Interview: Hysteria! Showrunners Matthew Scott Kane and David A. Goodman

Hysteria! is Peacock’s original pop-horror thriller series Hysteria!, a tale of murders, kidnappings, and reported “supernatural activity” that triggers a small town’s witch hunt set during the “Satanic Panic” of the late 1980s. At New York Comic Con, The Geeky Waffle network producer Candace Kaw attended a roundtable with showrunners and executive producers Matthew Scott Kane and David A. Goodman.

Interviewer: What attracted you to the show?
David A. Goodman (Executive Producer): What attracted me was a great script. It is one of the best pilot scripts I've ever read. I've worked for over 30 years. I've worked for a long time as a writer and this was such an exciting project to get to be a part of. All of it was in that pilot script that Matt has developed.

Interviewer: How did you develop the show?

Matthew Scott Kane (Creator/Executive Producer): The short answer is that I really needed an agent. So, I started brainstorming what's a good script idea to do. And something that was on my mind at that time a lot in 2019  was the idea that we're kind of living in this post-factual age, like using social media and what we see on cable news and all of that stuff just seems like, you know, decades and decades ago you could trust. You can trust the news.

You can trust what you hear from your friends. You can trust these things. Now, everything is in question. And when lies kind of get disseminated as truth,  that starts to warp people's, you know, versions of reality. And suddenly, they're living in a world that other people are not. And that's a really scary idea.

That was going on in the world I was living in. And I very quickly connected that to the 80s and the Satanic Panic, what was going on back then, because it's not really that different, you know, you had people saying that Ozzy Osbourne, Smurfs, and Jason Voorhees were going to turn your kids into Satanists and kill you in your sleep and do all of those crazy things and that didn't happen. It wasn't true, but so many people got worked up into such a fervor over it that we, you know, people got incarcerated, bad things happened because of it, and it was all based on this unfounded fear of the occult. Just truly smoke without fire.

Interviewer: You play a lot with expectations of actors; Julia's playing the famous mom we know and love. And then you have Bruce, who is like the 80s horror guy. When you are playing against those types with a show like this, and you're kind of pushing your expectations of these actors, but for you both, what was the most fun of getting to see the actors in the show flex their muscles?

Matthew: Well, with Julie in episode one, you can kind of have your cake and eat it, too, because you still have a little bit of that understanding, fun, quirky mom at the dinner table. Then, as the episode goes on and as she gets pulled deeper and deeper into this thing, crazy stuff starts happening.

That final act of the first episode was my favorite moment with her; just because it was such an announcement of this is not going to be clear about me, we're not doing that again. We are going to be pushing her as a performer. Julie was so excited about doing stunts. She told us on many occasions she's very sturdy; she can take it.

nd you know, the same goes for Bruce, the same goes for Anna. We didn't ask anyone to give us a flavor of the thing they did before. And I think we cast people who we loved so much in those things that we wanted to allow them to do the exact opposite. In unexpected ways. And I think we did that.

Not just with those three, but I mean, we get it to Milly Shapiro, who plays Ingrid. She played one of the darkest characters I've ever seen in her Hereditary and comes in and is hilarious in the show.

Interviewer: You had incredible music in this show. Yes. What was the process of picking the right songs for each episode? And were there any songs you couldn't get? 

Matthew: So, I will start with the last question. We were not able to get Beth by Kiss. Apparently, the Knights in Satan’s Service have a very strict moral code.

They would not allow us to use that song in a very sweet scene. It was Dylan and Judith at the lockers talking about his nails. It's a very sweet, romantic beat. And, no, they said, "Under no circumstances will you allow you." They were the only band that did that.

Everyone else was so excited. We got everything we wanted. That was the one song.

Credit to our music supervisor, Jen Malone. She had to hunt people down to get the clearances for five different songs that anyone else doing this job would have just said, it's not worth it; pick something else. She went and got the exact right thing. She's the coolest person I've ever met. And it really made that soundtrack what it is.

Interviewer: If you found yourself in a horror franchise, which do you think you will most likely survive?

David: Jaws because I just won’t go into the water.  So I saw Jaws when it came out in 1975.. I was in Cape Cod with my family, I didn't go in the water for the rest of the vacation. And they're saying it's a pond! Sharks can't get in the pond!

Matthew: I think my answer is Leprechaun. One good kick he’s out of there.

The Geeky Waffle: Throughout the series its ambiguous on whether its supernatural or mental, if there's another season, will you explore that more? 

Matthew: We will continue to explore that if there's another season. With regards to not closing the door on it this year,  I think part of the statement we're trying to make is whether or not something is real, it doesn't matter in this context. It doesn't matter because there's such deep belief that it is, that if people are willing to believe it's in the world, that they're willing to will it into the world,  hen what's it matter if it's objectively real or just real, living rent free, or something like that. You know what I mean? 

Interviewer: How did you assemble such an all star cast with this many great people? Did you have them in mind when you were writing and was there anyone you could not get?

Matthew: No one we couldn’t get. We were so lucky to have gotten Julie on board at the beginning. Julie was the first adult actor to sign on. And I think that gave us some credibility, to have a two time Emmy Award winning actor leading this show. Now suddenly it goes from being this script by a relatively unknown writer, into the new Julie Bowen poem show.  And now suddenly, oh my god, Anna Camp is going to be in the show too. Bruce Campbell too?

David: Bruce was the last guy through the door. His character initially wasn't in the pilot. And we developed that character, Matt and I and the staff have developed that character. And so, in a certain way, it wasn't until we'd written the scripts that, I think Bruce could see, Oh, this is worthwhile. But he was last through the door. And that was a truly exciting moment. Yeah. We're such fans of his.