On this season, we'll be covering our vehicles of hysteria, how pop culture and the media shape our psychology and society, and how our national mythologies manipulate the realities we share, and sometimes

the realities we don't.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

I want to play a game.

You have a date with Carrie.

They were making love while that young boy drowned.

Do you like scary movies?

What's your favorite scary movie?

It's 10 p.m. in a darkened rec room.

Your bikes long discarded. The moon smirking its way through the black sky.

Your blockbuster rental VHS fuzzing into focus, tracking lines rolling up the screen.

After three previews for three more horror movies you're now

desperate to see, your friends are drizzled across the furniture in creative positions,

acting tough enough to be completely unaffected by the apprehension. By 20 minutes in, however, the witty banter and boozy-stoned

sexy party scenes are disintegrating into jump scares and more and more sadistically innovative

death scenes. You start cutting glances at the uncurtained window on the other wall, its pitch-black

portal to the outside world, to a potential killer that could be watching you. A stretch of tension

brings two of your friends closer together, their sweaty hands touching tentatively on the

couch. Your most nervous friend sits wide-eyed and stiff, your least nervous friend laughing

brazenly at the campy gore. It's late by the time the movie ends, later than you're usually out, and suddenly

you're riding your bike home in the midnight air. You ride faster than normal. The world is

noticeably different, more dangerous, more fantastical, and any shadow can seem like a monster made just for you.

...