Peacock’s Satanic Panic Pop-Horror Series

Satanic Panic is having a resurgence in pop culture (see: Eddie Munson in Stranger Things), but did it ever really leave? You can certainly feel its lingering effects whenever social media is weaponized to spread misinformation. Hysteria! creator Matthew Scott Kane aimed to infuse that spirit into his new Peacock series; it’s set in a small Michigan town circa 1989, as heavy metal-loving high school kids clash with their conservative parents. There’s also a supernatural mystery afoot, to the consternation of the local sheriff played by cult movie legend Bruce Campbell.

Ahead of Hysteria!‘s arrival just in time for a spooky-season binge, io9 talked to Kane and his fellow writer and executive producer David A. Goodwin to learn more about the show’s origins, intentions, riff-tastic soundtrack, and more.

Cheryl Eddy, io9: Satanic Panic “nostalgia” has popped up in recent years—it was a prominent theme on Stranger Things, and there was a documentary on its origins that came out last year, Satan Wants You. How does Hysteria! approach Satanic Panic in a way that brings something new to the conversation?

Matthew Scott Kane: I can’t speak to the documentary that came out … I tried to avoid all Satanic Panic-related media for the last year or so just to stay focused on the one I have in front of me. But I think really what we’re doing is we’re trying to make connections between then and now. When I first wrote this script back in 2019, there were a lot of anxieties on my mind that I think a lot of other people were feeling as well. Unfortunately, I think they’re still feeling them today, which is that there are a lot of ways right now for the truth to get mangled and disseminated, and for that dissemination to completely change a lot of people’s view of reality and what the world is around them. 

So I wanted to kind of take that outlook and perspective of what’s going on right now and in the last several years and apply it back to the Satanic Panic, when I felt like something very similar was happening. This is a time where some people genuinely believed that the Smurfs and He-Man and all sorts of cartoon characters were trying to lure your kids into some kind of secret Satanic underground. We did it this way because it’s a lot more fun to go back and look at this period and talk about heavy metal and John Hughes movies and Video Nasties and all that sort of stuff. But that to me is where I think we stand out from other stuff. 

David A. Goodman: I think that the core of the show—I came to the show after Matt had written the pilot, and what I really connected to and I think [how] it connects to Satanic Panic is this universality of a parent’s fear of what their kid is up to. Is my teenager going out into the night and getting into trouble? And the answer is yes. The fear of those parents, and how it manifests, ends up being something that’s not just [happening] during the Satanic Panic. Every generation goes through some version of this. And the Satanic Panic—there’s a bit of nostalgia for the ‘80s, the pre-internet age and pre-cell phones, and yet the world was changing. It ends up being a great way to experience that, and also add this level of horror and crime procedural and comedy.

io9: You mentioned heavy metal. Hysteria! was clearly made by people with a love of metal. What are your backgrounds in that department? Also, did you set out with a list of songs you knew you wanted to include on the soundtrack?

Kane: To answer your first question, what my background is with metal is being gifted a lot of ‘80s metal albums for Christmas over the course of my childhood. Iron Maiden and Metallica and all that kind of stuff was definitely something that was just sort of given to me from my dad and my brother as well—he was two years older than me, so he was always the one that was two steps ahead of me. I was in a band in high school, but it would be an embarrassment to call us metal. We weren’t even close. 

Getting to the music for the show, we had an incredible music supervisor named Jen Malone, who did the songs for Wednesday as well as Euphoria, as well as a number of other huge things. And a lot of what you hear on the show, I’d say about 75% of the songs were in the script … the idea was “We want to set this scene to this song for a reason.” And then the other 25% was a collaboration of, “We’re not sure what this moment needs.” Jen has a much deeper wealth of knowledge than either David or myself in terms of the music side of it. She could come in and give us buckets and buckets of great options for things that we never would have found. 

Goodman: I have no background in metal. I had never listened to it before starting to work on this show, although I was surprised to discover that I did like some metal songs. I didn’t even know that they were called metal. Matt gave me a real primer on what I needed to listen to, and I’ve grown to love it. It has so much depth. I think that’s the other piece of it that gets dismissed so easily as superficial and nasty and dangerous. There’s so much depth to the music, to the lyrics of these great bands who do this music. This has been an enormously expansive creative experience for me as I’ve been exposed to something that I had dismissed. So that’s been my experience on the show.

io9: Bruce Campbell plays a character that feels both totally suited to him, but also different than anything we’ve seen him do before—the level-headed town sheriff trying to roll with all the crazy stuff going on around him. How much of the role was tailored to Bruce once he came aboard? And is he the reason the show is set in Michigan? 

Kane: He’s not the reason the show is set in Michigan, but him being from Michigan helps the connection. So much of the crew and myself, I grew up in Southeast Michigan. I looked up to Bruce and Sam Raimi my entire high school career, and Bruce was sent the pilot script while we were casting. We had written the first four episodes or so, and we sent him the pilot script and he responded really well to it and signed on board. But then very, very quickly after Bruce signed on the writers’ strike hit, so we didn’t know how this role was going to fit Bruce. But miraculously—or it shouldn’t be miraculously, he’s an amazing actor—he came in and he hit it out of the park in the first four episodes. And then after that, it was really fun to write for Bruce Campbell now that we knew who we were writing for. It was a blast. He’s a legend for a reason. He came in and gave us a great performance. 

Goodman: Both Matt and I are such huge fans of his. I didn’t even quite believe it when the news came in that he was going to be in the show. And [he was] just such a pleasure to work with, a pleasure to write for, and [he] created a part that has a lot of levels to it. Genre actors, they have to do two jobs. They have to create their characters and then make them believable in a world that bends reality. And that’s his resume. 

Hysteria! arrives on Peacock October 18.

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