1 - Opening the Gate: Reconfiguring the Child Victim in Stranger Things

Summary

Abstract

The hit Netflix original series Stranger Things (2016–) cites several influential horror texts which depict children either as passive victim or monstrous threat. Children frequently occupy these polarised positions in horror films aimed at adult audiences, exposing adult fears over the child’s growing social power, knowledge and autonomy. With young as well as adult viewers in mind, Stranger Things self-consciously sets out to avoid the ideological trappings of its resurrected horror texts, mobilising its informing sources not just for nostalgia but also for reflection and critique. This chapter explores how Stranger Things initiates a shift from the child’s long-established position as horror victim to actively engaged horror participant.

Keywords: Duffer Brothers, children, horror, trauma, monster, Netflix

Set in the 1980s, the hit Netflix original series Stranger Things (The Duffer Brothers, 2016–) cites many influential horror texts from the period, where children feature either as passive victims or monsters masquerading under the guise of childhood innocence. In a flashback from the opening episode, Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) presents her twelve-year-old son Will (Noah Schnapp) with tickets to see Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), a film about a helpless child who disappears through a television set and is held at the mercy of evil spirits (ST 1.1). Like Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) in Poltergeist, Will disappears inside a frightening parallel realm known as the Upside Down, where he must hide from a carnivorous monster until Joyce finds him and brings him home. In the show’s second season, Will becomes possessed by a dangerous entity referred to by his friends as the Mind Flayer (ST 2.8) and recalls “an icon in American mass culture” which reached popularity in 1970s horror cinema (Schober 12). Textual allusions to demonic child films such as The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973), The Omen (Donner, 1976) and Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984) feature in several episodes, as Will, although appearing as himself, now poses a threat to those around him and the lives of his friends and family.

Children frequently occupy these polarised positions in horror films aimed at adult audiences, with the victim-monster binary exposing adult fears of losing a child to monstrous forces or a turn to monstrosity, but also to the child’s growing social power, knowledge and autonomy.