DURING a seemingly normal night in the town of Happy Hollow, Faith Whitehead (Nikki Hahn) and her boyfriend Ryan Hudson (Brandon Butler) are attacked in her home and then kidnapped by men in white masks.
The following night, after reporting their son’s disappearance, Ryan’s parents find the symbol of a bloody pentagram painted on the exterior of their home.
With the rumours of potential cult activity spreading through the town, the members of local heavy metal band Dethkrunch, Dylan Campbell (Emjay Anthony), Jordy (Chiara Aurelia) and Spud (Kezii Curtis) decide to exploit the situation by rebranding themselves as a Satanic metal band.
Also exploiting the situation is Tracy (Anna Camp), Faith’s ultra conservative and religious mother who finally finds her constant Bible-thumping fear mongering justified as she starts a witch hunt against Dethkrunch.
Nuanced 80s hysteria
Set at the height of the Satanic panic that gripped America in the late 1980s, Hysteria! is quite effective at capturing how the mostly prude parents of that era were waterboarded with fears of their children “straying from the light” due to the explosion in pop culture involving rock and metal music, horror films and basically anything that was not pro-Jesus.
As much as making fun of overly religious Christians is very easy and a low-hanging fruit, Hysteria! goes about its criticism of them in a surprisingly mature way. Despite their apparent insanity, characters such as Tracy or Dylan’s mother Linda (Julie Bowen) are portrayed with nuance.
The former’s Bible-fuelled craze and fears come from her own trauma and there is empathy behind how it is portrayed and written. Even if the audience will not agree with Tracy’s actions, particularly against her own daughter, the series provides room to at least understand where it comes from.
Even Linda and characters such as the police chief Ben Dandridge (Bruce Campbell) are written to be relatable for parents who have to grapple with raising children who are acting out or rebelling as a retrospective for those of us who were once like the kids in the series.
Along with the character development, series creator Matthew Scott Kane also pulls off the background mystery involving the child kidnapping and the supernatural events that run in parallel to the main story involving Dethkrunch and Tracy.
Uneven in everything else
Though its writing is somewhat strong, the acting sometimes lags behind. On one hand, actors such as Bowen and Campbell naturally play their characters very well but then Hysteria! cuts to another character such as Tracy, who Camp plays with over-the-top and exaggerated acting. Even the young actors suffer from this whiplash.
That leads to a big problem with Hysteria! as it spins too many plates at once and can not decide what it wants to be. The tones often whiplash from comedy, horror, camp and serious before pivoting hard and fast to something else in every single episode.
Hysteria! is also obsessed with its needle drops, which range from rock to first wave black metal. Every five minutes or so, each scene transition becomes a cue to forcibly throw a rock or metal song in and more often than not, it is not about whether the song elevates the scene but rather whether the song title vaguely resembles what the scene is about.
These symptoms are largely due to how Peacock’s Hysteria! is the streamer’s obvious attempt at emulating the formula behind Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Based on how it ends, there may not be a second season but if Hysteria! gets a greenlight, Kane would benefit from giving the show a personality of its own.
