Let’s not waste time: Hysteria! is a show with its eyeliner on straight, its Walkman fully rewound, and its sacrificial dagger sharpened—but it still ends up fumbling the bloodstained ball somewhere between second base and the Ninth Circle of Hell. There’s a lot to admire here: a pitch-perfect setting, a killer cast, and a premise that’s begging to be possessed by greatness. But unfortunately, this one’s got a few too many devils in the details.

The show’s creative voice is Matthew Scott Kane, a relatively new name in showrunning but someone whose fingerprints (and perhaps goat hoof prints) are starting to appear across multiple horror-adjacent scripts. Hysteria! is his most ambitious and personal work to date, and it shows—especially in the show’s commitment to the 1989 setting and its exploration of small-town psychosis. He’s got guts and a clear love for ‘80s horror, but his storytelling instincts still need some demonic refinement.

Set in a sun-baked Midwestern town in the sweltering summer of 1989, Hysteria! kicks off with a bang—a satanic-looking murder of the local football golden boy that throws the entire town into a moral panic tailspin. Cue the townsfolk pointing fingers, the church pews filling up, and teens swapping Slayer tapes behind 7-Elevens. The show plays the Satanic Panic card with relish, reliving the absurdity and hysteria (hey, that’s the title!) of a period when parents were convinced their kids were one game of Dungeons & Dragons away from goat sacrifice.

It’s not subtle. But it’s definitely a vibe.

At its best, Hysteria! uses the Satanic Panic as a metaphor for moral scapegoating and generational hypocrisy. The adults in town are a parade of hysterics (pun very much intended), desperate to preserve order by projecting their failures onto the youth. Meanwhile, the teenagers—half of them genuinely messed up, the other half just LARPing in eyeliner—try to navigate a landscape that treats every zit-faced misfit like the spawn of Anton LaVey.

There are glimmers of something more interesting under the surface: repression, gender panic, the performative nature of suburban morality. But these ideas never quite coalesce into the sharp social satire the show sometimes hints at. It wants to be Heathers meets The Exorcist, but lands closer to Riverdale by way of Hot Topic.

Here’s where the ritual starts to fall apart. The first couple of episodes are rock solid—tight, eerie, and full of promise. But halfway through, the show develops what I’ll call “narrative necrosis.” The original plotline—a murder mystery wrapped in satanic lore—is abruptly sidelined in favor of a new arc involving a possible actual demonic presence. Yes, the show flips the script from social horror to literal supernatural shenanigans. And no, it’s not handled gracefully.

This bifurcation of tone is deadly. The twist is telegraphed a mile away, and instead of deepening the story, it dilutes it. It’s like watching a tight high-school drama suddenly sprout horns and start quoting the Necronomicon. Not necessarily a bad thing… if you commit. But Hysteria! hesitates. It wants the realism of True Detective and the lunacy of Stranger Things Season 4, and it ends up stuck in purgatory.

Credit where it’s due: Hysteria! looks phenomenal. The show is drenched in VHS grime and neon gloom. Director John Francis Daley (of Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) brings a slick, playful eye to the first few episodes. He’s clearly having fun staging classroom witch trials, cassette-tape rituals, and hallucination sequences with dutch angles and flickering fluorescents. The cinematography by Cort Fey (The Gift, True Blood) nails the retro suspense aesthetic.

If you squint, Hysteria! almost resembles a horror-tinged version of Stranger Things for people who wore too much black eyeliner in high school and didn’t grow out of it.

Julie Bowen (Totally Killer, An American Werewolf in Paris) is wildly fun as the repressed mom with a Joan Didion paperback in one hand and a crucifix in the other. Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead, obviously) chews scenery like it owes him rent—he’s the show’s chaotic spirit animal, even when the script doesn’t quite know what to do with him.

Anna Camp (True Blood) plays the local church lady turned Bible-thumping witch-hunter with a kind of zealot flair, while Garret Dillahunt (The Last House on the Left, The Road) does that Dillahunt thing where every line he delivers feels like a veiled threat. The teens are mostly solid, especially Chiara Aurelia (Fear Street 1978, Gerald’s Game) and Emjay Anthony (Krampus), who lend authenticity to roles that sometimes border on Breakfast Club cosplay.

Strengths:

• Killer cast, especially the older ensemble.
• Gorgeous retro cinematography.
• Sharp period details and cultural references.
• Some truly creepy moments in the early episodes.

Critiques:

• The plot structure collapses like a Jenga tower at a demon summoning.
• Thematic threads get tangled in supernatural spaghetti.
• The show doesn’t trust its audience to handle ambiguity—everything gets over-explained or undercut.

Hysteria! had the potential to be a genre-defining look at Satanic Panic through a modern horror lens. Instead, it’s a pretty entertaining mess—a stylish, occasionally brilliant, but ultimately incoherent blend of teen drama, conspiracy thriller, and light occult horror.

It’s a fun binge if you like your horror nostalgic and your social critique delivered with a wink and a whisper of brimstone. But if you’re looking for narrative consistency or emotional depth, you might feel a little… hexed. Fun, frustrating, and phantasmagorically uneven.​

TL;DR: Hysteria! wants to be Evil Dead meets Euphoria with a heavy dose of Reagan-era moral panic, but it ends up spinning its pentagram wheels. Great cast, killer vibes, and strong style—but it chokes on its own twisty ambitions.

Recommended if: You ever wore a Slayer shirt to church.

Not recommended if: You require your plot arcs to make basic narrative sense.

Creator: Matthew Scott Kane
Network: Peacock
Released October 18, 2024