ATLANTA — Back in the 1980s, America faced what was called the “satanic panic” when baseless conspiracy theories about satanic cults sowed fear and chaos around the country.
And this all happened without social media or the internet. Instead, paranoia spread via old-fashioned word-of-mouth. Peacock’s latest dramedy, “Hysteria!,” captures that craziness with the mysterious disappearance of a high school quarterback in a small Michigan town in the late 1980s and a seemingly normal teen who decides to use satanism to amp up his metal band’s popularity and gain favor with his gorgeous but very sketchy crush.
The show, which debuted Oct. 18 on Peacock, was filmed in metro Atlanta (including Conyers) with sets built out at Three Ring Studios in Covington.
Creator Matthew Scott Kane, 34, who grew up in suburban Detroit, said he came up with the idea in 2019 when he felt “this kind of frightening sense that facts and reality had stopped feeling secure and began feeling malleable. That freaked me out a little bit.”
This reminded him of the “satanic panic “ when people thought cartoons like Thundercats and the Smurfs were gateways to the occult and devil worship, when metal bands like Mötley Crüe and AC/DC were looked upon with suspicion.
“I wanted to tell this story when facts get bent,” Kane said. “What happens when people in a community start to proliferate fear. I also wanted this to be fun. Why not pay homage to John Hughes and ‘Evil Dead’ and video nasties and hair metal?”
Among the cast’s biggest names is Julie Bowen of “Modern Family” fame, who continues to play anxious but supportive mom extremely well. This time, though, her Linda Campbell is grappling with her son Dylan Campbell (Emjay Anthony), who dances with the dark side, while also wondering if she is actually becoming possessed by the devil.
Then there’s the show’s protagonist Tracy Whitehead, played with just the right level of suppressed anger by Anna Camp, who is best known for her comparably uptight Aubrey Posen in the “Pitch Perfect” films. Tracy is a religious mother who sees the town’s “satanic panic” as a way to build her own power. Her daughter is kidnapped in the opening scenes of the first episode and Tracy chooses to keep it under wraps instead of reporting it to the police.
“She knows the town thinks she’s kooky,” Camp said. “She has just one friend who comes to her meetings, but she’s still driven. She knows in her heart she’s doing God’s work. She’s there to save her community and her child and nothing is going to stop her.”
As Chief Dandridge, 66-year-old Bruce Campbell (“The Evil Dead,” “Burn Notice”) plays a character who is surprisingly empathetic and kind to the possibly satanic troublemaking teens while hostile to Tracy’s rabble-rousing, fear-mongering ways.
The three actors who play the “satanic” heavy metal band Deth Krunch — Chiara Aurelia (voice of reason Jordy), Kezii Curtis (wisecracking Spud) and Emjay Anthony (starry-eyed Dylan) — got to spend three weeks in “band camp” in Covington before shooting to learn their instruments and bond.
“I already knew how to drum,” said Curtis, “but I had to learn how to heavy metal drum. It’s a whole different set of rules. Way more intense. I can’t tell you how many charley horses I had while we were filming.”
“He pulled the whole band together,” said Anthony, who got to smash a prop guitar, too. He added: “The hardest part for me was playing the guitar” even more than the emotional arc of his character.
Aurelia, who got to sing, credited “tons of Auto-Tune.”
The show gives each of the kids enough airtime to build their backstories and why they decided to market their band as “satanic.”
“We dove into the psyche of each of our characters,” Curtis said. “We each had our own reasons.”
Campbell, the true veteran of the primary cast whose career goes back to the early 1980s with “The Evil Dead,” was happy to join “Hysteria!” for several reasons.
“These are my ‘Burn Notice’ and ‘Hercules’ buddies at Universal,” he said. “Though they’re all 25 years old over there and don’t remember who I am, I have an affinity to Universal. It’s a real company doing a real show and the writing was really good.”
The show title was not a deliberate ode to Def Leppard’s hit 1987 album and song. Kane said the name of the show directly addressed the “satanic panic” phenomenon and he only realized after the fact about the Def Leppard connection. “That was a happy accident,” he said.
