Chewing on and Spitting out Some Ideas about the Stranger Things Monsters

             This is my last post for the RIG Monsters class during this spring term. Thank you to everyone

who took the time to read my posts and to comment on them. I hope each one of you goes forward and 

earns smashing success with your stories and continued academic pursuits!

About three or four years ago, I watched the first season of Stranger Things on Netflix. My daughter had recommended it. She had seen it when it aired originally.

The purpose of this post is to critique the monsters. To do that, I could not rely on my memory. So I watched a few clips of the show on YouTube, read some info on the show, including the Wikipedia article, but most importantly consulted my daughter. I drove to her house, which isn’t far from my own, and she showed me some of the key episodes with monster appearances. We didn’t watch an entire episode except for the last episode of Season 3, “The Battle of Starcourt.”

One of the things that became apparent from both watching the show and clips and listening to my daughter is that the show leaves many questions unanswered. The monsters hail from a place called “the Upside Down.” It can be considered a parallel universe or another dimension or perhaps an added layer to our own, normal realm of human existence. Many of the homes or buildings we see in the normal world of the Stranger Things characters (the mythical Hawkins, Indiana) also exist in the Upside Down but altered in their appearance. It is the same with the trees. They have their counterparts in the Upside Down. The difference seems to be all in the looks. Trees and houses in the Upside Down surface as dark, damp, and rotted or sickly items, as if they are representations of a state of decay.

That principle of duplication with decay does not apply to people. Thus, there are no versions of any of the characters in the Upside Down. That deficiency does not supply the rationale for the monsters in the Upside Down to kidnap the normal dimension denizens, however; rather, nourishment and gustatory considerations prevail. The two-story high Mindflayer, a fleshy, muscled, gnarled hybrid of octopus and spider, for instance, wants to dine on Eleven to nourish and turbocharge its own mental and psychic capacities.

Hunger seems to animate the Mindflayer and the other monster species prevalent in the Upside Down, the Demogorgon. I have been told a Mindflayer is a Demogorgon or a kind of one. I am not certain a geneticist or taxonomist would classify the Mindflayer thusly. The monsters share similarities, such as the aforementioned predilection for human and the built-for-carnivorousness jaws each monster sports: big mouths, rows of teeth stretching inward and, in the case of the Mindflayer, a second, alienesque jaw jutting in and out.

Yet just as wolves and bears are not the same species because they are carnivores, have lots of teeth and powerful jaws, growl, and walk on all fours, so the Mindflayer and the Demogorgon are not the same species because of their likenesses. The Demogorgon is a biped, has five fingers and five toes (in the form of ripping, tearing claws), and two legs and two arms attached to a central torso. In many respects, it has a humanoid form. Its head, however, is unique. It is tulip-shaped when closed, and when it opens and extends its “petals,” the head manifests, in addition to its rows of teeth, a surprising emptiness to accommodate its throat’s passageway where there would have been brain in a human being. This assembly allows the Demogorgon to consume very large humans, shredding and breaking them up into digestible portions that can fit and move down its gullet and which are decomposed further by the happy application of the acidic juices it sprays onto its meal as it descends. Clearly, the Demogorgon possesses no brain but rather a distributed or loosely confederated nervous system of sensors and receptors. The stomach sensors signal emptiness to receptors in the maw and around its body, inducing an non-voluntary reaction to hunt and eat.

Some Demogorgons have performed actions, such as unlocking doors, not by psychic propulsion but by a non-voluntary kind of pitch tuning of its body and a body temblor that is transmitted across inorganic substances to locks and bolts, for instance, with the appropriate effect.

The Mindflayer, on the other hand, has many more legs to provide mobility and a multiplicity of extendable/retractable arms it can shoot out and in to grab, sort, “sniff” prey, and even attack with lethal or destructive force anything it encounters. In spite of its gigantic maw, its head appears to have space to house a large brain from whence it exercises its psychic control over other organisms with intellect. As with the Demogorgon, it lives to feed, which brings me to my final point.

Given the landscape of the Upside Down, its darkness and dreariness, and the little white puffs of cotton or feather that float through the air, what is it, and why does it house monsters that do nothing but eat?

I am driven to the conclusion that the Mindflayer and the Demogorgon are akin to the creatures in Stephen King’s The Langoliers. They ever eat the present, or what is alive now, to bring it into the past, which is always decaying. The Upside Down feeds off the normal world and “sustains” itself thus. That’s why the monsters from the Upside Down cannot remain in the living world unless there is a tear connecting them to the Upside Down. Close the connection, and the monsters die because the past isn’t alive to live in the present. On the other hand, persons from the normal world can survive in the past and be retrieved because they are still alive, which is why the monsters must consume them to make them permanent parts of the past!