Satanic Panic and a Possible Season 2

(This story contains major spoilers for the first season of Peacock's Hysteria!)

Hysteria! Creator Matthew Scott wrote the first script for the series in 2019. He had something to say about “the idea that facts and reality are up for debate” and feared that if it wasn't done relatively quickly, this underlying theme would become out of place.

It took five years Hysteria! to present it to viewers – but if anything, his idea of ​​how people perceive the world around them has become even more relevant.

“Everyone had their own version of the truth, and I was very uncomfortable with how that changed. “I wanted to tell a story that was on that scale,” says Kane The Hollywood Reporter. “I've been studying satanic panic for a long time and felt like these things were a natural way of talking about each other. That's why I wanted to make a satanic panic show that is an allegory for what we are going through at this moment. Unfortunately, not much seems to have changed since 2019 – we’re still in the thick of it.”

Hysteria! The focus is on teenagers Dylan (Emjay Anthony), Jordy (Chiara Aurelia) and Spud (Kezii Curtis), who are in a metal band called Dethkrunch. When the quarterback of their high school football team goes missing – and someone paints a pentagram on his garage door – they decide to take on a satanic trick for the band. It works too well. The band becomes increasingly popular, but the fake cult they form with the help of some outsiders soon proves to be a little too real. Like summoning the real Satan and revealing some very disturbing characteristics of Dylan's crush Judith (Jessica Treska) and some of the other cool kids at school.

The demonic aspect of the series hits hardest on Linda (Julie Bowen), Dylan's mother, who begins to sense and experience an evil presence around her.

“Is that her?” Bowen asks rhetorically. “We were each given a script, and every time I got a new one I thought: Is this really happening, or is this not happening? And I was never told. So I just played it as many times as Linda would feel confused, confused, and scared, because who the hell knows? I had to believe that Linda believed it was really some kind of obsession.”

As it turns out, the quarterback's disappearance and eventual death is set in motion by Tracy Whitehead (Anna Camp), a passionately religious woman who wants to scare her daughter Faith (Nikki Hahn) away from sex and hires a cult deprogrammer/criminal known as The Reverend (Garret Dillahunt) – who once drove her out of a hippie commune after she saw the devil during an LSD trip. Faith and the QB, Ryan Hudson (Brandon Butler), were having a make-out session, so the reverend's henchmen kidnapped him too, only to watch him die of an asthma attack.

The Reverend stages a cover-up that makes it appear as if Satanists have kidnapped and killed Ryan – and Tracy finds scapegoats in both Dethkrunch and Linda, whom she blames for allowing evil into her home to defile Dylan's soul , which further fuels panic in the city.

“Tracy is a very flawed person, and she begins the season by dedicating herself and serving God,” Camp says THR. “Later we learn that Tracy is also about saving herself and her daughter, and we see how selfish she can be – but most of all she is about saving her daughter. She doesn't want anything bad to ever happen to her, and no matter what the price is, she doesn't care. She will stop at nothing to protect her daughter, and in one episode she says she will let God decide whether what they do is right or wrong.”

Even as the police chief (Bruce Campbell) approaches the reverend, strange things continue to happen: the chief receives a call on a dead line, Linda's condition worsens, and the band members try to clear their names out of fear and panic – which manifests itself physically manifested as reddish-purple spots on people's skin – continues to spread.

“This is a story about people making bad decisions; “Teenagers make bad decisions and their parents make bad decisions, and that’s universal too,” says executive producer David A. Goodman. “(The show) adds that to everything that Matt brought to that first script. I only joined the project after Matt had written the pilot and everything was in place.”

Kane was born in 1990, a year later than the show takes place, but he has a vivid childhood memory of going to his first concert – Kiss – and wearing a band T-shirt to school the next day.

“My teacher wouldn't let me come to class wearing that shirt because, in her words, Kiss stood for 'Knights in Satan's Service,'” Kane recalls. “That was the first time it really opened my eyes to, 'Oh, people are actually afraid of this stuff that feels so harmless.' I mean he sings about his love gun and how he rocks and rolls all night long. This isn't evil stuff, but I think that was my first exposure to satanic panic, and that was the first time I think I felt the calling to become more involved in this world. It just seemed cooler and more interesting to me.”

Hysteria! It's never quite clear whether what's happening is just panic or whether Satan has actually taken hold (although the final shot of the season suggests the latter). Kane and Goodman say they would like to explore these ideas in a second season.

“Our goal would be to follow these characters,” says Kane. “We love Dethkrunch. We feel like they still have a long way to go. We believe Julie Bowen's character Linda, Anna Camp's character Tracy, and Bruce Campbell's Chief Dandridge have so much more to come. I think there are springboards they can jump from to have a great second, third and fourth seasons. ”

Goodman adds: “We have also created a family of characters played by these great actors, both children and adults. We don't want to walk away from them. Even though we push the characters to their limits and limitations in the finale, there are still plenty of places for them to go. This is the group we would like to continue with and we believe the audience will too.”

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Hysteria! is now streaming all episodes on Peacock.