The origin story of “Hysteria!,” which arrives Friday on Peacock, goes back two decades to a Kiss and Aerosmith concert at Detroit’s Comerica Park that made a big impression on the show’s 34-year-old creator, Matthew Scott Kane.
It was the first concert ever for the teenage Kane, who was dazzled by the theatrical effects, “these guys spraying blood and spitting fire.” His dad bought him a Kiss T-shirt on the way out, which he proudly wore to school the next day in Ypsilanti, but his teacher told him he couldn’t enter her classroom with the shirt. “I asked her why, and her explanation was: ‘Well, do you know what that means? Do you know was Kiss means?’” She was referring to the debunked rumor that the name stood for Knights in Satan’s Service.
Kane was forced to change into a shirt from the lost-and-found pile and went home worried. “My mind is racing, like, ‘Am I in league with the devil because I think "Shout It Out Loud" is a cool song, or "Detroit Rock City," or whatever?'” He asked his father, who was sitting in his recliner reading the newspaper, whether the members of Kiss were satanists.
“He stares at me for a minute and he just goes, ‘Yeah, that’s bulls---,’” recalls Kane.
That anecdote fits right in with the narrative of “Hysteria!,” which is set during the1980s satanic panic, the real-life period when unsubstantiated allegations and conspiracy theories involving ritual satanic abuse spread like wildfire. With the yearning of an old John Hughes teenage comedy and the creepy twists of the Netflix sci-fi drama “Stranger Things,” “Hysteria!” (all eight episodes will be available starting Friday) unfolds in the fictional southeast Michigan town of Happy Hollow, a place described with a slogan on a grain silo that brags: “Great town. Even better people.”
In the first episode, a high school quarterback disappears at night, and a pentagram is discovered painted on a garage door. That's enough to send concerned adults spiraling into rumors that a satanic cult may be responsible. But for a young misfit named Dylan (Emjay Anthony), the events become an opportunity to promote the heavy-metal garage band he has formed with a couple of equally unpopular friends.
As Dylan tells his bandmates, cynical lead singer Jordy (Chiara Aurelia) and wisecracking drummer Spud,(Kezii Curtis): "We are the ones nobody notices. The goths. The burnouts. The nerds. It’s never going to be our time. So either we resign to our spot in obscurity or we create our own luck. And I don’t know about you guys, but I’m tired of being invisible.”
Some face paint, black nail polish and a song about the number 666 boost the band’s popularity. Soon, the members of Dethkrunch become the focus of a witch hunt led by an alarmist religious parent (Anna Camp, "Pitch Perfect"). And the odd events being investigated by the town’s police chief (metro Detroit's own Bruce Campbell) start menacing Dylan’s own levelheaded mom (Julie Bowen, "Modern Family"), who by the end of the first episode is grappling with supernatural forces that evoke the mood of ‘80s classics like “Poltergeist” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
It’s a grabby debut as a TV series creator for Kane, who not only conceived the show but also serves as its creative boss along with his co-showrunner, David A. Goodman. It’s also a chance to embed the story with nods to his hometown. The kickoff episode alone features an I-94 to Detroit freeway sign, a snippet of a Bob Seger song, signs for Jet’s Pizza, Leo’s Coney Island and Furs by Robert, along with the super-cool Pistons Bad Boys T-shirt that Dylan wears.
Although it was filmed in Georgia, “Hysteria!” visually resembles a small Michigan city like Ypsilanti, where Kane spent most of his younger years. “It was like I was telling them, ‘Hey, look at pictures of downtown Ypsilanti and just do that,’” says Kane of the production. He is speaking during a recent Zoom interview and wearing a sign of hometown pride, a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. “I’ve got about 20 different old English hats that I just cycle through on a day-to-day basis depending on the outfit. You caught me on a maroon day,” he jokes.
Hooked on pop culture
Growing up, Kane says, his family moved often for his father’s work as a store director for the Meijer grocery chain, living in Saginaw, Dayton and Cincinnati in Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky, before reaching Ypsilanti. Kane lived in the Eastern Michigan University campus town from 2000 to 2012 and says, “I consider that very much home.”
During those moves, Kane’s love of films and television was shaped by the things he brought along, “a lot of VHS tapes and comic books.” As he explains: “When I came home from preschool, I would watch Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ over and over and over again. I was very much in those (pop culture) trenches from age 4 or 5. That was always my wheelhouse. I just didn’t understand that they were jobs. I didn’t know that people actually made these things. I just thought they showed up at the movie theater or your rental store.”
As a student at Ypsi’s Lincoln High School, Kane became a huge fan of independent films of the ‘90s and directors like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith , Richard Linklater and Richard Rodriguez. He also loved the early films of Sam Raimi, the Oakland County native who revolutionized horror flicks with 1981’s “The Evil Dead” and went on to make mega-films like the “Spider-Man” trilogy starring Tobey Maguire.
Says Kane: “I’m 14 years old sitting in English class and asking my teacher how to format screenplays. And he has no idea what I’m talking about. … This was the career that I wanted to chase.”
Kane also was in a high school band as a teen, an experience that helped inspire much of the world of “Hysteria!” with its camaraderie and internal drama. “The amount of fights we had about how much money was in the band fund is so silly, looking back on it. It was always about $10,” he remembers.
Kane chose the University of Michigan for college because he felt it was the best place in the state to study film and TV. Indeed, U-M’s Department of Film, Television and Media has a list of alumni now working in the entertainment industry, including Craig Silverstein (executive producer of AMC’s “TURN: Washington’s Spies,” FX’s “The Old Man” and Disney+’s “Percy Jackson and the Olympians”) and Audra Sielaff (writer for the “One Day at a Time” reboot from Netflix and FX’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”).
While focusing on screenwriting, Kane made an impression on several faculty members, including Jim Burnstein, the director of U-M's screenwriting program who says via email that Kane’s success isn’t surprising.
“He was the type of young writer who you could tell pretty quickly had the talent to make it in Hollywood. However, talent alone isn’t what leads to success in the entertainment industry. It’s all about discipline and drive, which Matt had in spades. He also understood and fully embraced the rewrite process which is the very core of our screenwriting program at Michigan. It’s how you make a good script great.”
Kane cites two other faculty members who fostered his ambitions. He says lecturer Veerendra Prasad was “really the first person in that program to see something in one of my scripts and say you’re really on to something here.” Another lecturer, Oliver Thornton, led a class that required creating a TV show and writing the first episode for the final project. As Kane recalls, “I’m feeling like, 'Oh man, I didn’t think I did very well on this.' I picked it up on the last day of class. It had an A+ on it and (Thornton) said it was the only time he’d ever given an A+ in his life.”
Off to Hollywood
After graduating from U-M in 2012, Kane was ready to take three months off and basically rest. But professors like Burnstein didn’t let him linger. “They put me in touch with these people (in the entertainment industry) who would essentially say: 'You need to be here right now. You need to come to Los Angeles right now because if you give yourself three months after graduation, you might give yourself another three and another three and then never, ever come out here.' By July 2012, I was in a small apartment in Valley Village, California, trying to get ... started.”
Kane learned the ropes as a production assistant for the syndicated “Judge Joe Brown” and FX’s “American Horror Story,” an assistant production coordinator for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and a writer for the Freeform series “Stitcher.” But he always kept an eye on the bigger picture of developing his own project, which led to “Hysteria!”
”Conservatively, this script has been with me for five years, but really stretching it back, I think I wrote the teaser for this back in 2017," he says. After winning a screenwriting prize in a contest held by the U-M Entertainment Coalition and the U of M Club of Los Angeles, Kane’s “Hysteria!” script had a public reading with U-M alumni actors that helped him see his words brought to life. According to Kane, the script from that reading is about 90% of what actually is in the first episode.
The road to getting “Hysteria!” on TV took some unexpected turns. With “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” writers-directors Jonathan Goldstein (another U-M grad) and John Francis Daley (who starred in NBC’s “Freaks and Geeks”) and the Good Fear production company on board, the script drew competitive offers and wound up at a streaming service other than Peacock just as the COVID-19 pandemic was about to shut down the world.
Kane says he spent a year working virtually on the show only to have that network ultimately pass on it. A few years later, Peacock asked for another pitch, and “Hysteria!” earned a straight-to-series order. Then work was interrupted for a period by the writers and actors strikes.
“It’s so weird to say, (but) I didn’t feel like this show was real until we were shooting episode four,” says Kane. “We had a really smooth start and it’s been an endurance test ever since.”
Kane says he’s extremely proud of the final results of “Hysteria!” While praising the entire cast, he singles out landing Bruce Campbell — Sam Raimi’s Birmingham Groves High School buddy who went on to star in the “Evil Dead” franchise — to play the police chief as especially meaningful to him.
“Bruce is the tone of this show and to have him in the show helps it all make sense. … I was a Bruce Campbell freak growing up, and it’s such an honor to have him there kind of being the anchor for this show,” he says. “I think Bruce is a much, much more talented performer than he gets credit for, and I think he nails it in this show.”
"Hysteria!" has yet another serendipitous southeast Michigan connection. Jordan Vogt-Roberts, who grew up in Royal Oak and directed 2017’s “Kong: Skull Island,” is an executive producer of the series, and he directed episodes one and eight. Kane says that while talking to Vogt-Roberts about casting, he mentioned seeing Bruce Campbell’s screening of his 2007 horror comedy “My Name Is Bruce” at Royal Oak’s now-demolished Main Art Theater.
Vogt-Roberts “kind of took a minute and said, ‘Dude I was at that movie. I was there!'” says Kane.
Kane advises aspiring screenwriters to learn their craft, something that he has put long hours into perfecting. “I have a warehouse full of script breakdowns on my computer. I’ve broken down things as high art as ‘Whiplash’ and ‘The Social Network’ and then as, I will say, lowbrow — but I think they’re great — (as) ‘Fright Night,” ‘Re-Animator,’ ‘Evil Dead.’ (I've) broken down all of those stories to understand how do these pieces fit together and how do these stories get told effectively.”
Kane says he just saw “The Substance,” the new body horror film starring Demi Moore, and can’t wait to explore its methods. He is now at a place where he is creating new shows for screens, but he remains what he has been since his Midwest childhood: a dedicated fan.
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.
'Hysteria!'
All eight episodes arrive Friday on Peacock. Episodes will also air weekly at 10:30 p.m. Thursdays on USA.
Rated TV-MA
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Peacock's scary new series 'Hysteria!' pays tribute to creator's Michigan roots
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