Peacock’s Hysteria! is a fun and exciting teen horror show perfect for the Halloween season. The show follows a small town in which a young boy named Dylan and his friends play in a heavy metal band. It’s the 1980s, and the “Satanic Panic” is at its height across the country, putting everybody in a stir. At the beginning of Hysteria! a jock from Dylan’s school named Ryan goes missing. What nobody knows is that he’s been picked up by a couple of men wearing odd masks that make them look almost alien-like. It’s Scream all over again. Also, Ryan was with a girl named Faith during this attack, and at first, it looks like she’s been killed, but she returns home all muddied and scared a few days later. However, she’s surprised to realize nobody actually thinks she’s been missing; they’ve just been thinking she’s sick. Plus, she’s not really a popular kid. Anyway, when Ryan goes missing, the whole town decides that it’s a Satanic cult that’s behind it. At the same time, Dylan sees that the word “Satanic” gets the whole school excited, and what better way to market his heavy metal band than by calling themselves “Satanic.” Obviously, this doesn’t go too well for him, so let’s get straight into everything important that happens in Hysteria!
Spoiler Alert
What Happened to Ryan?
To understand what happened to Ryan, we must first learn about Tracy. Tracy is Faith’s mom, a pious churchgoer who also has a church group in town. She’s diligent in the Lord’s work and a single mom who does everything she can to keep her daughter safe. As you can imagine, when children are restricted too much, they start to become rebellious. While Faith might want to be talking to boys and dating them, she hasn’t actually done anything. This is when rumors spread about her going “too far.” As if this isn’t hard enough on a teenage girl, Tracy learns from a fellow church mom that her daughter may not be a virgin anymore. This of course angers Tracy, but she goes so far as to believe Faith has an evil entity inside of her.
When Tracy was 17 years old, her parents sent her to a man whose alias was the Reverend, because she had been tempted to the dark side by a group of hippies. This is 1969, as you can imagine, and Tracy slept with a random hippie who gave her the freedom of marijuana. This made her family think she was pure evil because she literally “opened up herself” to a stranger. The Reverend then manipulated Tracy into believing she actually had the Devil inside her. Of course, this isn’t easy; he uses actual medication to make her vulnerable to his ideas, and eventually she becomes the Tracy that she is today.When Tracy learns about Faith letting go of her faith, she decides to send her to this reverend. So, it is he who gets her and her boyfriend kidnapped to be brainwashed. However, in the middle of trying to scare Ryan and turning him loose, the Reverend’s men don’t know that the boy is asthmatic, and he ends up dying after getting an attack while in their custody. The men leave Ryan in the middle of the forest.
Why Does Dylan Get In Trouble For Ryan’s Death?
Now Dylan and his friends Jordy and Spud start to gain popularity after pretending they’re a Satanic band. Specifically from the prettiest girl in school, Judith. Dylan’s had a crush on her for years now, and this is the perfect opportunity to make his move. What he doesn’t realize is that Judith is actually into the whole Satan thing, which will come to bite him in the back later. Jordy and Spud definitely see a problem with Dylan’s plan, but when they notice that people are actually interested in coming to see their band perform, they decide to go along with him. At the same time, another one of the jocks named Cliff bullies Dylan and knows that he’s faking. So, after the performance, he asks Dylan to sacrifice a cat in front of him and a bunch of the popular kids, including Judith. Instead, Dylan decides to carve out a pentagram on his palm (yikes) to prove that he takes orders only from “the one.”
Tracy and the Reverend then make an elaborate plan to use Dylan, Spud, and Jordy as scapegoats for their mistakes. Now that Dylan’s carved his hand, there’s obvious reason to believe that he could’ve actually sacrificed a boy for the sake of his band, no? Obviously not; he couldn’t even mess with a cat, never mind a boy, but anyway. The Reverend gets his men to plant a dead deer and make it seem like there’s actually something sinister going on in town. Spud’s the one who finds it and informs the police chief. The chief’s the only guy who believes the kids are innocent, but there’s only so much he can do by himself when the rest of the town believes that Dylan is responsible.
What Happens to Linda?
On the other hand, when Linda, Dylan’s mom, learns about his apparent devil worship, she finds a bloody t-shirt in his room. This is after she’s consumed a bunch of media about 17-year-olds turning into cult leaders. She doesn’t want to believe her son’s one of the “crazies,” but seeing how things are, she starts to believe there’s actually something lurking in the dark. On the night Dylan carves the pentagram in his hand, Linda gets thrown about the house and passes out after being tossed through the coffee table. I suppose this is when she starts to believe there’s actually something evil in her house and it’s trying to possess her. The town priest makes an interesting statement when Tracy confronts him sometime later. “Evil feeds on fear, and I wonder who was the one who spread fear in this town?” (Pardon my paraphrasing.).
At some point the whole town starts to get weird marks on their bodies, like blood clots, making it seem like they’re all going to get possessed. But Linda’s the one who actually gets possessed. Since the show is called Hysteria! we’ve got to clarify that she’s not actually got the devil inside of her; she’s just become so paranoid that she thinks there are two souls within her body, one good and one evil. She sees the evil one as the Devil himself. This gives Tracy the perfect opportunity to make it look like Dylan is actually responsible for Ryan’s death, but we’ll get to that in a bit. In the meantime, the chief finds one of the Reverend’s men and starts to investigate the case, which leads him to the man himself. This means he’s getting close to the truth, which is terrible for Tracy. Additionally, Faith seems to be coming to terms with what’s happened too, so Tracy’s like an island sinking into deep water, you know?
Jordy and Faith used to be friends at some point, but Tracy made Jordy’s parents think that Jordy was a witch. This pushed Jordy into becoming a recluse and hiding behind the personality of a porcupine. I guess the heavy makeup and the “dark aura” are a layer of protection, eh? Anyway, when Faith returns from the grasp of the Reverend, kind of unperturbed, she meets up with Jordy, and it seems they might go back to being friends, but Jordy reminds Faith that she never stood up for her in front of Tracy, and Jordy’s family was ruined because of that. But now, when Faith needs help, she goes to Jordy, hoping that she can expose the truth behind the Reverend. Faith had Ryan’s inhaler because he had dropped it when the kidnappers’ had arrived. Gilbert’s the guy who feels responsible for Ryan’s death, and in his guilt, he starts to drink and shows up at Tracy’s house on the night of the school dance. Faith’s been a rebel all this while and goes to the dance despite her mother saying no. She returns home just in time to see Gilbert attacking Tracy. In self-defense, or rather in defense of her mom, Faith smacks Gilbert on the head with a heavy object. It looks like he’s dead just as the Reverend and the other guy show up.
Tracy and the Reverend then blackmail Faith, saying they’ll tell the cops she killed Gilbert if she tells the police the truth. This is when she comes up with a plan to get Jordy to help her. Her mom sends her to plant the inhaler at Jordy’s and then gives an anonymous tip to the chief. The chief doesn’t find anything there because Faith still has it, and she tells the Reverend that she needs his help and he should initiate the process with her again. When he goes away, she plants the inhaler in a vent in the room she’s locked in. When the chief arrives, the Reverend is already getting ready to run away, even though Faith tells him that nobody knows where she is except her mom. The chief shows up and almost dies by the hand of the Reverend, but Faith saves the day, and the chief arrests the guy. But it’s not over yet, because, right at this moment, Tracy is doing an exorcism in front of the whole town in the church.
Does Linda Die?
Now, all the adults in town believe Dylan’s responsible for Ryan’s death, and all Tracy needs is for Linda to admit he’s a Satanist and she’d have planted the seed. I guess in reality, Tracy’s essentially becoming a cult leader herself in this process. She makes everyone trust her because she’s a person of God, and then, without any qualifications, she does an exorcism on a woman who simply needs help to remember who she really is. Tracy plants more fear in Linda’s mind during this exorcism, but Linda’s love for her son never gives way. Dylan’s also at this exorcism, but before Tracy can point fingers at him, Jordy and Spud show up, telling him everything that’s gone down so far. When Dylan tells everybody that Tracy is responsible for Ryan’s death, the adults don’t believe him, and the church ends up catching fire in the hysteria of things. Dylan’s the one who saves his mom and brings her back by reminding her how much he loves her. Jordy saves Tracy from the fire despite her hatred for the woman, proving who is actually good and who’s pure evil.
At the end of season 1, it seems everything is back to normal and Linda’s well and fine. On the other hand, the band’s officially back together, and there are no more cults but only real friends. Judith, on the other hand, is sent off to LA for trying to host a sex ritual in the middle of a pentagram, trying to bury Dylan alive (even if it’s for a few hours to teach him a lesson), and essentially trying to kill her ex-best friend Tonya. She’s definitely sus, but we’ll see where things go. Also, in the last scene of the show, we see a sinister hand and horns peek out of the door to Linda’s room. This could imply that a second season is possibly underway. Plus, we now know that Tracy is basically a leader for the town folk, and that could turn dramatic really quickly. You know what they say: people do crazy things when they’re afraid.
