic you meet in meta-horror movies like Scream. Guitarist and bandleader Dylan (Emjay Anthony), the closest character this ensemble show has to a protagonist, is especially desperate for attention. For him, the buzz around Ryan’s disappearance spurs a realization: “Him being missing for one day has gotten more attention than me being present for my entire life.” So, to capitalize on all the satanist chatter—and despite the fact that his own knowledge of the occult is limited to the Ozzy Osbourne song “Mr. Crowley”— Dylan starts promoting Dethkrunch as a real cult. Before he can reconsider this extremely bad idea, Judith (Jessica Treska), the Heathers-esque popular girl he’s crushed on for years, embraces the dark rebrand and sets about recruiting new members.

Thanks to her eerily persuasive iNFLuence, Dethkrunch is suddenly hanging out with jocks who might otherwise have scapegoated them, transforming their basement performances into campy spectacles. Dylan carves a pentagram into his hand to impress Judith. (It works.) But you don’t go around pretending to run a satanic cult in a town whose favorite son is missing under spooky circumstances without making some enemies. As word of the teens’ exploits spreads, the town’s police department (led by Evil Dead icon Bruce Campbell) and official clergy resist the panic. Yet Happy Hollow’s resident Jesus freak, Tracy Whitehead (Anna Camp, playing a character that calls back to her unhinged performance as True Blood holy roller Sarah Newlin), finally has terrified parents’ attention with her diatribes about Satan corrupting the youth. Meanwhile, Dylan’s mother, Linda (Modern Family matriarch Julie Bowen as you’ve never seen her before), keeps getting yanked out of reality, in increasingly alarming episodes. Is the stress of her darling son’s fearsome new reputation overwhelming her, or is something genuinely sinister happening?

While it’s rare, these days, to see TV that nimbly juggles teen and grown-up characters, Hysteria! strikes the right balance. Along with a show equipped to entertain the broadest of Halloween-loving audiences, creator Matthew Scott Kane’s (Stitchers) approach, reinforced by efficient use of a large cast and multiple storylines that rarely get tangled, yields a portrait of a community that is surprisingly nuanced for the horror genre. There are intergenerational rifts, former friends with unfinished Business, a cross section of characters who feel misunderstood or overlooked by the people around them. The series leads with a layer of referential humor, leaning on teen slasher-movie tropes, satanic panic lore, and familiar faces like Campbell, Camp, and Milly Shapiro, the unnerving girl from Hereditary. But it’s the perceptive, character-driven drama they’re grounded in that makes the comedy and the horror work.

About that horror: The retro aesthetic does keep the gory bits from being as inventive as they might otherwise have been. And once the true villains emerge, their backstory and motivations can feel a bit unsatisfying. More effective as a driver of spooky action is Kane’s reading of the satanic panic. If, in Downs’ words, “something” was really “going on out there” in Middle America, it was the contagion of misdirected fear—the same terror of youth and change and, above all, difference that has driven contemporary panics from QAnon to Marjorie Taylor Green tweeting that “they can control the weather.” (Who are “they”?) “Scared people do scary things,” Campbell’s Chief Dandridge advises Dylan as his neighbors grab their pitchforks. They sure do.