Review by C.J. Bunce
From Burn Notice to Psych, from The Librarians, to Ash vs Evil Dead and Lodge 49 to the new Peacock series Hysteria!, Bruce Campbell is batting a thousand as a TV actor. His latest series finds him as a good guy just trying to do his job, police chief in a small town and grandfather to the local high school’s popular girl. It’s the 1980s and the hysteria and Santanic panic paranoia of cults in small town America linked to rock music is at its zenith. So when a high school garage rock band decides to monopolize on said hysteria to get noticed, it may or may not be linked to the kidnapping of a local teen and murder of her boyfriend. Which makes for a perfect plot for Bruce Campbell to play the hero yet again. Fans of Campbell, coming of age high school stories like in Stranger Things, Orange County, and Boo, Bitch, and anyone wanting to revisit a production getting the 1980s just right won’t want to miss the eight episodes of Hysteria!, now streaming on Peacock.
“We got them from a public library, not a book bound in human flesh.” That’s a clever reference to the Necronomicon, the big bad prop from the Evil Dead franchise starring Bruce Campbell, who brings the street cred to this series. Billed as a horror series, it’s an even better coming of age story, but its achievement on both fronts is from its smart script, its casting, and its re-creation of a school and home life in Anytown, USA, in the 1980s (the fictional Happy Hollow, Michigan). It’s one of those stories that is much better than the marketing for the show–one of those you might call “better than it deserves to be.” Why not? The 1980s weren’t that long ago, so the real-life version of the kinds of ideas revisited in the film aren’t yet a part of distant memory.
Who doesn’t have some nostalgia for the 1980s? Hysteria! goes head-to-head with Stranger Things, but you can probably see each of these teen characters somewhere in your high school if you were around back then. That begins with the band mates. Emjay Anthony (Krampus, Tales from the Loop) plays Dylan, who plays guitar and sings–and drives the story. Chiara Aurelia (Agent Carter, Cruel Summer) plays Jordy, the long-time Goth singer and guitarist, and Kezii Curtis (Dolemite is My Name, Black-ish) plays Spud the drummer. You might call Dylan the Orange County kid of another decade. He’s earnest, while also a typical dumb teenager. He doesn’t consider that there may be real-life consequences and implications of how far perception and misperception can go in branding his band as a “Satan-worshipping cult band,” a play on what Gene Simmons was doing marketing the band KISS in the 1980s. Dylan tries this on a far more local scale to get noticed in his school and gain the attention of Judith, the granddaughter of Bruce Campbell’s police chief. Portrayed by Jessica Treska (Magnum PI, Criminal Minds), she looks like she was plucked out of Fast Times at Ridgemont High or a 1980s John Carpenter movie. What makes her different is she is a bit more layered than the typical attractive teen in this type of movie–and not in a good way. Yes, she is trying to find her own voice, and she wants to get out of town and get accepted at a college, but she also is quick to embrace joining a cult to get there. Maybe she’s the only evil one in the story. Dylan is in over his head.
Hysteria! reflects all that high school life-conflict-angsty world done right. Judith’s friends don’t like the band nerds until they embrace the perceived danger of the cult–really the idea that parents won’t like it so this suddenly means “cool rebellion” in their eyes (or at least for most of them). Suddenly Dylan is one of the cool kids, and even bully Cliff (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s Elijah Richardson) wants to be friends.
Creator-writer Matthew Scott Kane plays with drama, supernatural, and even comedy tropes. The humor amps up when the band, called Dethkrunch, brings in some unlikely students to pose as cult members in order for Dylan to convince Judith he’s the real deal–a cool kid with a dark side. The kids include a girl named Ingrid (Hereditary’s Milly Shapiro) who conveniently has a pet goat (named Cheerios)–Ingrid’s realistic kid dialogue makes her a standout.
Many coming of age stories would stop there. But Hysteria! strives to compete in the same territory as Stranger Things, which means the rules of the real world don’t always apply. Just as Dylan starts making up aspects of Dark Arts for band posters, his mom begins seeing a demon and getting a strange skin rash, which works its way onto many people in town, including the police chief. Is it real or just in her head, and how unreliable and tricksy is the director in what he’s putting on the screen? The visual effects and makeup for the demon elements (characters that may or may be real) are on par or better than in Stranger Things. Dylan’s mom is played by Julie Bowen (Totally Killer, Happy Gilmore) who gives the role all she’s got. She is a hairdresser, a mom, a wife, a typical neighbor of the 1980s. But what’s the supernatural element at play here? Is it really some kind of demonic possession? The director goes too far at times in portraying story elements to the viewer as real to the characters that might not be real in their story, which lands as confusing in the end. It’s not the tearing off of the mask at the end of a Scooby Doo episode, but not all aspects of the plot are tied up as they could have been. As the police deputy exclaims, this supernatural junk simply isn’t real, so something real-world is driving everything. The deputy is played by Warehouse 13’s Allison Scagliotti, whose rapport with Bruce Campbell is enough to warrant their own X-Files-esque spin-off, although she barely gets any screentime–another disappointment.
But wait–weren’t two teens kidnapped and one murdered? On the other side of town is Jordy’s ex-BFF Faith, played by Nikki Hahn (Magnum PI, American Horror Story). Faith managed to escape the two masked kidnappers before she saw who was behind it, a church reject deprogrammer called the Reverend, played by genre regular Garret Dillahunt. It turns out the Reverend had done this before, and it goes way back to secrets with Faith’s mom–Anna Camp (True Blood, Pitch Perfect, Mad Men, Creepshow) as Tracy Whitehead. Camp might have the best written role of the series. Manipulative and a con artist, she straddles the elements of playing a crazy religious fanatic who at times is a percolating victim ready to crack and an oppressive mother manipulated into harming her own daughter–and maybe she’s even a killer. As a TV villain, she’s vile–the preacher in Footloose if that were a horror movie. The violence doesn’t get as dark as the stuff of the original The Exorcist, The Omen, or Rosemary’s Baby or any popular horror flick of the 1970s or 1980s, but director Kane borrows enough so that the vibe has been sufficiently captured in a 2020s PG-13 style.
So how does it all come together? You’ll want to watch the series to find out. You’d never guess it from the marketing, but it delivers a wide range of genre goodness. Although its two story paths drive home the action in the finale, it unfortunately doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it delivers enough to make it a promising first season if more were on the way.
All eight episodes of Hysteria! are now streaming on Peacock.
