Bruce Campbell has a formula when it comes to picking which roles he wants to pursue.

“As you get to be an old actor, all you care about is good writing,” the Hollywood icon, 66, exclusively told The Post. “Because as a young actor, you don’t even know what good writing is. You get the part, you’re so excited, and you’ll say any line of dialog that anybody writes. And as you get more experience, you start to identify what’s actually a well-written piece.”

When it came to starring in the new Peacock thriller “Hysteria!” which follows the “Satanic Panic” of the late 1980s, Campbell knew Chief Dandridge was a character he wanted to play.
 
“This one caught my attention because of how well-written it was,” he confessed. “And horror is a tough genre to get a fresh angle on. So, I thought they were pretty good. There’s not a lot of horror shows out. There are movies that have that kind of satanic panic as a base. So I thought they did a good job with it.”

Despite being involved in “Hysteria!” and the “Evil Dead” series, Campbell isn’t the biggest horror buff.

“I am not a huge fan of it myself,” he admitted. “But what I like is that it’s one of the few genres that gets a visceral reaction from the crowd. Someone watches a drama, they’re eating popcorn, their face isn’t changing – maybe a couple of tears. Horror movies, they’re jumping out of their seats. You want the popcorn to go airborne, you know?”

“Same with comedies,” continued Campbell. “So, comedies and horror are about the only ones where the audience really gets riled up. And as a presenter, actor, filmmaker, that’s what you want. You want to get the audience engaged. So that’s the fun of horror. And I’m also just glad horror is a little more mainstream now. When I started, horror was a little more taboo.”

“Hysteria!” brought back the gems of the ’80s, including big hair and Walkmans, but in 2024, the “Knots Landing” alum isn’t looking to revisit that decade.

“You can shove the ’80s as far as I’m concerned,” Campbell quipped. “I thought it was a pretty weird repressed decade. You can have the hairstyles. ‘70s were way better. Music in the ’70s was way better. Music in the ’60s was way better. People will argue with me all day long. I don’t care. That’s fine. It’s just your opinion.”

He added, “I thought the ’80s were kind of soulless. That was a big cocaine decade, too, and cocaine is a soulless drug. So it was a weird decade, lots of repression and then lots of rebellion, which may have led into this satanic panic. Whenever you have a very closed-in society, you’re going to have your rebels.”

Campbell also believes something else has changed for the better. “I realize now that TV is fundamentally different from what it was,” he said.

“My first TV was ‘Knots Landing’ in about ‘87, and it was not well photographed. They didn’t really care about quality,” he recalled. “They didn’t do more than one or two takes. So they were racing through it, and no one seemed to care. It was really a strange thing. I did one TV job, and then I didn’t do TV for five more years, and it’s really been cool to see how TV has improved, and it’s kind of where it’s at now.”

Campbell concluded, “It’s nice to see because TV used to be where actors went when their careers were over. You go to ‘Love Boat’ or ‘Falcon Crest’ back in those days. It’s nice to see TV in a good place.”

All eight episodes of “Hysteria!” drop Oct. 18 on Peacock.