“THE GATE…I OPENED IT…”

“I’M THE MONSTER.”

 

ELEVEN

*1 The Prince of Demons from Dungeons & Dragons (for a primer, see this page). But the creature’s origins date back much further: the name Demogorgon appears in reference to a frightening demon in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and in even earlier writings. A Georgia gaming enthusiast named Damon Paul painted the two-headed figure shown in the first episode.

*2 The troupe of boys recalls the self-proclaimed “Goonies” of the 1985 film: Mikey (played by future Stranger Things 2 star Sean Astin; nerdy Data (Ke Huy Quan); talkative Mouth (Corey Feldman); and chubby Chunk (Jeff Cohen). At the start of their last weekend together before Mikey moves away, the gang discovers a treasure map that leads them on a series of picaresque adventures involving pirates and a family of not-very-bright mobsters.

*3 The set encouraged a spirit of play. Vintage board games line the shelves of the Wheelers’ basement, and in the corner sits a Rubik’s cube. The goal of Erno Rubik’s puzzle cube, invented in 1974, is to twist rows of smaller cubes until each side displays a solid-colored face. Obsession with the cube reached a fever pitch in the early 1980s, when children like Mike would devote hours to figuring out the puzzle.

*4 To find locations that felt appropriate for a small town not yet enveloped by suburban sprawl, the crew scouted woodland areas across the northern foothills region of Georgia, an environment in which pines often predominate on former farms.

*5 The exterior location for the Wheelers’ home is a private residence outside Atlanta, Georgia, originally constructed in 1963. The property is a common example of suburban architecture from the era, and it really is situated on a cul-de-sac.

*6 Upstairs, Mrs. Wheeler favored wallpaper in floral and chinoiserie patterns, though downstairs she left a mishmash of masculine plaid wallpaper and wood paneling. “We pored over dozens and dozens of huge books of wallpaper,” says production designer Chris Trujillo. “In some cases, we would find something we liked as a reference point. Then, if we couldn’t find something that we were happy with that existed, in a couple of instances, we had the paper made specially for us.”

*7 Karen’s desire to keep the house just so extends to her children’s bedrooms, which occupy the upper floor. Older daughter Nancy’s room is decorated in pinks, while Mike’s room is a traditional blue. It also contains a subtle homage to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, courtesy of set decorator Royal: “Growing up, I always remembered that the mini-blinds in Elliott’s (Henry Thomas) bedroom were rainbow. I wanted to do a version of that in Mike’s room.”

*8 Macramé is a craft similar to knitting, but rather than stitching yarn together, macramé artists tie knots in string to create patterns. Macramé may be decorative, or macramé textiles can be used as bedspreads or tablecloths. In the 1970s, macramé wall hangings and holders for hanging plants were very popular.

*9 Joyce’s home is strewn with vestiges of ’70s design such as the crocheted throw often draped on her couch. Crochet is a yarn craft invented as a less expensive way to make lace-like fabrics. It comes from the French word croche, meaning hook, and is performed by knotting loops using a needle with a hook at one end. In the 1960s and 1970s, crocheting really took off. Stripes, chevrons, and “granny squares” were among the most popular patterns of the day.

*10 This foreboding fog recalls John Carpenter’s 1980 horror film The Fog, in which supernatural phenomena occur on the eve of a small town’s centenary.

*11 Only seen at the end of Steven Spielberg’s film, the shark from Jaws nevertheless remained an ominous threat. The Duffer brothers took a cue from the less-is-more approach in cultivating suspense, waiting until later episodes to reveal the Demogorgon in all his glory.

*12 The English author is the most revered fantasy author of all time, having written The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, elaborate fictions set in a faraway land known as Middle-earth. Mike and the other boys would have known Tolkien’s works backward and forward.

*13 The Atlanta building has a foreboding history well suited to the Stranger Things story line. From 1965 to 1997, the forty-two-acre campus was home to the Georgia Mental Health Institute, a 141-bed psychiatric hospital jointly operated by Emory and state authorities (it now houses the university’s Continuing Education Department). The imposing structure has appeared in other productions as well, including the acclaimed 2016 NASA docudrama Hidden Figures about female mathematicians in the 1960s.

*14 Firestarter is a 1980 book by Stephen King that follows Charlie McGee, a nine-year-old skilled at pyrokinesis—she can start fires with her mind—who’s abducted by a secret government agency that wants to use her as a weapon for its own nefarious ends. As in Stranger Things, use of this special skill causes nosebleeds, but in Firestarter, it’s the girl’s psychic father who’s afflicted with them. Drew Barrymore played Charlie in the 1984 film.

*15 Foreigner’s power ballad “Waiting for a Girl Like You” (1981) plays as Nancy sleeps with Steve for the first time—completely unaware that her best friend is being sucked into a nightmare dimension only one floor below.

*16 In the film, after Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) spots a UFO, he can’t shake the image of a mountain from his mind. Like Joyce Byers, his behavior appears to become increasingly neurotic. He even sculpts the peak out of the mashed potatoes his wife serves for dinner one night.

*17 The mother in Poltergeist (1982) also uses a household electronic device to communicate with her child who is lost in a netherworld. The film (written and produced by Steven Spielberg, but directed by Tobe Hooper) is a prescient parable on the evils of too much screen time. In a planned community in Orange County, California, a young girl hears voices emanating from the family’s TV set when programming is off the air. Her parents only hear static. Eventually, she is sucked into another dimension; she calls out for help through the television. In Stranger Things, Eleven becomes entranced by the TV screen in a similarly eerie way, and electric devices of all kinds offer conduits and signals of interference from the other side. Both productions could be read as allegories of the modern human struggle with technology that threatens to overpower us.

*18 Ryder’s nuanced depiction of a mother moving through the stages of grief showcased not only Joyce’s vulnerability and despair, but also her rage. Angry and frustrated by the idea that her son is trapped just beyond her reach, she takes an axe to the wall in her living room, determined to break through to her son. The moment is somewhat reminiscent of The Shining (1980), in which Jack Nicholson’s character breaks down a bathroom door to reach his wife—though his motivations are more lethal.

*19 The school was named for the Founding Father who famously uttered, “Give me liberty, or give me death.”

*20 Amateur radio (colloquially known as ham radio) involves using a radio for communication for noncommercial purposes and/or to exchange messages. Science teacher Mr. Clarke obtained his setup from Heathkit, a company that makes kits for assembling electronic devices ranging from clocks to weather stations. A short-wave radio can be used to communicate across long distances.

*21 The frocks that became ubiquitous among a generation of girls took their name from an old English nursery rhyme: “Little Polly Flinders/Sat among the cinders,/Warming her pretty little toes./Her Mother came and caught her,/And whipped her little daughter,/For spoiling her nice new clothes.”

*22 The first real athletic shoe was introduced to the public in 1923, when American basketball player Charles “Chuck” Taylor joined a team sponsored by the Converse Company called the Converse All Stars.

*23 Seeing Eleven in Nancy’s old dress and a long blonde wig evokes the moments in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in which Gertie (Drew Barrymore) initially treats the alien creature like a doll, adorning him in her favorite finery—blonde wig, floral frock, mink stole, rhinestones, and pearls. Her brother protests, “You should give him his dignity.”

*24 The famed 1844 novel by French author Alexandre Dumas chronicled the 17th-century adventures of a young man named d’Artagnan who fell in with a trio of formidable swordsmen: Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. It’s also the name of an excellent candy bar made from chocolate and whipped nougat. Both the book and the candy are referenced in Stranger Things 2.

*25 Before the era of GPS and Google Maps, a simple compass was the easiest way to navigate. Compasses feature a freely rotating needle that interacts with the Earth’s own magnetic field to determine in what direction north lies. However, the instrument is not infallible: disruptions in the Earth’s magnetic field can alter its readings (a fact Eleven used to her advantage).

*26 The isolation-tank scenes have drawn some comparisons to the film Altered States, which stars William Hurt as a professor who experiments with psychedelic drugs while inside a sensory-deprivation tank. The movie served as a key reference point for Stranger Things production designer Chris Trujillo as he was early in the process of conceptualizing sets for the series.

*27 The black room with the black-water floor is reminiscent of the “black room” in Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who lures men into her lair who get absorbed into the black water and digested.

*28 1980s men’s mullets came in numerous variations: the Country mullet (think Billy Ray Cyrus), the Heavy Metal mullet (à la Whitesnake), the Wet-Gel mullet (Lionel Ritchie). Steve’s version is most reminiscent of the meticulously coiffed New Wave mullet made popular by stars like John Taylor of Duran Duran, though Steve doesn’t have the frosted bangs . . . yet.

*29 A bear trap has spring-powered steel jaws that are prompted to close tightly around an animal’s leg when triggered.

*30 The spiked bat Steve Harrington uses against the Demogorgon might be seen as a real-life incarnation of one of the weapons in the Dungeons & Dragons arsenal, the club.

*31 Haunting figures in hazmat suits, like those Hopper and Joyce don in this sequence, cast a long shadow over the cinema of the 1970s and ’80s, cropping up in films such as Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Romero’s The Crazies.

*32 This sense of foreboding that accompanies the otherwise joyous moment of a lost child’s return may again recall Poltergeist or the Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost” (1962).