The Stranger Things 2 Autopsy, Part III - The Weird

"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing things certain things certain results will follow..."

-Aleister Crowley

Book VI: Liber O

"The gate. I opened it. I'm the monster."

-Eleven
Stranger Things, Episode 6, "The Monster"

"...I learned a terrible truth. If you investigate deeply enough, sometimes you become part of the conspiracy."

-The Reverend Ivan Stang of The Church of The SubGenius

The Big Book of Conspiracy Theories

"Who is Number 1?"

"You are, Number 6."

-The Prisoner

BEFORE WE BEGIN

I mentioned before that there were no conspiracy theories for me to mention in regards to Stranger Things 2 to entertain your brain in my last couple of blog posts. I was wrong, there are several. First of all, and I have to admit this was new to my mind, one of the themes I've found in reviewing the zany, crazy theories surrounding The Montauk Project is that the scientists working for the government there were trying to do something very important to our discussion: mass mind control.

Apparently the big chair scientists were placing disposable psychics in (study the original conspiracy theory if you need to catch up) had another purpose...to allow the psychic to control massive populations of people at once. This wasn't the original intent of the work, it is just that by the end of the project's run (according to conspiracy theorists and supposed whistleblowers) having a way to mass mind control a population using technology developed by scientists with a window into the future is kind of what happened.

An actual photo of Montauk at Long Island, New York.

From a government perspective, I could imagine how having a chair that allowed a single psychic to make an entire enemy military, or even nation, stand down in the event of a war is pretty amazing. You wouldn't have to kill anybody to win the war if you had such a weapon. Of course, only a fool believes that evil people working for the government wouldn't use mass mind control on their own population. Only a fool believes that the government isn't trying to control your mind, right now.

My personal problem with the concept of placing a psychic into a mind control chair to amplify his powers is...what if he mind controls the people working in the entire military facility? Or just the scientists in charge of the project? Seems like a great way to escape to me, like something Dr. Who would do...use incredibly powerful technology created by the bad guys against them to destroy their evil plans. So I just can't imagine that part of the theory being true, compared to summoning a rampaging id monster from deep inside a psychic's mind to destroy a military base from within, which is equally bonkers.

Inside the plot device, I mean, The Pandorica.

There are actually many, many other splendid theories regarding our government, and other government's, studies into people with paranormal powers. In one instance a scientific study conducted by Dr. J.B. Rhine back in 1941 centered upon a gambler he met who claimed to have an ability to mentally affect the tumble of the dice roll. After numerous experiments designed by Dr. Rhine to eliminate any mechanical bias, it was determined that the gambler could change the dice rolls using his mind. The chances of the man being able to affect these chances was determined to be about 10115 to 1.

https://www.urigeller.com/psychokinesis

In another instance, experiment after experiment has been conducted to figure out why a person can detect when another person is staring at them from behind. In 1989 two separate experiments were conducted on children in public schools, one in America and the other in Germany. In both instances children could detect being stared at 56.9% of the time, with some children able to individually detect being stared at from behind at an even higher rate. The probability of the children being able to do that by chance is 3 in 1,000,000.

https://www.sheldrake.org/research/sense-of-being-stared-at/the-sense-of-being-stared-at-experiments-in-schools

A recent document declassified by the CIA and released to the general public reported that China has been studying super powers in humans for decades. “Chronology of Recent Interest in Exceptional Functions of The Human Body in the People’s Republic of China” makes it clear that people can perform incredible feats such as psychokinesis, clairvoyance and telepathy. According to the report the Chinese military have been working on repeating these feats since 1984.

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000400300011-9

Another declassified document released under the Freedom of Information Act reported that the Air Force figured out that people can both teleport, and teleport objects at will, decades ago.

https://fas.org/sgp/eprint/teleport.pdf

Another CIA document reports that back in the 80's our own government conducted studies to determine how and why some people, including children, had the ability to see small objects in containers with their mind, and somehow move these objects through space and physical barriers. The CIA even created a film to record these miracles being performed. Why isn't that on YouTube?

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000300390001-2

THE BEGINNING AGAIN

It all started in Stranger Things, when Eleven was asked to make contact with the Demogorgon. Where did it come from? From the Upside Down, the infinite blackness that seems to exist in her mind. What happened when Eleven made contact with the Demogorgon? It turned around, roared, Eleven screamed, and a rift opened up between this world and a nasty, horrible place called The Vale of Shadows.

Two heads...one for Eleven, one for The Monster.

Eleven and The Monster escaped. When The Monster followed Will, it took him into the Vale of Shadows while Eleven appeared in the real world. Will hid from The Monster for a while but it eventually found him, and he ended up unconscious with a strange, animal tube stuck in his mouth. The Sheriff took the tube out of his mouth and got Will back to our world.

After The Monster was banished Eleven ended up in The Vale of Shadows, but later escaped back into our world. Will came back, but he started to barf up little slugs that went down the sink and became Pollywogs. These slugs were similar to the slugs that came out of Barb's dead body in The Vale of Shadows. These slugs seemed to be able to teleport back into the other world, even in their larval state, which makes sense when you think about what The Monster could do instinctively.

An obvious Alien reference.

DEMOGORGON, POLLYWOGS, THE ROT, THE THESSALHYDRA & WILL

At the beginning of Stranger Things 2 the problems left over from the first section are haunting the next section of the series. The Pollywogs Will is coughing up escape from the sewer and begin to burrow into the earth around the town, eating animals for their blood and leaving behind a waste that rots and corrupts the soil, causing plant death and leaving behind strange, seemingly biological tunnels rife with fleshy tendrils and nasty fungal plant life that sprays poison and seems to be a bridge between The Vale of Shadows and this world.

The rot and corruption seems to form a dark cloud that Will can only see everyone later calls The Thassalhydra. It possesses Will (because it is biologically related to him since the entity came from the waste the Pollywogs left after he coughed them up) and slowly starts to turn him into Something Else. Fire eventually drives it out of Will while Eleven simultaneously closes the portal into The Vale of Shadows where all of these nasty things come from.

Notice how the Thassalhydra resembles weather...a cloud without rain.

Eleven has her own problems. She escaped from one bad place where she was imprisoned by a dubious father figure. Now she's in a cabin, seemingly held hostage by the Sheriff, a dubious father figure. I don't think Eleven had the supernatural power, or psychic self-awareness, to close the portal at the beginning of the second season. She had to go through an epiphany, a series of enlightening events, before she could do so.

At the end the portal is closed, Will is saved, Hawkins Energy closes and all seems well. Except that Will can still sense the Thassalhydra, still able to perceive our world from the next, probably because while the Pollywogs are dead and burned, the rot is still in the land. The tunnels are still there, forming portals into the next world. The invasion is not over because there is still another connection, causing the problem.

This seemingly simple story belies a massive amount of supernatural and cinematic references connecting the work to a long series of similar works that reveal a profound, deep connecting mythology that exists in horror, sci-fi and other sources from decades ago. Art in film does that. It ain't literature unless it is somehow connected to something else from somewhere else, including mythology, featuring a bildungsroman about growing up enough to appreciate your own power so you can defeat evil in the world around you, which is what Eleven had to do before she closed the portal. She probably could not have just pulled it off in the first episode of season two.

If Will was The Mind Flayer did he mentally blast Eleven?

I have a question...what would have happened to Will if he had continued to become possessed? Since he would have basically been a vassal for the Thessalhydra (in the same way that the little girl in The Exorcist is a vassal for the demon Pazzuzu), what would have been his purpose, then? Perhaps he would have been like The Yellow King, another Lovecraftian, Antichrist, Harbinger of Cthulhoid Doom type character. By the way, Prince of Darkness features possessed characters, too. So does Ghostbusters. 

He'd predict a horrible future for everyone, and then start doing everything he could to make the tear in reality Eleven fixed worse. His job would be to help the other evil dimension (what the kids call The Vale of Shadows) invade, probably using the leftover rotting tunnels in the earth to do it. This is, of course, my prediction regarding one of the characters in Season 3. We've already seen someone nearly possessed. Next we shall see someone absolutely possessed. Remember, the rot is still there, the tunnels remain, and the Sheriff sure got a big blast in the face from something Not of This World. Will the Thessaldydra attempt to control him, next?

I must admit at this point that I don't quite understand the relationship between the Demogorgon in Stranger Things and The Vale of Shadows, including the denizens that dwell there like the tentacles, the slugs and The Thassalhydra. Maybe the Demogorgon is the Thassalhydra, leftover from when Eleven blew it to bits. The fact is we never see another Demogorgon in Stranger Things 2. We still don't know where the tentacles come from. We do know that Barb got taken, and ended up with slugs coming out of her mouth. Will got taken, and ended up with slugs coming out of his mouth. 

Where did the tubes come from? Probably The Thassalhydra, since that is exactly what the creature of the same name does in Dungeons & Dragons. I'm beginning to think that Eleven's monster was totally new, and it was as alien to The Vale of Shadows as it was to our world since it came from The Upside Down in Eleven's mind. Why do some people end up being eggs when The Demogorgon gets them (like the Russian spy in the first season) while some people end up with tubes in their mouth, or a dead corpse with slugs coming out of them? Weird.

A doorway to another evil dimension (whether it's Hell or the antimatter universe discussed in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness) that is going to open up and release demons/zombies/etc. in order to kick our dimension's ass is a common theme in horror films going back through the decades, so of course that is a theme in Stranger Things. The 90's horror science fiction film Event Horizon featured a stranger Hell dimension mirror universe that corrupted and drove insane the dumb humans from our dimension that ended up there, although it wasn't trying to invade our own dimension. It did, however, feature a possessed character, similar to Will.

Next time I'm going to focus on Eleven, her mental journey, and how coming to terms with her own darkness through personal visions is actually a big part of 80's film psychology. Why was Will called The Mind Flayer? Who is Kali? Who is King Mob? What is Barbelith? We'll find out more in Part IV!

The Monster in Stranger Things, Part IV - The Weird

I am sorry I took so long. Halloween is always very busy for me, and by the time I was done, there was no time to post anything on my humble website because I had to make money doing freelance writing, the moonlight was in my eyes, and I had to see a man about a hearse. Here is more information to back up my awesome theory. 

This is Part IV of an exploration into the nature of Demogorgon (or The Monster, as I prefer to call it) in the Netflix sci-fi/horror masterpiece, Stranger Things. You can read Part I here, Part II here and Part III over here. Spoiler alerts will follow, as usual. 

(HELL)O AGAIN

I dropped da bomb regarding my theory several weeks ago. Instead of debating with people who do not believe my theory, it has been more enlightening to read the ideas of others and see if their ideas were more bullet-proof than what I came up with. So far I am quite pleased. In discussing their own ideas, nobody has dived into the conspiracy theories that make up the mythology of Stranger Things, which is very important to the work, in order to explain what The Monster is. 

I’d like to apologize if I mislead anyone into thinking that The Monster in Stranger Things is Eleven’s alter ego. It is not. I referenced other films that dealt with similar themes regarding spontaneously appearing imaginary beings in order to show that the Netflix series was dealing with material that actually had roots in previous film and literature. Now I am going to talk about a few more films, and then I am going to dive into the conspiracy theories that make up The Monster.

That being said, throughout the first episode X-Men #134 is mentioned a lot. In this comic, Phoenix, a female character with awesome psychic powers (including telekinesis) has a dramatic personality change (mind control is involved, of course) and becomes an alter ego, Dark Phoenix, turning evil. The Duffer Brothers would not have mentioned this comic without a good reason.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

The Duffer Brothers did not just reference other films when they were creating the series. They also referenced conspiracy theories on the Internet. Sure, the cinematography, subject matter and other themes draw from serious literary and film influences, but the writing goes beyond that to fulfill its objective. The Internet is a gigantic library of logic and instinct, magik and science, business and entertainment. While wacky conspiracy theories make up much of Stranger Things, so does quantum physics, forbidden science and black magik.

RANDOM CHAOS

The fantastic yet horrific story the Duffer brothers told to entertain us did not include a creature that had no rules whatsoever. If it did, the audience would notice and the story would suffer. Most horror films deal with adversaries that have supernatural origins. However, the supernatural elements still follow guidelines, either because a proper authority tells us the rules, or because the monster in question is based on some cultural mythology that has rules we already understand since we are familiar with the legend, thanks to previous sources. Werewolves can be killed by silver bullets. Vampires can be killed by stakes through the heart. You know the drill, once reminded.

THE RING

The Ring is a horror film about a little girl who dies, becoming a ghost that kills people. In life she expired because her parents dumped the little girl into a well, leaving her to die. Now, anyone who doesn’t share the videotape of her insane, macabre mental images is doomed to be killed by her avenging, somewhat digital image. The bodies seem to be dead because of a heart attack induced by fear. This makes sense. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House features a similar series of circumstances. In The Ring, you have to share the videotape, or you will die. Think about it. The little girl was ignored. Now everyone has to pay attention to her, or they die. Too bad the whole world abandoned VHS for DVD a long time ago.

THE GRUDGE

In The Grudge, a father killed his wife, his child and a cat in his house, somewhere in Japan, right before he committed suicide. Because of this, anyone who enters the former docile of the murdered, doomed family is under a curse. No matter where they go the person sees images of the family until they are killed by the angry ghosts, usually because they have lethal heart attacks induced by fear. While the haunting that kills people seems to have random elements, there is still a pattern by which the narrative is still infused with drama. People walk into the house where the murders occurred. They see something horrible. Bad stuff happens to them in the form of hallucinations that are reminiscent of the members of the family until either the father or the mother kills them. Simple rules. Don’t go in the house, unless you don't enjoy terror, hallucinations and death.

NO RULES?

Just as the Duffer brothers looted past films for Stranger Things, they looted the Internet in a similar way for The Monster. Eleven has rules. So does the splinter from her personality that has incarnated from her mind to terrorize the world. Imagine a series where the monsters had no rules? 1977’s House, a Japanese horror film, seems to be this way. A pack of young girls go to a house where a crazy old woman is hanging out with her cat. Without explanation, bad stuff happens.

A chandelier shoots crystals at people. A young girl loses her head in a well, and it flies around and bites people. A piano eats a young woman. Stacks of flaming wood attack people. People look into mirrors and see monstrous versions of themselves until their face shatters like glass. Monstrous phantasms appear. Chandeliers eat heads. Turns out it is the old woman, but if you destroy her painting of a cat blood shoots out and people burn alive. WTF. Don’t go in the House. 

Watching a series like that would become the opposite of fun, fast. Why is this stuff happening? Why should we care if everything seems so random? Why get attached to characters that randomly die in hallucinogenic ways? The Walking Dead has gone on for many years using the same old rules for their zombies. As an audience, we can handle mystery early on when we are enjoying our monsters, but after a while the novelty fades and somebody who seems to know what they are doing appears and explains all the chaos.

DEMOGORGON

Eleven has telekinesis, controls electricity and can open wormholes into another dimension using electromagnetism. The Monster detects electricity, follows it, devours the energy, can open wormholes into another dimension  and also has electromagnetism. (Sharks can also detect electricity, using a process called electroreception.) It can manipulate objects (before Will gets grabbed, it uses telekinesis to open the lock on the door). Then, it creates a wormhole to suck the person into The Veil of Shadows. It is also large, strong and somewhat invulnerable. It can be slowed down, fought off or temporarily evaded, but Demogorgon seems to be pretty unstoppable, according to its own rules. Where did those rules come from? At one point the characters have a meeting about The Monster, and compare the thing to some sort of primordial beast or roving animal. There is a sense that it is not evil, just doing what it does to exist.

There are many fascinating blogs and YouTube videos that attempt to figure out more about it based on the show itself, which is an intelligent approach. My plan is to use the Internet and explore other angles by using conspiracy theories, the occult and quantum physics, plus some weird, evil science stories, to give you all more information to help back up my theory, and show that the Duffer brothers really have done an amazing job of explaining a demon in a story by avoiding the occult and embracing the darker side of scientific experiments our world is heir to, all the way back to WWII.

CONSPIRACY THEORY CHAOS?

The heart of the argument is the combined conspiracy theories the Duffer brothers accessed to make their monster. Yes, there are many old influences affecting the cinematography, the casting (I am sure you noticed the Sheriff looked like Jack Nicholson in The Shining), the credits, etc., but brand new influences kept it all fresh. Instead of basing The Monster on Germanic legends of the Black Annis, myths about werewolves or stories about zombies, the Duffer brothers mined conspiracy theories found on the Internet. Each of these modern myths provided a piece of the overall idea that made Demogorgon. I am going to run through them, pointing out the pieces as we go. Without these conspiracy theories, you don’t have Eleven, you don’t have The Monster, and you don’t have Stranger Things.

MKULTRA

Back during WWII the Nazi’s had a lot of disposable people, some really evil individuals running the show, and a scientific drive to do anything, and commit atrocities of any nature, to control everybody Adolf Hitler wanted controlled. People were chosen from concentration camps for Nazi scientists to experiment on. There were no rules, no ethics and no limits. Massive funding, unlimited bodies, anything goes. Only Satan knows what they came up with.

At the end of WWII, many Nazi scientists ended up in America, thanks to Operation Paperclip. The American government wanted the knowledge these scientists possessed, especially because the USA thought fighting the USSR was more important than anything. One of these scientists, Dr. Josef Mengele, ended up in our country where the CIA put him to work experimenting on people the same way the former Nazi experimented on Jews in the name of science, fascism and evil.

MKULTRA is discussed in Stranger Things. What is important is that this program led to many, many other programs. The scientists at Hawkins are certainly cut from the same bloody cloth as the Nazi’s that worked on mind control project for der Furher, and Eleven is certainly the product of these horrific experiments. Just ask her mother. The work that is being done at the lab goes much further, leading to other, darker projects. Sure, Eleven’s mother was the product of MKULTRA, according to the series, but what is going on at the Hawkins Lab is not that project.

PROJECT MONARCH

Mengele wasn’t the only wacky Nazi scientist engaged in hijinks and goings on involving the torture and experimentation of human beings. Another evil expert on the subject was a very terrible guy named General Reinhard Gehlen, who ended up in America in 1945 after helping Hitler spy on Russians using scientific experiments best described on Reddit under the Horror section. According to researchers on the subject that specialized in conspiracy theories, anything Mengele didn’t do, Gehlen did, and they continued their work in America, torturing human beings while Americans paid the bill.

For decades experts agree that Gehlen continued to explore the human mind for the CIA, dedicated to creating the perfect spies and assassins using hypnotism, the occult, drugs, electroshock therapy, sexual molestation, trauma and everything else they could think of to break a human mind, splinter it into fragments, so that each piece formed a shard, or alter, that was programmed to do different acts according to their subliminal control. Crazy, fun stuff, right?

Later on, another name pops up: Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron, a psychiatrist whose favorite method was to attach metal helmets to the heads of his subjects, electrocuting them into comas so he could remake their personality. ‘Member the strange, wire covered helmet Eleven is wearing in some of the flashbacks?

Monarch programming consists of several layers. Beta programming turns the person into a sex slave. Omega programming makes the person kill themselves if captured or questioned. Theta programming was based on making psychic assassins by stimulating their brains to develop psychic powers to make them trained, lethal, programmed killers. Bingo.

There is a lot of material available online, written by attorneys, survivors, psychiatrists and investigators, about Project Monarch and how it still might be going on to this day. What is disturbing is that, according to researchers, the project used a lot of black magik symbols, Satanic imagery, occult iconography and other unpleasantness to make the programming as nightmarish as possible to the child involved, in order to make sure their normal personality is smashed to pieces so the alters can be programmed to do their work.

Have you noticed that there is no mention, whatsoever, of demons, ghosts, the occult or anything else like it in Stranger Things? Nothing at all. The Duffer brothers used the Internet to make their monster, but they completely took out references to magik and the occult. You are only getting the science side of this horror story, which is a very Lovecraftian approach, when you think about it.

Eleven doesn’t have a split personality. She doesn’t become another person when somebody says the right code word. But there is a fracture in her psychology, and shard that has been taken from the greater whole, which explains why the poor girl doesn’t have much of a personality in the show. She has been raised all alone, with minimal outside contact, and she has been giving a cocktail of drugs and other psychosurgery for who knows how long. That would probably explain her odd, distant demeanor.

 ‘MEMBER THE DARK CRYSTAL?

At the climax of the story, a splinter is united with the greater whole and, in a brilliant flash of light, they are united, opening a rift in time and space that allows the merged being to move on to another dimension, whole at last. The end. Did I just describe the climax of Stranger Things? Nope. That is the end of The Dark Crystal.

When Eleven recognizes Will in the photo on the wall, The Dark Crystal is on the wall next to her. We never see her talking to Will. We never see them together. She recognizes him, though, because the splinter that has been shattered from her mind saw Will, and is running around, doing that evil. In The Dark Crystal the two separated beings unite, becoming a being of spiny, brilliant light. I am not saying Eleven’s dark half is running around. It is supposed to be her id. We will get to that, later.

In a few days I will give you another post about this subject, after I post something else for The Man. You know how it is, Bills have to get paid. Money has to be made. See you soon!

The Monster in Stranger Things, Part III - The Weird

This is Part III of an exploration into the nature of Demogorgon (or The Monster, as I prefer to call it) in the Netflix sci-fi/horror masterpiece, Stranger Things. You can read Part I here and Part II over here. Spoiler alerts will follow.

AS WE CONTINUE…

I am going to tell you about a few more films that relate to the nature of The Monster in Stranger Things. After that we will discuss a few conspiracy theories that relate to the same subject. After that you will be given a theory about what the true nature of The Monster is, with proof. So let’s go.

THE DARK HALF

Myth, literature, film and psychology are full of references to The Shadow, the id, the ti-bon-ange, the personal demon, the qareen, the familiar spirit, an imaginary friend, etc. It is the part of us that is bad, selfish, evil, animalistic, certainly violent, sexual and mostly hidden from our conscious mind. We don’t like to face the fact we can be bad, bad people. The part of us that does evil that hides from the light? That is your shadow, and it is hidden for a reason.

The Dark Half is a flick about an author that likes to write as an alter ego. As his alter ego, he writes a series of books about a character named Alexis Machine who is a vicious, cold, evil gangster. These books become popular, but when the author decides to stop writing the books, his alter ego literally rises from the grave to kill everyone responsible for his retirement and make the author write about him, again. At the end of the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the main character also meets his own dark half.

Authors like Helena Blavatsky and another author on the occult, Alexandra David-Neel, talk about a thing called a tulpa, which is an incarnation of a thought form that eventually becomes real when enough people believe in it, or one person concentrates on it enough. Alvin Schwartz, the creator of Superman, claims he ran into Clark Kent in a taxi one day in New York City. Even Alan Moore, author of the Hellblazer comic book series claims to have met his own imaginary creation.

According to Tibetan mysticism, a tulpa is a sign that the universe is just an illusion. What is in the world is in the mind. What is in the mind is in the world…or can be put there if there is enough horsepower to make it happen. In The Dark Half the character created by the author is partially him, but partially Alexis Machine. The author made the tulpa perfect in his head, so he is. Eleven was probably goaded into doing just that.

If you were to combine the concepts of a tulpa with Jung’s Shadow, the combination would be monstrous, indeed.

CLOAK & DAGGER

But before that film there was Cloak & Dagger, about having an imaginary friend that is real. A young boy who plays a role playing game based on James Bond stories (which is very similar to an RPG I played growing up called Top Secret S/I) has an imaginary friend named Jack Flack, who is the ultimate spy, replete with military uniform, black beret and all the right moves. The spirit is a lot like the boy’s own father, who is just a pilot that flies 747’s for a large airline.

The boy and Jack Flack are drawn into an adventure of global national espionage with dire consequences if the bad guys get the MacGuffin. At one point, (spoiler alert) Jack Flack dies, and the boy must confront the fact that his imaginary friend never existed as his hero vanishes. Only the boy can see this tulpa, not other people, and it is during a grim time in the film when the harsh reality of real life death sets in.

Jack Flack, of course, represents the boy’s image of his father…perfect, unstoppable, unreal and daring. Later, his father performs a few heroics of his own, and you get the idea that the tulpa has somehow infused his being, making him better, as if the combination of his boys faith in his father, and the energy released from the discarnate tulpa, has given him the power to save the day.

Now that we’ve studied the occult, we all understand that Jack Flack and the villain in The Dark Half are the same thing, right? A tulpa, which is basically a demon you summon out of yourself.

We’re all familiar with the literary horror masterpiece, Doctor Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Edith Wharton’s Triumph of Night has a scene where a character encounters an image of his own fiendish evil, standing across the room by a chair. The audience loves seeing this phenomenon at work on the page or screen. Did you notice that Dracula seems to be the exact opposite of Van Helsing? He is an incarnate, utter refutation of everything Van Helsing believes when he devotes himself to science. Van Helsing is benevolent, scientific order. Dracula is supernatural, occult evil.

ALTERED STATES

One final film to discuss before we go back to the Upside/Down is Altered States, a 1980 sci-fi film about a man played by William Hurt who goes through a series of scientific experiments to find out what happens when you use drugs, hypnotism, sensory deprivation, human isolation and psychology to see how far you can send a man down his own subconscious rabbit hole.

Aided by the power of ayahuasca, he at first experiences intense, primal hallucinations that seem as if he is looking into different worlds of existence until his body starts to transform into different forms representing human’s evolutions back into the beginning of time. This eventually results in the man becoming a primal, blob-like mass of bioplasma that destroys the lab with waves of psychic energy. At the end of the film he says nope to dope and "ugh" to drugs, evolving back to normal.

This concept of science studying psychology only end to end up high on drugs studying the paranormal, is again very similar to the concepts we see at work in Stranger Things. I still haven’t explained why The Monster looks the way it does, where it came from, how it came from there, where it is and how Eleven ended up meeting it. Follow me, we are almost there. Step carefully…the Qliphoth is all over the place.

BACK TO THE DARK CRYSTAL

When Eleven recognizes Will, she just sees his photograph on the wall. She then flips over a black game board, says the boy is in the Upside/Down, and places the boy’s figure (represented by a wizard) on the game board. She then grabs the figure of a demon, Demogorgon, to represent The Monster chasing Will. Did she run into Will in The Vale of Shadows? No, because she never went there. How does she even recognize Will at all? She isn’t told what the boy looks like. Will isn’t in the same place as Eleven, though, but later on she tracks the boy with her mind to the clubhouse in the woods for his mother. How is this happening?

PLANE TRUTHS

The boys describe this evil, dreadful place as The Vale of Shadows. We see the place as a dark, lightless place that resembles a nightmarish copy of our world. It seems to be haunted by shimmering motes, and entities contained within can interact with electrical devices. The Vale of Shadows seems electrical. Even The Monster seems to travel through things that contain bioelectricity, electricity or things that can transmit electricity. That is Eleven’s power, after all. She controls electromagnetism. Similar to the girl in Firestarter, who controls fire.

The interesting detail is that in old skool Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, there is no Vale of Shadows. In the game reality is comprised of many dimensions, organized like clockwork, containing heavens, hells, other planes of existence and everything in between.

The Manual of the Planes is a book released by TSR back in the 80’s that defined this multiverse for adventurers who apparently couldn’t get enough. It even came with a handy-dandy chart. My players didn’t like this book. My pit traps used to drop you down five levels deeper into the depth of the dungeon. Once I read The Manual of the Planes, my pit traps dropped you into Hades.

The Demiplane of Shadow is a close contender. Like most “evil” dimensions in AD&D, going there would probably kill you. A gloomy, disturbing place comprised of shadow where mysterious, energy-draining creatures lurked, anyone going there probably wanted to leave, because the realm was indeed poisonous. Things lived there, but it was otherwise a dark image of our world.

The Negative Material Plane is also similar. A nasty place just as bad as the one we just talked about, undead spirits lived there, and if you stayed too long the place killed you and turned you into an evil ghost. Thanks a lot. Necromancers, demons and devils also hung out there. If your Dungeon Master arranged for you to be there, he was probably a jerk.

The Ethereal Plane is a plane that helps us understand what is going on when characters enter The Vale of Shadows in Stranger Things. Gloomy, shadowy, foggy and creepy, The Ethereal Plane didn’t seem to be as intrinsically evil as the other places we just looked at. But a lot of bad things could come out of this place to get you. An odd dimension that was somehow connected to all other dimensions, it consisted of several levels.

The Border Ethereal was where creatures went when they wanted to interact with our world. Like standing in the ocean close to the shore, being here meant you were in the Ethereal plane but you could still interact with the normal world. This is where ghosts hung out, and it was a pain in the ass when the Dungeon Master attacked you with something from here. Usually, you couldn’t hurt them but they could hurt you.

The Deep Ethereal went even further. Things here couldn’t be seen in our world, at all, and this dimension went even deeper, touching all planes and containing its own denizens and wild, illogical, unstable geometry. Of course it was very, very dangerous and if you went there, something really powerful and bad eventually found you and taught you just how badass things got in AD&D. The Vale of Shadows, in Stranger Things, is a lot like the Ethereal Plane. There is this sense that it is a duplicate of our world, but colorless, alien and evil. One very important thing to remember, however, is that The Vale of Shadows is not The Upside Down. Eleven has never even been there. Where has she been?

The Upside Down is the term she uses for the vast, glossy black realm where people and objects appear and vanish in her mind’s eye. Eleven first uses her telepathy to track a Russian spy that is in the process of reciting a message. This makes sense…unclassified documents prove the U.S.S.R. was working on a study of ESP, telepathy, the sixth sense and all of that under the umbrella pseudo science term, “psychotronics.”

After she tracks the Russian spy, The Monster appears. Later, Eleven finds The Monster and makes contact with it. She also finds Will and the clubhouse.  But she never goes into The Vale of Shadows, and no other character goes into the Upside Down. The psychosphere is what The Upside Down is. This is an occult term used by many different writers on the subject, including Brian Lumley, Roland C. Wagner, William S. Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft. The Oxford English dictionary defines it as, “The sphere or realm of human consciousness.” Carl Jung called it The Collective Unconscious. In Marvel Comics, it is their equivalent of the Astral Plane. According to books on astral traveling and projecting your spirit and all of that fun occult stuff, when you dream you enter (at least, mentally) the psychosphere.

In this place, ideas, spirits, concepts and the imagination form the landscape. In stories by H.P. Lovecraft like “The Dreams in the Witch House,” and “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath,” characters enter into these realms while sleeping or on drugs and see kaleidoscopic images beyond imagination, thought, space and time that they find hard to describe. My theory is that Eleven sees things with a much better focus, which is why she sees the place the way she does.

The psychospere, or kamaloka/astral plane, in TRUE DETECTIVE.

Think of the psychosphere like the Internet. When you use Google to search for something, you do it either by directly entering the name of the subject, or ideas related to it, like titles of songs or albums. You can find an author by a book, or a book by an author. Ideas connect to each other, the way Paris is in France, but also in the same way the Eiffel Tower is in Paris, or Ratatouille is a film about France, but is also a French dish, and then there are of course French fries and berets and mimes and art films and…

…you get it. Things connect in abstract ways. Eleven, however, finds people with great accuracy and focus. The Upside Down is also the place where she finds The Monster.

ELEVEN = MONSTER

At one point Eleven says, near the end of the series, “I am The Monster. I opened the gate.” We know what The Monster is. What is the gate? Is she The Monster? Yes, she is. Remember, Eleven controls electromagnetism. This scientific phenomena is at the core of a lot of conspiracy theories and occult research, including the creepy teleportation story about the aircraft carrier in The Philadelphia Experiment. Eleven did open a portal, or wormhole (or…vale), into the psychosphere and pulled out The Monster inside her head.

The problem is The Vale of Shadows is another dimension, not quite in synch with our own. It is not the psychosphere, where The Monster came from. It is a new place created by the wormhole created by Eleven when she confronted the beast the kids call Demogorgon in her own head. It is an image of our own world. The Monster is basically in orbit around Eleven. He (or, she) can’t go back to the psychosphere. She can’t go back to Eleven (and when The Monster does in the last episode, they both vanish). She can’t stay in the real world for long. So The Monster roams around wormhole, tracking electrical signals, traveling through animals and conductive materials, killing people, consuming blood and perpetuating itself.

Remember the story about the flea on the rope? A wormhole is like a rope, and The Monster is attracted to blood, like a flea.

That is why Eleven says she is The Monster. She is, and she opened the gate that let it out. You’ll notice that the areas in the lab where the rift first opened are getting worse. There are also living, biological tendrils around the rift. Inside, electrical motes drift everywhere. The Monster travels through electricity, overwhelming devices it comes across. Like Eleven, The Monster can perform the same effect, opening a wormhole in the same way an electric eel unleashes energy to stun prey to eat. She then pulls her prey into The Vale of Shadows. It used to be in Eleven’s head. Now it is in a place that still looks like the inside of a human brain, full of blood vessels, nerve synapses and dreamlike images of the world Eleven encounters, consuming the electrical energy to survive.

A COLLAGE OF CONSPIRACIES

Project MKULTRA is one conspiracy theory that is mentioned a lot in Stranger Things. The horror film Jacob’s Ladder dealt with a similar issue, which is that nefarious elements within the government and CIA are grabbing people and performing mind-control experiments for the purposes of espionage, mass manipulation, and murder. It is just one of many, however. The Duffer Brothers went further and farther than anyone. After I give you the answer I shall further explore the conspiracy theories, occult references and literary ideas that make up the mythology of The Monster. But first we have to talk about Project MKOFTEN.

PROJECT MKOFTEN

There are many conspiracy theories out there. The people who write about them vary in sanity, intelligence and credibility, but some names stand out in the dark that the industry rates higher than the others. Jim Marrs, Douglas Hoagland, William Cooper and, finally, Peter Levenda, who is an author of many books about the occult and evil government hijinks including Sinister Forces and Unholy Alliance. One of the lovely things about Levenda is how he connects the shadowy experts in the occult world with hidden government agents that operate with technocratic impunity.

Amateurs discuss Project MKULTRA. The awesome discuss Project MKOFTEN. According to these theories, there were many projects conducted by the CIA, in conjunction with the military under the auspices of the government, that were performed specifically to use magik and the paranormal to fight communism. Project MKOFTEN is important to Stranger Things because of a few key points Levenda and other authors repeat.

These points are that Project MKOFTEN was intended to find spies working for the Soviet Union that had psychic powers using the mind to do it. The government wanted to locate them and kill them from a distance by unconventional means. One of the final goals was to summon demons. MKOFTEN used everything to do this, including black magik. CIA agents consulted with experts on the occult, according to Levenda and other authors. After many years of playing with spells, hypnosis, drugs and sensory deprivation, they found a technique that worked which included taking people with psychic powers and putting them inside Faraday cages.

A Faraday cage is a copper-lined cell that blocks out electromagnetic interference so that the person inside can focus without any other energies affecting his work. According to the conspiracy theory, psychics locked in Faraday cages ended up with amplified powers, similar to Professor X when he sits in Cerebro. Scientists studied their powers and worked with them to improve their abilities. When you combine this detail with conspiracy theories about other operations including The Philadelphia Project, Project Spellbinder, The Montauk Project and Project MONARCH (which deals with the concept of torturing children to create multiple personalities for the purposes making programmed assassins), you end up with the answer to the true nature of The Monster.

THE FINAL ANSWER

Eleven is psychic. She controls electromagnetism. Eleven can also use the psychosphere to find other psychics. The scientists running the project want her to kill spies, but she won’t. So she was psychologically and sexually tortured to create a splinter personality, or alternate identity, to kill the Soviet spy. Part of this torture involved being put in an isolation chamber that was also a Faraday cage (pay attention when she has a flashback about being taken from her father and locked in the prison…the walls are lined with copper). Deep in her subconscious, a tulpa (or demon) formed, and when it appeared The Monster looked like her father, a tulip (tulpa…tulip…get it?), a lion and a nightmarish beast. It killed the Soviet spy, and the scientists decided to make her contact it. She did so, but the horror of confronting her id, her shadow, her personal demon, caused her create an electromagnetic pulse that opened a gate AKA the wormhole into The Upside Down AKA the psychosphere, forming The Vale of Shadows. This is why there is a crack in the wall of the lab. The Monster needs electrical energy and blood to survive. It eventually escapes and proceeds to do just that. Eleven recognized Will because The Monster found him, first, and she is it. At the end of the series, Eleven touches it and they are fused together, but as a result she is thrown into The Vale of Shadows.

Now you know why Demogorgon is important. He is a demon, because that is what The Monster is. By the way, it is technically a she.

IN (TEMPORARY) CONCLUSION

Yes. I know. That is a lot to consider. Be back next time as I continue to explore the worlds of Stranger Things using the occult, quantum physicis and modern conspiracy theory mythology as our guide. Until then, be careful what you think about, you never know what might come out!

https://www.netflix.com/title/80057281

The Monster in Stranger Things, Part II - The Weird

This is Part II of an exploration into the nature of Demogorgon (or The Monster, as I prefer to call it) in the Netflix sci-fi/horror masterpiece, Stranger Things. You can read the first part here. Spoiler alerts will follow.

Rather than just tell you what it is, I am using the film and literary references made by the show to prove my case, step by step, fact by fact. I’m also going to explain how modern conspiracy theories, quantum physics, string theory and that sweet, sweet black magic all contribute to create the horror at the heart of the show.

MEET THE MONSTER

When we first encounter The Monster in Stranger Things, it is not in chronological order within the complete time of events leading up to the final showdown of the sci-fi/horror series. A scientist is running down a corridor within the Hawkins facility. He is trying to get away. A light bulb smashes down the hall as he looks out from inside the elevator. The scientist suddenly looks up, screams and gets grabbed, vanishing.

These are the first clues we are given about the nature of The Monster. The lights break as it gets closer. The Monster is rather large, and yet doesn’t grab the scientist as it enters the elevator. The light breaks and it grabs the scientist, who is suddenly able to see it. If the scientist could see his killer down the hall, he would have had different body language. Cowering in fear, gibbering in horror as he hid around the wall, hoping the elevator doors will close (in films the doomed protagonist will usually push the buttons on the elevator as fast as possible, hoping to save himself as the bad guy stomps down the hall). But he doesn’t act that way. He stands nervously, waiting, until he looks up and gets grabbed. This tells us that The Monster does interact with the environment around it in some way, which causes electrical lights to flare and explode. It also tells us that it moves through the environment, but isn’t entirely in sync with our reality.

Later, poor Will rides his bike, and the light on his bike blows up. He sees The Monster, but he can only perceive the outline of it. He is pursued relentlessly until he gets inside the shed in the back of the house. The light goes out and Will is grabbed.

This is not the first time The Monster first appears, however. The real story starts with Eleven. She is told she has to track down a spy from the U.S.S.R.  Within “The Upside-Down,” she does so. As she gets closer to the spy, who is rather calm and completely unaware, Eleven seems pensive until something bestial is heard behind her. That is the first time The Monster is sensed, if not seen, in the chronological order of Stranger Things.

What is confusing is that we never see Eleven escape from the Hawkins facility. We know that she was wearing her white hospital gown when she did, because that is what she is wearing at the diner where she enters to steal some fries. When she first touches The Monster, she is wearing that kooky tan diving suit. This means that she did not escape at that moment. If she had done so, the Sheriff and his deputies would not have found the shred from her hospital gown, instead of the kooky tan diving suit, in the pipe outside the facility which indicates where she escaped from and what she was wearing.

For a short time I believed certain false things about The Monster, based on the show. I thought that it traveled through light bulbs and light sources. I also believed, for a brief time, that Eleven turned into The Monster when she was asleep. I was wrong. When the Sheriff and Winona Ryder are in The Vale of Shadows, the horrified teenagers watch as Christmas lights activate as the two adults walk through the hall in the house’s counterpart. Since the adults can’t travel through light, The Monster probably isn’t, either. When the scientist in the very first part of the show sees the lights flare up in the lab’s hall, The Monster is causing the lights to flare up as it walks. Eleven can’t be The Monster when she is asleep or whatever, because she confronts the demon that has been stalking her friends in the end, which is the climax of the show.

This is one of the reasons why the nature of The Monster is so confusing. When you see a movie with Dracula in it, there is going to be an expectation that Dracula is going to follow the usual rules. That also means that the characters opposing them are going to have to also follow the same rules to defeat the vampire. Garlic, holy water, fire, decapitation, LAW rockets…the usual arsenal. If the movie did not follow these rules, as an audience we would be unhappy because the formula was off, unless a suitable explanation was given.

Imagine if The Monster in Stranger Things was just a werewolf. Worse yet, imagine if we were given a complete explanation of what it was in the first fifteen minutes? It wouldn’t be as fun. We would feel let down. Watching the rest of the series wouldn’t be as intellectually challenging. The Thing seems to do this, because the scientists seem to figure out how their adversary works, and how to bring it down, somewhat midway through the film. This doesn’t ruin the fun because The Thing is so stealthy, cunning and capable of shifting shape. It is also so horrifying that every time we see it, there is something new that horrifies us. It is not the same Thing, every time.

I also have to admit to another theory I eventually threw away: I thought The Monster was a phantasm that could only be seen in the minds of its observers, similar to Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street or the horrifying stalker killing young kids in the very modern horror flick, It Follows. The Monster is real because, after the fight in the house with the teenagers who use bullets, fire and a kit-bashed spiked mace to fight it, the bat is covered in black goo and there is a definite meaty, bubbling residue on the bear traps the teenagers employed in the fight. So much for my theory.
You don’t even see The Monster in Stranger Things, most of the time. It is there, but not there. Why doesn’t it stomp around visible all of the time? How does it get into our world? Keep reading, Young Grasshopper, there is more to your universe than you can see or imagine.

MORE MOVIES

Some people have said that The Goonies is a big influence on the show. I disagree because a) the adversaries in the film are not monstrous and b) there is nothing really supernatural going on in The Goonies, although Sloth kind of looks like a post apocalyptic mutant cannibal. Who are, of course, people, too. So don’t judge. Observers probably make the comparison because the teenagers and children all team up to explore One-Eyed Willy’s trap-laden cave, but beyond that there is not much to work with, for our theory on the film.

Alien, however, is a big reference. Almost too much so. The Monster we are discussing seems to devour people whole and then barf up a big egg. This egg seems to extrude a long tentacle which is inserted into another victim’s mouth, after they have been tied up in some ectoplasmic goo, similar to the xenomorph in Alien but also like a wasp that constructs a nest with a similar gooey material which hardens into matter that can hold eggs. You’ve already seen Alien, you already know what happens and understand the obvious parallels to Stranger Things, so we can move on.

Spoiler alerts, everyone. The Entity is an 80’s horror film based on a real-life event that is more horrifying than the film it became. I believe this film is a reference to Stranger Things, like Poltergeist, even though the audience never sees a poster for either movie anywhere in the show, just like E.T., which is also an influence. You’ll notice by now that as we study the films that influence the show, we are also studying the chaotic elements that make up The Monster. The Entity, like Poltergeist, deals with science trying to study the paranormal and basically getting its ass kicked.

A young woman with children living in a house in the suburbs starts to become haunted by an invisible, monstrous poltergeist that doesn’t just throw stuff around, it beats her up and rapes her. Yup, straight up, as evil as hell. This goes on and on until she brings in a team of scientists to study what is happening. This culminates with the woman volunteering to live in a fake house within a large lab that has a chemical solution above it similar to liquid oxygen, to freeze her invisible attacker in place. Eventually, she is assaulted, but she jumps out of the house as the scientists spring the trap. What they see is a huge, demonic-looking spectral shape that is able to affect our reality, but is invisible and impervious to physical harm. It escapes, but everyone in the lab knows there is another evil place out there, and the denizens within are not our friends.

More spoiler alerts! Yet another damn reference for Stranger Things, The Mist is a short story by Stephen King that is a reference to the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, who is also a gigantic influence on the show. It was later made into a terrible film with the guy who played Punisher in the kind of bad film by John Travolta. What is important is that in The Mist (literary or otherwise) nobody really knows what is going on when their small town is hit by a serious case of Call of Cthulhu WTF?

There are tentacles and beasties and long-leggedity ghoulies and all manner of odd, freakish monsters, but what the good, normal people of this small town figure out is that nearby, scientists have been performing dark experiments using radiation, electromagnetic energy and Satan-knows-what to try to punch a hole in the fabric of reality. When the group of intrepid townsfolk reach the lab, all of the scientists have committed suicide because the experiment worked.

No explanation as to why the town has been invaded is given, except that very intelligent people understood the ramifications of their actions and whacked themselves to avoid the future. Yup, Stranger Things makes a reference to this work as well, although the scientists in the Netflix series don’t entirely understand what they are doing because after the portal opens up to our world (replete with all of its slimy, tentacle-waving otherworldly biological weirdness) they can’t close the portal, and don’t even know where it goes.

TIME FOR A MONSTER

As I’ve mentioned before, Eleven encounters The Monster when she is about to kill the Russian spy, who is probably also psychic. The Monster appears with a growl behind her. Later, the scientists in the lab, led by her father, induce the young girl into confronting The Monster in the Upside-Down. As she approaches, it is creating some sort of egg. They were not in The Vale of Shadows. There were no slugs or tentacles or trees or ectoplasm. It was just pure, reflective black.

The Monster seems to devour its prey whole (with a head shaped like a tulip with teeth the point inward, it certainly seem capable of doing so) which means we can safely say that the egg is the Russian spy, or what was left of him. This also tells us that after The Monster devours people, it also barfs up the leftover matter as the gooey ectoplasmic substance Will was trapped by when the Sheriff and his mother find him at the end of the show. Yes, this is another reference to Alien.

What happens next? We'll talk about it, next time! Until then, sleep tight, and don’t let the bogeyman under the bed bite!

https://www.netflix.com/title/80057281

The Monster in Stranger Things - The Weird

INTRODUCTION

Stranger Things, the gigantic horror sci-fi mega hit Netflix show that has entertained millions of viewers across the planet, is a retro wonder to behold but difficult to entirely understand. One of the reasons why is because Demogorgon, the xenomorph that is killing and kidnapping the characters throughout the film, is never completely explained. In most horror flicks featuring cryptozoological monstrosities, there is a point where a scientist (or some other qualified expert) finally tells the audience what the hell is going on. For your edification and entertainment, I’m going to do my best to do just that. Spoiler alerts!

It will be neither simple nor quick and by the time I am done, you may not want to know about the original nature of the creature in the Netflix original series that many viewers adore but fewer totally understand. Like the cosmic horrors unleashed by understanding too much about the evil alien gods in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, the dark truths revealed by what you will be told may really, really screw you up mentally, forever, similar in the way that confronting your own personal demon without appropriate therapy could render you insane. You have been warned. Continue at risk to your own mental health.

WHAT IS THE MONSTER?

Although there have been a lot of videos on YouTube about Stranger Things, not too many people have tried to break down the origin of The Monster on the show. It is one of the primary foes throughout the story, but as I’ve mentioned before the audience really isn’t told exactly what it is, where it came from, what is going on, or what it is up to. There is no real point in the film where a character like a doctor or scientist says, “I’ve figured it out! The Monster is a mutant child living at the bottom of the lake!” It never happens, unlike films like Jaws (we already know what a shark is) or Predator, where the Latin American woman’s soliquoy about legends regarding the alien gives the audience at least some clue as to what the antagonist is. In The Thing, scientists eventually figure out the biology of their opposition, and illustrate it for the ears of the audience. The Monster is frequently called “The Demogorgon,” but I personally don’t like that description. Why?

DEMOGORGON

Because in the role playing game Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the demon known as Demogorgon is nothing like what The Monster is in Stranger Things. In the game, Demogorgon is described as being sentient, intelligent, and can even speak many languages. Heck, it has tentacles for arms and can cast spells, too. In a short story from The Dragonlance Chronicles, a hobbit-like creature known as Tasslehoff Burrfoot ends up encountering Demogorgon, who has been captured by an evil wizard. In the story the demon is more like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Mephisto from Marvel Comics, devious and capable of conversation. The Monster in Stranger Things is a ravening beast, seeking prey, turning them into eggs as a part of its bizarre lifecycle, and then constructing portals around it to grab more prey. Not exactly Mrs. Personality.

The Demogorgon as a reference is still important, however, because that is what the characters on the show use when talking about The Monster. This is because it is a clue to the audience that Eleven and The Monster are the same. She even says so when she tells the boys that she is The Monster, and that she also opened the gate. What is Eleven talking about?

WHAT'S OLD IS NOW

Something to consider when thinking of the show is that the creators didn’t want to give you the same old monsters you grew up with. Old skool Hollywood horror consisted of a series of cinematic archtypes that were based on ancient mythology found throughout the planet. Werewolves, vampires, golems, zombies, witches, insane killers, ghouls, mummies at demons are the main villains in numerous fictional creations across time and space. If, by the end of Stranger Things, we had been told that The Monster was just a lycanthrope, it would have been disappointing. Being given the whole truth would have been less entertaining. As viewers, we want to be surprised. We want to figure it out for ourselves. We also want a reason to watch Season 2.

FILM INFLUENCES

Stranger Things is a superb conglomeration of horror and science fiction that draws influences from previous films, modern conspiracy theories, and ancient mythology. As a result, The Monster is similar to all of these other, modern monsters. Alien was about a xenomorphic creature that hunted, infected and bred with humans. Jaws is about an underwater monster that hunts instinctively, and so cannot be reasoned with or logically influenced. The Thing was about an alien from outer space, or perhaps another dimension, that behaved the same way. It infected humans, replicated itself (a form of procreation), and murdered other entities. There is even a scene in The Thing where its head splits open, forming a mouth that eats another doomed, screaming person, similar to how The Monster operates. This poster appears many, many times throughout the show, like an eerie warning.

These movie posters are no coincidence. The director put them in the scene for a very good reason. In films excruciating attention is given to everything in a scene you are looking at, especially if it is symbolic and subliminal. Everything in the background, including words and images, matters. If you are constructing a scene where two characters are getting married, newspaper clippings that are lying around saying, “DEATH,” or “MURDERED,” or paintings on the wall depicting sorrow, violence and war would indicate to the audience that things aren’t going to work out for the couple. Stanley Kubrick was a master of this. Watching films like The Shining absolutely require a viewer to examine the background and the images that subtly communicate to the viewer the true story, in order to understand some of the deeper themes in the film.

IMAGE CONGLOMERATION

The Dark Crystal is one poster that appears in the film. Evil Dead is another. These posters appear to remind the viewer of previous movies & monsters, but the references in the show go far beyond film. For example, Stephen King’s It is also a massive influence, although we don’t see a poster for the book, which is about several young children that confront a demon, only to find out that the beast it actually an alien, of sorts. They eventually learn that It can really only appear as something the viewer has already seen, and is afraid of. To one person, it is a werewolf. To another, it is The Creature from the Black Lagoon. While The Monster in Stranger Things is not nearly the shapeshifter Stephen King wrote about, the mysterious nature of its origins, and the nightmarish aspect of its existence, is very important to the story we are studying now, because all of these film and literary references merge to make the threat our protagonists face in the show.

Firestarter is also a huge influence. In the book (also by Stephen King) a young girl who has pryokinetic abilities because her parents were experimented upon by the government (who used drugs as part of the process) escapes from a military laboratory and eventually destroys her aggressors with the power of her mind. You never see a poster for Firestarter in Stranger Things. You also don’t see a poster for the 80’s Spielberg sci-fi smash hit, E.T., although that film is also an influence. The technocratic menace of the Department of Energy is similar to the dread inspired by the scientists pursuing Elliot and his extraterrestrial counterpart in the film, and the children escaping from government forces scenario repeats itself with unabashed adoration.

THE DARK CRYSTAL

The poster for The Dark Crystal is a big clue. When Eleven recognizes Will Byers after seeing his picture on a wall, she proceeds to explain that he is lost in what she calls, “The Upside Down,” and is being pursued by The Monster, which she symbolizes using a statue of Demogorgon. The Dark Crystal is a film about how evil reptilian scientists damage their dimension by performing an experiment on a massively powerful, crystal structure. The experiment cracks the crystal, causing a shard to fall loose from the structure. The entire point of the film is that the protagonists must place the shard back into the crystal it came from, repairing the fracture and fixing the dimension. As this happens, the evil reptilian scientists are reunited with their peaceful counterparts, merging to form brilliant, glowing entities that vanish spectacularly. Sounds kooky, but why is that story important to Stranger Things?

Please return to this website in a few days, and I shall continue to tell the tale of what The Monster is. Next time we’ll continue, examining the visuals, studying the clues, exploring the legion of conspiracy theories, literary references  and other films that are the modern inspiration for Eleven, The Monster, and other dark experiments that have spawned the dangers which threaten the lives of our intrepid protagonists in this very original, and highly horrifying, Netflix show.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80057281