The first season of the Netflix show Stranger Things, released last year, immediately plunged its protagonists into danger. In the first episode we see 12-year-old Will Byers, one of a quartet of Dungeons & Dragons-playing nerds, waylaid by a dark shape on his way home along the wooded back roads of Hawkins, Indiana. He abandons his precious bike and runs to his house. But the home, which should be a place of safety, offers no haven. His mother and brother are working extra shifts to keep the family afloat—his deadbeat father long ago abandoned them all—and so, alone, the sensitive child is easy prey for the monster. Will is snatched before the opening credits.
The show’s second season, available October 27 for binge-watching by obsessive fans, is a slower burn. A year after the events of the first season, not much seems amiss in Hawkins as Halloween 1984 rolls around, save that a newcomer has beaten the gang’s high scores at the local video-game arcade. But Will has brought back more than just trauma from his ordeal last year: He’s seeing apocalyptic visions and coughing up creepy slugs. The kids, teens, and adults who in the first season teamed up to save the day have a new mystery to unravel—and consequences to reckon with from the mistakes and compromises they made along the way. Lies spread, you see, like strangling roots. The series has maintained the retro setting, pulse-pounding suspense, and charming cast that made it a hit, while deepening its thematic concern with the intergenerational wounds of abuse and neglect.
In a review of the show’s first season, Joshua Rothman described Stranger Things as something like “Lovecraft in suburbia.” The looming, multi-armed monster presented as a new archfoe in the latest season certainly suggests the showrunners—identical twins Matt and Ross Duffer—leaned toward the Lovecraftian. Yet there’s still something crucial missing in that description. H. P. Lovecraft’s particular brand of New England nihilism located horror in the unknown, uncaring vastness of the sea and outer space, from the depths of which emerge alien gods who prove humanity’s insignificance—not by their malice but by their indifference. What drives Lovecraft’s protagonists mad is the revelation that humans don’t matter to the universe. Thus his subgenre is commonly called “cosmic horror.”
The philosophy of Stranger Things is more human-friendly, and the horror of Stranger Things is closer to home. The monsters come from another realm, but not from deep space: It’s the so-called “Upside Down” right under the surface of our world. When characters get a glimpse of it, they see a rotting, cold, toxic duplicate of the town of Hawkins. The geography is the same, the buildings are the same, but everything is crumbling, fetid, overgrown with slithering vines and squelching tentacles. Season two forgoes any subtlety. The evil of the Upside Down twists its way into Hawkins, rooted in the soil itself.
The theme of absent and abusive fathers runs deep. The monster that took Will in the show’s first season is the negative image of his absent father. It torments his mother Joyce, riddles the house’s walls with holes, and drags Will to a dark and lonely place—literalizing the wounds Lonnie Byers inflicted on his family. Another father we see—Ted Wheeler, whose son and daughter both become entangled in the supernatural adventure—is a stand-in for obtuse and unconcerned parents everywhere; his highest domestic ambition is napping in his recliner.
And then there is the father figure at blame for the crisis. Our world was first exposed to the Upside Down by experiments Dr. Martin Brenner ran on the young girl known as Eleven in the Hawkins National Laboratory, a secretive subsidiary of the Department of Energy. Brenner styles himself a father figure, even having Eleven call him “Papa,” but he’s only interested in exploiting her psychic and telekinetic abilities for their military potential. He locks her in solitary confinement when she fails to give him what he wants.
In season one, Eleven escapes and gets her first taste of real friendship (and Eggo waffles) from Will’s trio of friends, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas. Picking up where the first season ended, we learn in season two that she is now hiding from sinister government forces with help from Hawkins’s redoubtable, irascible sheriff, Jim Hopper. Hopper and Eleven make a fractious but winning surrogate family; gruff Sheriff Hopper even has some great dance moves he puts to use as he and Eleven fix up their cabin hideout. Their dynamic recalls Wolverine and Laura from this year’s Logan—a battered loner struggling to be a good father to a powerful, traumatized youngster. Hopper has his own secret grief, the loss of his daughter Sara years ago. His reluctance to share this with Eleven is understandable but adds to her growing feeling of isolation. Hopper’s plan to hide Eleven from the world may keep her off the government’s radar, but it does little to heal the wounds of her childhood spent being experimented upon in a laboratory, cut off from the world, from a sense of belonging, from her brokenhearted mother.
Speaking of mothers, in the second season Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers has leveled up in maternal ferocity, this time fighting to save not only her son’s body but also his soul. The show follows the sequel tradition of Alien to Aliens—with the monster a more known quantity, some horror-movie beats are replaced by action-movie beats. Ryder, though, gets to have a classic horror arc: Something is wrong with her child, and she will fight the forces of hell for him.
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Eleven’s psychic wound is the gate that let all this supernatural evil into Hawkins. Season two makes this explicit. The fundamental question of the season is what to do with this gate, this wound: Cauterize it repeatedly? Or take the risks needed to heal it? The new battalion of scientists at the Hawkins lab have opted for containment. With the judicious, regular application of a flamethrower, they think they can keep the gate to the Upside Down charred and inactive. This is paralleled by Hopper’s approach to keeping Eleven safe: The strict isolation he imposes is meant to help but it frustrates Eleven and doesn’t get to the root of the problem.
Eleven was never allowed to feel welcome and at home in the world. She was the child of Omelas, the one innocent made to suffer for the utopia enjoyed by everyone else—the utopia in this case being the United States in the 1980s, which the shadowy experiments on Eleven were intended to help protect from the Soviet menace.
Eleven is not the only child mistreated by irresponsible adults—and I don’t just mean the other government test subject we meet. Several other child characters, such as the new addition to the kids’ D&D party, spunky skater-girl Max, are scarred by the sundering and suturing of their parents’ marriages. While the decision to set the show in the early 1980s sometimes seems to have been made to keep the characters from having cell phones—part of a wider trend of pre-cell-phone, ’80s-set horror movies and shows—it also drops us right into the fallout of the baby boomers’ divorce boom.
The most facile dismissal of Stranger Things is to call it nostalgic kitsch. Yes, it wears its influences on its sleeve—there are obvious nods to Steven Spielberg’s E.T. and Stephen King’s It. There’s also more than a little of Twin Peaks behind Hawkins, the sleepy town full of dark secrets. But the stylized period detail (it’s more an ’80s fantasia than an exacting historical piece) is the backdrop for a rip-roaring story. Like most scary stories worth telling, it’s about children and childhood. It weaves together the fears of children exploring a world too big for them, the fears of teenagers leaving childhood behind, and the fears of parents worried for their vulnerable children. You could call that, respectively, the Stand By Me, Halloween, Exorcist trifecta. But it’s also a structure that highlights the deep, dark things many of us face at each stage of life. It’s not the abstract, existential fear of Lovecraft’s stories but rather the more intimate, familiar, and universal fears of being a human, made vulnerable by one’s love and connection to others.
The monsters of Stranger Things remain mysterious enough that we don’t know what motivates them: animal hunger and instinct, or some rational (but alien) agenda we cannot grasp. But allegorically, the monsters have a clear role—they’re orphan-eaters. Every supernatural evil on the show has its root in the abuse and abandonment of children. That trauma—no, that sin—festers and spreads to imperil everything wholesome. The ethics of the show are clearest on this point. Other patterns appear in its moral universe: Lies, however well-intentioned, always sow chaos; generosity, however foolhardy, always has its reward. But the deepest theme is that parental wrongs are never without ramifications.
A recurring image in both seasons is that of the child characters speeding around on their bicycles, gliding on dark wooded roads lit only by their bike headlights. This free-range childhood is both a throwback idyll and the source of danger and tension—we know what might be lurking in those woods. But it’s not constant supervision that the kids need; helicopter parenting won’t save Hawkins. Hopper tries something like that with Eleven and it proves stifling. What the children need are adults who see them as individuals learning to navigate a morally fraught world, and provide them care, attention, and good examples. Adults who build homes that are sanctuaries from darkness—and places where children can equip themselves to go out and confront the monsters.
Alexi Sargeant is a theater director and culture critic who writes from New York.
