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Was the Set of Peacock's Hysteria! Cursed? Actors Recall Flickering Lamps, Black Cats & Holy Water
If you're gonna play around with Satanic cults, even in a fictional context, it doesn't hurt to have some holy water handy.
***WARNING! The following contains certain spoilers for Hysteria!***
Messing around with the occult, even in a fictional context, can be a very dangerous business, indeed.
For decades, actors and crew members working on supernatural-related horror projects have recounted eerie tales of unexplained occurrences throughout production. The most famous "cursed" set of them all, of course, was that of William Friedkin's The Exorcist, which basically created the demonic possession genre as we know it today. Hysteria!, the new Satanic Panic series streaming exclusively on Peacock, owes much to the 1973 classic, and may have even conjured the same sinister entities.
The set of Peacock's Hysteria! might have been cursed and/or haunted
"Oh my God, there were so many weird things!" declares cast member Anna Camp (Tracy Whitehead) during a Zoom interview with USA Insider. One such phenomenon involved a lamp on the Campbell family set, where Camp and Nikki Hahn (Faith Whitehead) would sometimes hang out when not filming their scenes. "We were talking and all the sudden, a lamp would start flickering," recalls the former. "We would go over to it and then it would stop. As soon as we walked away, it turned on again."
"I started asking it questions," chimes in Hahn. "I was trying to communicate with the night-light spirit. It was like, ‘Okay, blink if you’re here.’ It took a second, but then it blinked. We still don’t know if somebody was [messing with us]. I just believe that it was a ghost."
Camp, meanwhile, likes to think it "was a happy ghost from the ‘80s that wants our show to be a big hit." She and the spirit both got their wish: Hysteria! is currently among the Top 10 TV shows on Peacock and holds a fresh 75% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Hahn also believers her prom dress in Episode 4, "Dance Macabre," was possessed by a clumsy apparition, "because I kept spilling things and I’m not a spiller," she insists. "I kept spilling things on the prom dress and luckily, there were multiples. I was like, ‘I feel whoever owned this before’ — because it was true vintage — ‘maybe she spilled a lot.’ I had clumsy energy in that dress and in nothing else."
Elsewhere, a number of the young actors found themselves stalked by an influx of the most iconic bad omen of them all — black cats — loitering outside their apartments in the small Georgia town of Covington where the show was filmed. "I found a black cat at my door," remembers Chiara Aurelia (lead Dethkrunch vocalist and bass player Jordy). "I opened my door, and the black cat literally came running into my apartment the night before we started production."
"The black cat thing was kind of creepy," agrees Jessica Treska (the Satan-crazed Judith). "We would see black cats all the time in the most random places ... That definitely added to the paranoia we all felt filming this show."
But wait! There's more! According to Kezii Curtis (Dethkrunch drummer Spud), a truck carrying a number of period-specific cars was literally hit by a train before production began. "The car you see in the final product is the not the car I learned how to drive," he explains. "The [original] car was on a truck and the truck carrying the car got hit by a train."
"It got stuck on the train tracks," adds Emjay Anthony (Dethkrunch guitarist and ill-advised cult founder Dylan Campbell).
Aurelia sums it up best: "This show is haunted, but in the best way."
In an effort to arm himself against any malevolent forces that might be summoned by the filming of that sensual Satanic ritual in the high school bomb shelter (also part of Episode 4), Anthony purportedly sought out some heavy religious artillery. "I was definitely really nervous for that. Emjay and I both were," Treska says. "This was one of the scenes where we were dousing ourselves in holy water right before. Emjay had this little holy water from the Vatican that he brought [to set]."
While the steamy sequence forced Treska out of her personal "comfort zone," she ultimately decided to go through with it, "because I think it made sense in the show," the actress concludes. "It really did progress the story and took Judith’s character — and the way that she’s pursuing Satanism — to the extreme. I think it was necessary for the show to get to that place. And then obviously with Chief Dandridge [Bruce Campbell] coming in, that was hilarious to film; just to watch his reaction coming into that room because it felt so real. I felt so exposed ... it almost felt like we weren’t acting."
All eight episodes of Hysteria! debuted exclusively on Peacock Friday, October 18. In addition, Episodes will also air weekly, every Thursday night at 10:30 p.m. ET on USA Network.
