Interviews
Stars of Peacock’s “Hysteria!” Discuss Satanic Panic Origins and Forming a Heavy Metal Band [Interview]
Anna Camp’s devout Christian Tracy Whitehead is at the frontlines of stirring up a Satanic Panic frenzy in Peacock‘s coming-of-age thriller “Hysteria!” Her central targets? High school outcasts and close friends Dylan Campbell (Emjay Anthony), Jordy (Chiara Aurelia), and Spud (Kezii Curtis).
That the trio is part of a heavy metal band draws Tracy’s ire, setting the stage for paranoia, mistrust, and occult madness when they decide to lean into their Satanic reputation. That backfires when a series of bizarre kidnappings, murders, and supernatural events trace back to the friends. That Tracy has domestic woes with her own daughter, Faith (Nikki Hahn), will only further complicate the growing division between teens and grownups alike in the small Michigan town plagued by, well, hysteria.
Written and executive produced by Matthew Scott Kane (Stitchers) and David Goodman (The Orville), “Hysteria!” explores the dark era of Satanic Panic through a coming-of-age genre lens, blending drama, comedy, and horror. Tracy Whitehead serves as one of the central antagonists, one that bears the strongest resemblance to historical figures tied to Satanic Panic, but expect far more than meets the eye to Camp’s character.
“I didn’t really base her off of anyone specific,” Camp tells Bloody Disgusting. “I drew from a lot of things. There’s a little Tipper Gore in there, obviously. But a lot of it is in the script. With each script I got, I got to learn more about Tracy because she starts off pretty small, and then you get to see who she really is, what made her who she is today, and the trauma she experienced in her past. And as an actor playing the ‘villain,’ you don’t normally get to go back in time and see what made them the way that they are, why they are so driven, and why they are so ‘kooky’ or ‘crazy.’ This was a real gift to get to go back in time because I think it created a lot of empathy for me, the actress, to have for Tracy. It also hopefully creates empathy for the audience. And they can look at Tracy in a different light after they see one of the episodes in the season. It was really exciting to get to play that role; I think they wrote an incredible character.“
HYSTERIA! — “Die Young” Episode 102 — Pictured: Anna Camp as Tracy Whitehead — (Photo by: Daniel Delgado/PEACOCK)
Tracy may be the driving force behind the hysteria and turning the residents against each other, but she at least raised her daughter well. Faith is at the frontlines of the horror in the series premiere, and the traumatic event winds up irrevocably altering her relationship with her prickly mother. Moreover, Faith simply wants to experience normality, out from under her mother’s oppressive thumb.
Hahn explains, “Something that I couldn’t wait to explore and that I think is so relatable is that really, at the end of the day, she is just trying to be a normal teenager, which is, I think, something everybody can relate to. She’s finding her own individuality. It definitely was fun to explore her kind of stepping into high school and adolescence for the first time and to kind of play around with that since these are her first experiences, a prom or boyfriend, crushes. So that definitely was a lot of fun to have room to explore that.”
While Faith’s journey in trying to piece together what happened to her and stand up to her mother makes for a rewarding arch in itself, the beating heart of “Hysteria!” lies with the rock band navigating their newfound popularity/infamy, friendships, and identity.
Of the three, the band’s frontman, Dylan, makes for the most brash and driven by hormones. In sharing how Anthony, Aurelia, and Curtis formed the tight-knit relationship between characters, Anthony gives insight into his character. “We actually had a band camp,” Anthony says. “We flew out three weeks earlier than we started filming, and we learned our instruments because I already played the drums, but Chiara learned the bass, and then I learned the guitar. So, we definitely had a lot of time to practice. It was five hours a day for three weeks.”
HYSTERIA! — “The Satanic Panic” Episode 101 — Pictured: Emjay Anthony as Dylan Campbell — (Photo by: PEACOCK)
It wasn’t just band camp; the actors took improv, too. Anthony adds, “It was definitely interesting. We had the improv class, which was more than an improv class. We really dove into our characters. I remember we would read scenes, and we were just asked questions like, ‘What is your character feeling right here?’ This and that. So, that definitely helped me dive into the character a lot. But the best thing about Dylan is that he just loves guitar. So, I think that’s definitely a safe space. He’s not very sure about anything except for his music.”
Aurelia explains, “What’s interesting about this friend group dynamic is everyone’s relationships are different. Even though we’re all together all the time, my relationship with Kezzi’s character and my relationship with Emjay’s character and their relationships, to me, create this really interesting triangle. It was really fun to be able to bounce off of the boys and feel really comfortable with them. We became our own friends off set as well. So, getting to play with that and rely on each other, go to work, and get excited to hang out every day with your friends and feel really comfortable in a working environment, getting to play around and just have fun with these characters.”
As for her character, Jordy, Aurelia was drawn to the layered role. Jordy isn’t just your stereotypical goth girl but a take-charge type whose intelligence puts her on the cusp of solving some of the season’s biggest mysteries. She tells us, “For Jordy, growing up, there were a lot of different transitional periods. Between her relationship with Faith and not really feeling like she necessarily fits in with the cool kids at school and being judged by everyone, I think that she uses her looks and the way that she represents herself as a form of self-expression. Our showrunner, Matt, talked to me about how growing up, he felt like he related most to Jordy and that there was an element for him of that deadpan sarcasm, which was his coping mechanism. Obviously, he’s not the same as Jordy, but he used that deadpan sarcasm in his life, and that’s the way that he communicated with others.”
HYSTERIA! — “Can I Play With Madness?” Episode 103 — Pictured: (l-r) Emjay Anthony as Dylan Campbell, Chiara Aurelia as Jordy, Elijah Richardson as Cliff — (Photo by: Daniel Delgado/PEACOCK)
“I think there’s a bit of a disconnect between her and her family and her relationships,” Aurelia continues. “Even the fact that she needs to change and transform herself outside of her home in order to go to school, and there’s a part of her life that her parents will never understand; there’s a part of her life that her friends will never understand. But I feel like there’s so many layers beneath the surface, and there’s so much that she’s been through to get to where she is. Being able to fully have Spud and Dylan as her friends, whom she can rely on, are pretty much the only people in this world who truly know her. I think that’s her safe space. She chooses to go along with Dylan’s crazy plan because she adores him, wants to see this through, and wants him to be happy. But I think she knows the whole time that shit’s about to hit the fan.”
If Dylan is the more impulsive one to Jordy’s more reserved intellect, Spud often acts as the comic relief and peacekeeper when rifts emerge. Kezzi’s character may be prone to jokes and spouting conspiracy theories, but there’s a grounded intelligence that’s often overlooked by everyone around him. Kezzi agrees, “Yeah, between talking to Matt, our amazing showrunner, and our first episode director Jordan [Vogt-Roberts], it was really important that what Spud was saying was not exactly far-fetched. It was almost like what he was saying was outlandish, but there was some truth to it, and I carried that with me throughout the show. If I had to say some funny banter here, it would be in truth. So, it was just keeping, I don’t know, just a reality lens on the character at all times, just looking at things from all angles.”
HYSTERIA! — “Dance Macabre” Episode 104 — Pictured: (l-r) Kezii Curtis as Spud, Chiara Aurelia as Jordy (Photo by: Mark Hill/PEACOCK)
Of the three, Spud also shares the most scenes with Bruce Campbell, who plays the compassionate Chief Dandridge. “Bruce is the truth,” Kezzi says with a grin. “That’s the saying I have for him now. Emjay had said it earlier; he carries himself as a veteran because he is. He’s been on multiple sets. He knows how it’s supposed to go, but he’s also so approachable. It was really cool to be able to collab with him on scenes and be like, ‘Oh, I didn’t think about it like that. Did you think about it like that?’ So, I mean, for Bruce specifically, because I had the most scenes with him, it was honestly just like another fun day at work.”
All episodes of “Hysteria!” premiere on Friday, October 18, 2024.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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