Hysteria!, a coming-of-age satanic panic drama thriller from writer Matthew Scott Kane, Dungeons & Dragons filmmakers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, and Chris Bender and Jake Weiner’s Good Fear, has received a straight-to-series order from Peacock. The drama, which focuses on the shocking tale of the teenage Satanic Panic to examine America’s dark history of mass hysteria.
In the 1980s, a moral panic known as the “satanic panic” emerged in the US. Allegations that outcasts of society were engaging in satanic rites, including cannibalism and human sacrifice, sparked a panic. Labeling items like Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal music as satanic recruitment tools was one aspect of the fear. In the most current Stranger Things season, the town’s belief that Eddie Munson’s Dungeons & Dragons club was actually a satanic cult served as a story hook for the satanic panic.
A gang of high school outcasts who start a heavy metal band are the subject of the television show Hysteria! The band aims to capitalise on the town’s widespread satanic hysteria when a classmate goes missing by creating a reputation as a Satanic metal band. But as the town is hit by further murders and kidnappings and becomes the focus of a witch hunt, the band ends up with more than they bargained for.
Accordingto Peacock, “When a beloved varsity quarterback disappears during the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the late 1980s, a struggling high school heavy metal band of outcasts realize they can capitalize on the town’s sudden interest in the occult by building a reputation as a Satanic metal band, until a bizarre series of murders, kidnappings, and reported ‘supernatural activity’ triggers a leather-studded witch hunt that leads directly back to them.”
