[This story contains mild spoilers from Peacock‘s Hysteria!]
For a project looking to quickly establish its horror bona fides, casting Bruce Campbell in a key role is a practically a cheat code.
Campbell has been an icon in the genre since Ash Williams first opened the book of the dead in 1981’s Evil Dead. His latest series, Peacock’s Hysteria! (whose full season premiered Friday), finds him again battling demons, but not in a chainsaw-attached-to-the-arm kind of way. Campbell plays Chief Dandridge, the head of police in a Michigan town gripped by a Satanic panic in the late 1980s — although the actual devil might also be lurking — and trying to solve a murder case that sets off the panic.
Although strange things keep happening, Dandridge (mostly) keeps a level head. It’s 180 degrees from Campbell’s best known role, but he says he was very much up for playing a voice of reason in the series.
“It’s a good place to be, because as a 66-year-old man, I don’t need to do the bug-eyed acting anymore, right? I should be the rational one,” Campbell tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s nice to have age-appropriate roles. I should be playing chiefs of police now, crooked politicians and prison wardens, things like that. It’s fun to step into those shoes, because I am a guy with experience, and it’s fun to play guys with experience.”
One thing Dandridge doesn’t quite know how to handle, however, is the spreading panic in the town after the high school quarterback goes missing and a pentagram is painted on his garage door. A high-school heavy metal band called Dethkrunch (played by Emjay Anthony, Chiara Aurelia and Kezii Curtis) decides to make a name for itself by rebranding as Satanists, which in turn leads to them forming a “cult” with some classmates that soon spirals out of their control.
One of the leaders of the cult is Dandridge’s granddaughter, Judith (Jessica Treska), which, not surprisingly, throws the chief for loop.
“I’m a grandfather [in real life] now, and if I found out my granddaughter was involved in some satanic ritual, I’d be like: OK, what the hell is happening!?” Campbell says. “I couldn’t imagine anything worse, and that’s why I think the Satanic panic caught on at that time period, because of how much fear it instilled in people. It’s a terrifying concept that some satanic influence can actually brainwash kids, make them do bad things. And the fact that whenever you say ‘Satan,’ that’s enough to like, just set people off. That instills fear in the hearts of people.”
Campbell also appreciates that Hysteria!, while a mix of comedy, high-school drama and horror, leans into the horror part as it builds toward its climax, which involves an attempted exorcism, a burning church and a suspenseful manhunt for his character.
“It gets kind of epic at the end, which is fun to see because it gives you hope that the studio behind it [Universal Studio Group’s UCP] likes it and wants to fund it and give it a proper send-off, because there are a lot of good shows that just don’t get seen,” he says. “I think they’re making every effort to really push this thing, and I give them credit for that. You can kind of smell it when you work on something. You can kind of tell where they spend their money and what they care about, and they’ve enhanced this show quite a bit since we started filming.
“I just think it’s a good, smart show, and it’ll keep you guessing and it is creepy as hell,” Campbell adds. “That’s the whole idea. Horror has become way more of an accepted genre. When I started, it was like, there was pornography, and then horror was right above porn. Now it’s just another genre. I give a lot of credit to shows like The Walking Dead for making it mainstream. This is just a cool, mainstream, creepy show.”
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Hysteria! is now streaming all episodes on Peacock.
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