The new Peacock TV series Hysteria! has an era-appropriate soundtrack. Set against the backdrop of the 1980s Satanic panic, Hysteria!‘s soundtrack naturally included the likes of Mötley Crüe, Black Sabbath, Def Leppard, Alice Cooper, and Judas Priest, but there’s also songs from Belinda Carlisle, New Kids on the Block, and Queen (of course “Psycho Killer” from Talking Heads also has a prominent appearance). Considering the time and place for the series, one shouldn’t be surprised to see any of those names, but you may have noticed some notable omissions.
Speaking with ComicBook in an interview for the series, we asked series creator Matthew Scott Kane about creating the soundtrack that lives in the show. Kane not only detailed how the songs all came together, with a major hat tip to the show’s music supervisor, but also revealed that none other than KISS wouldn’t allow their song to be used in the series.
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“So we had the world’s greatest music supervisor and a woman named Jen Malone, who you could throw her any track, any obscure or whatever, and she would go find it and slam dunk it for you,” Kane revealed. “I’m talking about like the Pixies cover two song from Eraserhead that has all kinds of legal red tape all over it. She got it for us. We have a song from a Swedish band called Father. Bathory, which that was a whole huge rights issue. The only thing that she couldn’t get for us and we all had a good laugh about it, was the song ‘Beth’ by KISS.”
He continued, “We could not get ‘Beth’ by KISS because there were, how do I say this? There were religious objections to using ‘Beth’ in our show. I did not know the Knights in Satan’s Service had such strict standards as to what what shows that their songs could appear on. But we respected their decision and moved on and had our composer create something that we think works for the moment better.”
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Hysteria! is described by Peacock as follows: “When a beloved varsity quarterback disappears during the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the late 1980s, Hysteria! follows a struggling high school heavy metal band of outcasts who realize that they can capitalize on the town’s sudden interest in the occult by building a reputation as a Satanic metal band. This is until a bizarre series of murders, kidnappings, and reported ‘supernatural activity’ triggers a leather-studded witch hunt that leads directly back to them.”
Hysteria! stars Julie Bowen (Modern Family), Anna Camp (Pitch Perfect), and Bruce Campbell (The Evil Dead, Army of Darkness), as well as Emjay Anthony, Chiara Aurelia, Kezii Curtis, and Nikki Hahn. All eight episodes of Hysteria! season 1 are now streaming on Peacock.