Hysteria!

Hysteria! is funny, loves heavy metal, and does up its 1980s setting well. But it’s also having a real good time keeping us on the back foot.

A fun, insightful, and occasionally scary coming-of-age horror series.

While the early episodes instill intrigue and build up the scares, Hysteria! loses steam as it progresses, succumbing to a generic narrative to explain its many mysteries (some of which don’t wrap up so satisfactorily). Still, don’t let that knock that stop you from wolfing down this fun spooky-season treat.

For the most part, “Hysteria!” threads multiple genres with tight precision; there’s classic horror in the supernatural elements, pieces of procedural and murder mystery DNA in the ongoing investigation, and a richly imagined teen drama tying it all together. .... The storytelling gets rockier toward the end.

It’s a mess, but it isn’t without audacity. That’s a calling card, if not necessarily a success.

So inaptly straight-faced that it casts Bruce Campbell as the chief of police and then denies him the opportunity to flex his action-comedy muscles, it’s a misguided nostalgia trip that never comes close to earning a devil-horn salute.

Ultimately, “Hysteria!” isn’t frightening enough to be a horror series, nor wacky enough to be funny. It loses its freshness and voice by ensuring the presence of every 1980s horror trope.

Julie Bowen (Modern Family) stars as the mom of a teenager (Dylan Campbell) who turns his heavy metal band into a Satanic group to gain popularity. Meanwhile, the entire town is obsessed by the fear of the occult, while some people actually seem to be possessed. This series moves slowly with more talk that thrills. And much of that centers around the teens and their typical high school issues. There's one impressive sequence of possession that ends the first episode, but after that, this series relies on the murder mystery to create interest. The supernatural angle never provides any scares, so this series quickly deteriorates into an examination of group panic with much more dialogue than thrills. (Eight 40-minute eps)