Interviews
“Hysteria!” – Bruce Campbell Explains What Drew Him to Peacock’s New Horror Series [Interview]
Peacock‘s coming-of-age thriller series “Hysteria!” is set to tackle the era of Satanic Panic, with heavy metal and actual Satanism sowing generational division in a small conservative town in Michigan. And what’s Michigan horror without actor Bruce Campbell?
The actor guest stars as Chief Dandridge in the series, set to premiere all episodes on Friday, October 18, 2024.
“Hysteria!” follows a group of 1980s high school misfits as they exploit the growing hysteria around teen occult activity, written and executive produced by Matthew Scott Kane (Stitchers) and David Goodman (The Orville). Caught in the middle of the mounting tension between adults and teens is Campbell’s police chief.
Unlike his most iconic character, Ash Williams, Chief Dandridge prefers logic and science. Though he isn’t your typical small-town police chief. That’s because he treats the teens with respect and compassion, a far cry from the typical parents in suburban set ’80s horror.
In other words, Chief Dandridge is the precise type of ally you want on your side when hysteria takes root and begins to spread. It also means he’ll be spread thin when the terror turns physical and hard battle lines form.
HYSTERIA! — “Speaking in Tongues” Episode 105 — Pictured: (l-r) Nolan North as Gene, Julie Bowen as Linda, Bruce Campbell as Chief Dandridge — (Photo by: Mark Hill/Peacock)
“Bad. The answer’s bad,” Campbell tells Bloody Disgusting of what would happen to the town if Chief Dandridge fails to root out the source of the town’s Satanic Panic problem. “Very bad. It would be the worst. He has a line at one point during an episode of, ‘Well if this isn’t real, we’ll get through this. But if it is real, then there’s no going back to what you thought the town was.’ There are things that happen in society that you go, ‘Wow, things are going to be different from now on; big sociological events, big disasters, big terrorist attacks. So this is the case where, in this small town, is it real or is it not? That’s the key thing, and my character as the chief of police doesn’t believe it. He’s a cop. Show me the fingerprints. Show me the evidence. Where’s the blood mark? Whatever. They have their own criteria. That’s what’s interesting to me, is that now these people who are not equipped have to try and deal with something that seems increasingly real.”
The atypical characterization of Chief Dandridge is a large part of what drew Campbell to the role. He explains, “The words pitched themselves. I read scripts, and very quickly, I go, no or yes. It’s that simple now. You really can tell. You can smell a rat. Actors can smell a rat after a while. What got me was the way that they spoke. He was an adult. He was acting like an adult. A weird thing that I actually really enjoyed was that he was not disrespectful to the teenagers who were involved, one of which was his granddaughter. I like that approach. It makes him way more of a gray area. He’s not just a good cop, bad dude. Cops love being portrayed as a tough cop. Right? What about the compassionate cop? Everybody wants a tough judge, right? Could I have a fair judge? How about a fair judge? I liked him. He’s a pretty rational dude, and so I like following him through, and I get disturbed when things start happening to him.“
HYSTERIA! — “Die Young” Episode 102 — Pictured: (l-r) Emjay Anthony as Dylan, Bruce Campbell as Chief Dandridge — (Photo by: PEACOCK)
It also helps that the cast is stacked. “Hysteria!“ stars Emjay Anthony (Krampus), Chiara Aurelia (Fear Street: Part Two – 1978, Gerald’s Game), Kezii Curtis, Nikki Hahn, Garret Dillahunt (The Last House on the Left), Nolan North(Pretty Little Liars), Elijah Richardson, Milly Shapiro (Hereditary), Allison Scagliotti (Warehouse 13), Jessica Treska, Julie Bowen and Anna Camp.
On working with this impressive cast, Campbell cracks, “I love working with people who have collagen in their faces. It’s refreshing. They’re so young. You look into their faces; they’re lovely, and they’re glowing, these kids. But it’s delightful because they’re very talented, they’re incredibly good-looking, and they’re eager. They’re fun. They want to learn. There’s no cigarette smoking. I’ve been around since I was three, doing commercials for baby wipes. There’s nobody like that. They’re fresh faces, and they want to be there.“
“It helps the old geezers, too,“ Campbell continues, “Because we go, ‘Oh, that’s right. That’s right. I don’t have to be completely cynical about this process.‘ So it’s helpful. They’re fun to be around. Julie Bowen, when I pitched her to the studio, they were hesitant, and of course, I’m lying about all of that. No. Look, comedy’s her background. Comedy, horror, it’s actually a fine line. There’s a lot of darkness in comedy. She’s great in the show. She’s hilarious. She’s kind of who you want to do this to, right? Because she’s her own version of a Mary Tyler Moore. You know what I mean?”
With the series premiering this week and Campbell playing such a level-headed character in an increasingly nightmarish predicament, how worried should we be for Chief Dandridge’s pursuit of truth and peacekeeping?
“You better worry for him,“ Campbell warns.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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