Stranger Things

November 6, 1983 in Hawkins, Indiana. Four twelve year-old boys play Dungeons & Dragons in a basement: Mike Wheeler, a shy boy whose angularly lined face reminds the audience of Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, the host and gamemaster, brains of the group; Dustin Henderson, curly-haired, a little chubby, and with a permanent lisp due to his cleidocranial dysplasia, the heart of the friends; Lucas Sinclair, African-American with attitude and common-sense to back up his boldness; and Will Byers, whose disappearance cycling home from the game triggers the events of the series. On a dark road Will is frightened into the woods and pursued by an unseen creature – terrified he makes it home but finds it empty, and takes refuge in the shed behind the house with a loaded rifle that doesn’t keep him safe.

Will’s disappearance causes ripples through the sleepy town of Hawkins as Chief Jim Hopper discovers connections to the sinister government Department of Energy based out of the nearby Hawkins Laboratory and Will’s frazzled mother Joyce Byers realises her son is trying to communicate with her from the eerie place he has been transported to. Will’s three friends launch their own attempt to rescue him after they run into a strange girl in the forest with a shaved head, barely able to speak, with the number 11 tattooed on her arm – a girl with extraordinary powers.

One of the strengths of Stranger Things is its intense focus on characterization, developing multiple characters leading their own intertwining and converging plotlines. Joyce Byers, played intensely and affectingly by Winona Ryder, is a single mum trying to bring up two boys on her meagre salary without assistance from their deadbeat dad. Loving and focused unerringly on trying to look after her sons, Joyce is devastated by Will’s disappearance but determined that she’ll find him alive whatever the cost. Her firm belief in his survival is tested multiple times but she holds on, buoying up others with her strength. She discovers that Will – trapped in an eerie parallel dimension – is trying to communicate with her through the phone and then through flickering lights, and pursues doggedly the means of keeping that line of communication open even when people treat her as if she’s crazy.

Will’s quiet older brother, Jonathan, investigates his brother’s disappearance with the camera that he uses as the lens of his life. He has a crush on the mostly prim and proper Nancy Wheeler, older sister of Mike, who has a thing for local bad boy Steve. Jonathan spies on Nancy attending an illicit party at night with Steve and his friends and accidentally captures the moment before Nancy’s friend Barbara is abducted by the same creature that kidnapped Will. Jonathan is caught with the incriminating photographs but while Steve and company are outraged, Nancy finds the photo that gives her a single tantalising clue to the fate of her friend, who she has been desperately trying to locate. Nancy and Jonathan join forces to find out what happened to Will and Barbara, leading them into a confrontation with the creature within its parallel dimension. Together they arm up and prepare to hunt it down and kill it.

Chief Jim Hopper is the police chief in the town of Hawkins; he leads the investigation into Will’s disappearance. An alcoholic with a drug problem of ambiguous scale, his life has been in tatters since the death of his young daughter from childhood cancer and his subsequent divorce. His story deals with a separate piece of the mysterious events in Hawkins from Joyce’s quest to keep in touch with and rescue her son, and Nancy and Jonathan’s plan to track down and kill the creature – those behind it. Hopper becomes suspicious of Hawkins Laboratory and the ‘Department of Energy’ that runs it after confusing a sighting of the girl with the shaved head for the missing Will, finding a shred of her hospital gown near a drainpipe leading into the grounds of the laboratory, and investigating the staged suicide of restaurant owner Benny who tried to protect the girl from government agents trying to reclaim her. Hopper digs into the background of the Laboratory and the insidious Dr Brenner, its cold-eyed chief of staff, finding links to claims of human experimentation, MK Ultra, and the alleged abduction of a young girl from her mother who was a government test subject. He determines that the ‘body’ of Will dragged out of the river is a dummy after his suspicions are roused by the local coroner being banned from examining the corpse. Hopper draws too much attention from the Laboratory who try to gaslight him, bug his house and destroy his credibility, but this only leads him to join forces with Joyce to find Will.

The last group of characters are Will’s friends. Social outcasts at school – Dustin mocked for his lisp and missing teeth, Mike for his unusual features, and Lucas for being the only black kid in a white community – they have an unshakeable bond. With the absolute loyalty of children, they defy their parents to sneak out at night on their bicycles to join the search for Will in the woods. In the pouring rain and the pitch black, they find a girl shivering and frightened. She’s wearing just a t-shirt lent to her by the restaurant owner Benny, swapped for her hospital gown, soaking wet, on the run from the Laboratory which has been using her for her telekinetic powers to spy on Russian agents, her head shaved like a cancer patient. She could easily be mistaken for a boy. The boys smuggle her into Mike’s basement where they find she can barely speak, doesn’t understand concepts like changing clothes in private, and has the number ‘11’ tattooed on her arm. But El, as they dub her – short for ‘Eleven’ – claims to know where Will is. She calls the parallel dimension ‘the Upside Down’. She knows about the creature. She’s afraid of the ‘bad men’. And with her help, the boys try to cross the barrier between the dimensions to help Will get home.

Stranger Things skilfully balances all these perspectives and their individual quests, with the plot proceeding on all fronts, while dropping hints left and right about the cause of events and the part played in them by Eleven and the Laboratory. Eleven experiences flashbacks when she uses her powers to lab experiments where she crushed a coke can with her powers and Brenner tried to get her to use them to kill a cat, which later provokes her into accidentally killing two orderlies in a fit of rage and terror at an impending punishment. She remembers being put into a sensory deprivation tank to perform a reconnaissance mission on a Russian spy halfway across the world, entering a dark world where she first encounters the creature, and reveals that she accidentally triggered the opening of the Upside Down to the real world. Meanwhile, Brenner investigates a tree-like mass which appeared inside the Laboratory when Eleven created the gate to the Upside Down: a pulsing, growling, fleshy abomination whose roots are slowly taking over the space inside the lab, half-wood and half-meat, with an opening in the centre strung with sinewy ropes that are a repulsive cross between cobwebs and decaying tissue. This frightening gateway, walled in flesh, isn’t the only hole in the “veil” between the Upside-Down and the real world – the creature creates them when it comes out to feed, each gory hole as sickening as the core one in the lab.

So what is the Upside-Down? A second series has been announced, so more concrete answers about the mysteries of Stranger Things have to an extent been held back; how Eleven encountered the creature while trying to “spy” on the Russian agent, how that encounter triggered the appearance of the gateway to the Upside-Down, what the creature is, none of that has yet been explained. The Upside-Down is a mirror reflection of the ordinary world, with the same buildings and landmarks as Hawkins, but everything is decaying and falling apart, the light is a permanent shroudlike grey, white ash tumbles and floats endlessly through the sky in poisonous rain, and eerie dangerous beings inhabit it. The boys dub the creature that kidnapped Will and Barbara the “Demogorgon” after a monster in their Dungeons & Dragons game. There’s a hint of Slenderman in its unnaturally long, stretched out proportions. Its skin is slick grey. Its horribly long fingers end in claws. It doesn’t appear to have a face when first seen, until its head unfurls like a Venus fly trap into four petal-like flaps lined with teeth around a gaping maw. The CGI could do with some work. Seen full on in the light, it becomes less horrifying and more unrealistic, although the Upside-Down itself is very well rendered.

The series’ creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, confirmed there was a lot they had to leave out of the eight episodes of Stranger Things, mainly about the origin of the Demogorgon and the Upside-Down itself, which they hope to explore in a future series if there’s enough interest. I’ve got a lot of questions. What does it mean for Will that he threw up that otherworldly slug at the end? Is he infected by the Demogorgon? Is that why he keeps having flashes into the Upside-Down, as if it is pulling him back in? Brenner said the atmosphere of the place was toxic. His soldiers and scientists went into it wearing breathing equipment because prolonged exposure was dangerous; Will was trapped there unprotected for days and days. Did Eleven survive? Hopper seems to think so – or know so, since he’s leaving food parcels for her in the woods. Was Brenner killed in the Laboratory or did the Demogorgon drag him into the Upside-Down, just like it did Barbara and Will? Is he going to reappear? Will we see more of what the Department of Energy was doing? How did the experiments give Eleven her powers? Will she be reunited with her mother?

There’s a very Super 8 feel that I picked up about Stranger Things, particularly the band of kids in search of the truth about an extraordinary event going on right in their hometown, and the series is a homage to 80’s films, with one reviewer calling it the series “that Stephen Spielberg and Stephen King never made”. Eleven’s powers and her worrying swings between timidity and violence are reminiscent of Stephen King’s super-powered girls from Carrie and Firestarter, while the coming-of-age and brave band of kids elements channels Spielberg influences from The Goonies, Super 8 and E.T. The horrifying symbiosis of the demogorgon’s lair in the Upside-Down harks back to Alien, as does the creepy opened egg that Hopper and Joyce pass while they walk through the Upside-Down in the season finale, while Joyce’s conversation with Will through the lights comes from Close Encounters and their communication through the walls of the house recalls the little girl Carol Anne from Poltergeist. Star Wars pops up when Dustin encourages Eleven to levitate his model of the Millenium Falcon and when the boys discuss the possibility that a helpful adult might do a “Lando”, forced into betraying them by nefarious forces just like Lando Calrissian led Han and Leia into a trap on Cloud City for Darth Vader.