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    Brianne Howey Feels a Presence Through Her Bracelet

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    Brianne Howey has a supernatural connection with her late grandmother, who’s “come through” by way of mediums, and a one-time séance that used her grandmother’s bracelet to guide otherworldly energy into the room.The star of Netflix’s hit show “Ginny & Georgia,” currently in its third season and remains one of the network’s top 10 shows after two weeks, wears a gold serpentine heirloom most days. “It just makes me feel like I’m with my grandma,” she said of the transcendental link. In an interview, Ms. Howey reflected on the bracelet that is, as she put it, “a physical manifestation” of her memories and her love.This interview has been edited and condensed.How did this bracelet find its way to you?After my grandma passed in 2022, one of my aunts told me that she had left it for me with my name on it, on a Post-it with the bracelet. It’s so, so special to me.Did your grandma wear lots of other jewelry, or was this her main piece?Not that much, actually. She was kind of a minimalist. My grandma was a really practical woman. She had eight kids. She was a nurse, very Catholic, not a lot of bells and whistles. So that makes this even more sentimental. My grandma was also the kind of person who, anytime she lost something, she would whip out her St. Christopher beads. She had a lot of rosaries. That was more her jewelry. There would be a rosary around her neck, in every pocket, and she would know exactly who to pray to if you lost something, if you were sick, if I was nervous about a test, anything.Do you wear it every day?It’s like a wedding band, almost: I feel kind of naked without it on, and it’s so delicate and comfortable and it lays so flat, and it makes me feel so close to my grandma because my parents had me super young. I was really raised so much by my grandparents, so it’s just extra special.I have sort of a roller coaster of a past with my jewelry collection. Twice in my life I’ve been robbed. And all my jewelry got stolen. So I’ve sort of been rebuilding. But both times, my grandma’s bracelet, I’ve always had it. It never got stolen, so that’s why it’s extra sentimental.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘Hysteria!,’ ‘Stranger Things’ and the Satanic Panic That Never Goes Away

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      Five years ago, the television writer Matthew Scott Kane sold “Hysteria!,” a scripted drama that takes place in the late 1980s. The series was inspired in part by the tumult of misinformation he found online and in the media of the late 2010s. Shows like these take time to make, and Kane worried the idea would pass its best-by date.“I kept thinking, man, I don’t know if this is going to feel relevant,” he said in a recent interview.“Hysteria!” which premiered on Peacock on Oct. 18, is set in a small Michigan town in the grip of the so-called satanic panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, an episode of mass hysteria which imagined that a cross-country network of satanic cults was engaged in ritual abuse, animal sacrifice and infanticide. In the pilot, a high school football star is discovered dead. Suspicion turns to several of his classmates, members of a heavy metal band that exploits satanic imagery.The aesthetics of “Hysteria!” — the wallpaper, the jeans, the popular music — are distinctly ’80s. But the impulse to displace social anxieties onto perceived groups of outsiders is as American as apple pie. (Are those apples poisoned? Do they have razor blades inside?) And in a culture of heightened political rhetoric and pervasive misinformation, as apparent now as it was five years ago, the distance between the satanic panic and current conspiracy theories — QAnon, say, or the supposed grooming of children by queer people — is a short one, barely the length of a suburban lawn.Recent works of fiction — “Hysteria!”; the novel “Rainbow Black”; the fourth season of “Stranger Things”; the film “Late Night With the Devil” — all treat the satanic panic as a discrete historical event. But they also suggest how the panic’s concerns resonate in the present. As it turns out, Americans are still panicking. We may always be panicking.“Hysteria!,” a new Peacock show set during the satanic panic, features an attempted exorcism. Mark Hill/PeacockWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Devil on Trial’ Review: Whodunit? Satan?

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      This documentary revisits a 1981 homicide that the defense tried to attribute to demonic possession.It isn’t for me to say whether Arne Cheyenne Johnson really killed his landlord Alan Bono because he was possessed by a demon, as his lawyers tried to argue in a landmark 1981 trial in Connecticut known as the “devil made me do it” case. But on the basis of the spurious, crudely sensational documentary “The Devil on Trial,” it isn’t for the director, Christopher Holt, to say what really happened, either.The film strives to present a credible account of a disturbing story, which also involves the supposed possession of a young boy and an exorcism conducted under the guidance of the self-declared ghost hunters and demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren — events loosely depicted onscreen in “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It,” a fictionalized account.The story is that Johnson accidentally summoned the demon possessing the child to enter his own body, igniting the mayhem that followed.While the documentary’s opening credits insist that “all the audio recordings and photographs” used are real, the film appears to have little interest in the truth and even less in reportorial integrity.The photographs, which purport to show evidence of possession, have been so heavily filtered and processed that “real” seems misleading. The old, garbled audio recordings are not compelling testimony either, and the filmmakers know it: They’ve goosed them up with sound effects and dramatic theme music.Firsthand accounts of the events from Johnson and others are used as fodder for slick re-enactments, which is where Holt really goes to town: Houses shake, lights shudder and shadowy figures lurk mysteriously, all in the style of a third-rate horror movie. The desperation to be scary, rather than engaging or provocative, is an intellectual failure, and an artistic one — a failure of imagination. Instead of challenging assumptions, exploring implications or discussing the difficult questions here, Holt merely mines the material for superficial shock value and lurid titillation.The Devil on TrialRated TV-MA for disturbing imagery and violence. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More