As Halloween season comes to a close, I want to give you one last look at the spooky stuff I’ve been watching in case you’re like me and your ideal Halloween night is spent with the lights off, hiding from trick-or-treaters, and watching something on your iPad with your headphones in.  But hey, I at least put a bowl out with some candy.  Well, I put a bowl out with a sign that says “Please take one” and everyone just assumes some kid dumped it into their sack before they got there.  It’s not very sporting, but what can you do? (I don’t actually do this; don’t do this, it’s not nice)

This probably won’t shock you, but I watch a lot of TV and movies, of all sorts of genres, and throughout the history of the medium. It’s to the point that, like rappers who can tell what their freestyle opponents are going to say before they finish their lines, I can usually tell what’s coming next.  I know the punchlines to jokes before they’re delivered, I usually have a good idea what the twists are going to be, so sometimes things just feel rote and predictable.  I value being surprised—which is different from being tricked, but that’s a topic for a different day.

The new Peacock original series Hysteria! is one of those surprising shows.  I settled in thinking it would be a fairly entertaining horror-comedy, something to akin to Totally Killer, Amazon’s retro time travel slasher comedy flick from 2023, in which Julie Bowen also stars.  But Hysteria! threw me for a loop.  I mean, it has Bruce Campbell in it, and four episodes in (halfway through the season), he seems to be the only character keeping his head on straight, which is not what you expect from a Bruce Campbell character.  I really appreciate that he’s playing against type here, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  The cast here is really good, with the more notable names like Campbell and Bowen giving way to the young actors and letting them showcase their performances.  But, I have to give a special shoutout to Nolan North as Bowen’s husband, the voice of Nathan Drake himself, the main character of my all time favorite video game series Uncharted and Allison Scagliotti, who played Claudia in Warehouse 13, a positively delightful sci-fi show whose time was, like many, far too short.

We start off as B horror movie as you can get.  It’s a small town called Happy Hollow in 1989 and two teens are getting hot and heavy while her mom is away and it does not take long before tragedy strikes.  Odd noises, an impending sense of doom; at first just, it was just that they were going to be caught by the girl’s pious mother, but then real fear sets in.  Two men in cloaks and masks burst through the door and drag the teens away.  Smash cut to the awkward Dylan at school, pining after the pretty, popular girl Judith, all the while ignored by everyone but his heavy metal bandmates.  Set firmly in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, Dylan decides to take advantage of the tragedy to create a hook for his band, because it’s all anyone can talk about now—you see, the missing boy, captain of the football team, of course, had a pentagram painted in red on his house.  So, he crafts new personas for himself and the band and leans into it.  Word of the concert spreads, the pretty, popular girl seems interested, and Dylan unwittingly puts himself at the center of mass panic.

And this is where things get precarious.  The first episode set up a fair amount of expectation for what was to come next, but I wasn’t hooked quite yet; I’d enjoyed what I’d seen, I had a few questions that needed answers—and you know how I love a mystery—so I was willing to stick around.  After all, shows need some time to gain their footing and while patience is much thinner these days than it used to be, I usually like to give a show three episodes if I think it has a chance of being good.  The pilot is a long one that does drag a little bit towards the end, as you blow past the usual 42 minute runtime of an hour long drama and to the full hour mark, there were many scenes that felt like the end of the episode, but then it kept going.  I wasn’t convinced yet, not fully, but I really wanted to know why all the news coverage was about the missing boy and not the missing girl and why the pentagram was painted on the boy’s house when they were taken from the girl’s home.  These are some of the questions that had me eager to watch the next episode.

The tone and focus change in the second episode, sort of eviscerating the expectations of it being a horror spoof, and while it still brings a few moments of levity and comic relief, the darkness at the center of the story starts to unfold.  I was so pleasantly surprised by how the show subtly diverted into a slightly more serious tone and started to thread its way through the different interconnected stories.  But what could easily feel like a JJ Abrams-esque mystery box that is going to present a great number of questions only to ignore or hand wave them away, Hysteria!, despite the comical punctuation in its name, presents itself as a serious show.  And by serious, I mean well-made, well thought out, and frankly, interestingly put together.  Rather than relying on big, dramatic reveals, Hysteria! metes out the information little by little, leaving you often learning something new about the mystery gripping the town and leaving you in the dark enough to remain in anticipation for what’s going to come next.  After four episodes, I’m pretty well hooked on this and I can’t wait to see if they can pull it off.

While Hysteria! doesn’t appear to have the depth or scares of Stranger Things, it’s hard not to draw parallels, especially with the fourth season, which relies heavily on Satanic Panic to scapegoat heavy metal fan Eddie Munson as the cause of the mysterious deaths in Hawkins.  Much like Eddie, Dylan becomes a bit of a pariah, but also a bit of a folk hero to the kids at school who have otherwise felt ignored—and that includes a surprisingly diverse cross section of the social scale.  However, Hysteria! doesn’t feel quite like it’s trying to be big, dumb fun, nor does it feel like it’s trying to be Stranger Things either.  It’s almost unfair to compare the two despite the surface level similarities, but it is inevitable.  Halfway in, the scares haven’t really ramped up—there are creepy rituals, a lot of metal music, a lot of makeup, and a lot of impassioned speeches about the lack of god in schools and community, given by Anna Camp’s suspicious-in-more-ways-than-one Tracy (you may remember her from Pitch Perfect, but to me she’ll always be Pam Beesly’s sister), but it doesn’t feel invested in making you jump out of your seat, which may disappoint diehard horror fans, but is just fine by me.  It feels like Hysteria! is building to something, perhaps a tale about the dangers of false narratives spreading like a virus, but it’s impossible to say just yet.  Because at the moment, it’s keeping me guessing as to where it’s going to go next.

Whether what’s happening in Happy Hollow is truly supernatural and demonic or just unreasonable fear gripping a panicked populace is yet to be seen.  But I’m definitely on board to see how it all pans out.