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!
