There’s nothing worse when Halloween rolls around than prank calls. Teenagers get it in their head that it’s a great idea to spook their innocent neighbors by putting on a voice and making up trouble, especially when there’s already trouble about. When that trouble happens to be satanic panic? All bets are off, just as a new clip from Peacock’s horror series Hysteria! proves.
The clip features Bruce Campbell’s Chief Dandridge as he investigates the disappearance of a young high school football player, when he’s interrupted by one of his underlings. The officer describes what seems to be a decent tip — a patient escaped from a sanitarium after being locked up for killing his teenage sister — but it all goes downhill when the chief asks the doctor’s name. When the officer confirms it to be Loomis, it’s all a bust: the call was a prank, describing the plot of the horror classic Halloween. So much for honesty.
Set in the middle of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, Hysteria! follows a group of teens who use the local moral crisis to boost the popularity of their heavy metal band, completely unaware that they’re actually summoning very real dark forces. Pretending to be Satanists has awoken something beyond their understanding, threatening not just them, but everything they hold dear, and whipping up a leather-studded witch hunt that leads right back to their door.
Hysteria! stars Julie Bowen and Anna Camp in some truly impressively ugly ‘80s outfits, which the king of slashers himself Campbell features as a special guest star. The series also features Emjay Anthony, Milly Shapiro, Allison Scagliotti, and Nikki Hahn, as well as executive producers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, better known for their own foray into occult magic with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
The series is just one of many recent projects praying on our sense of nostalgia, as well as the idea of Satanic Panic. The Shudder hit Late Night With the Devil brought a very real terror to our screens, while Lisa Frankenstein embraced the chantilly lace and Aqua Net of the mid-’80s as it hacked up and last year’s Totally Killer also featured Bowen as a concerned mother in the midst of a killing frenzy.
All episodes of Hysteria! are available to stream now on Peacock, with new episodes premiering linearly on USA Network each week. Check out the clip below:
