Stranger Things and the Screams of Children

Dr. Brenner and Eleven trying to recapture her powers in Stranger Things 4

Not much terrifies horror movie audiences anymore. The apparition of Death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal became a seriocomic plug in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. When male deaths became banal following horror classics like Psycho and Jaws, female deaths became the mainstay of the slasher movie boom in the 1980s and early 1990s. But children’s deaths still have the power to stir deep-seated horror.

Stranger Things 4 released on May 27th, 2022—three days after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting. When the first packet of episodes dropped, the Blue Wall of Silence was still out-and-out lying about what happened inside Robb Elementary. Episode Seven featured series protagonist Eleven walking barefoot on broken glass through a bloodstained corridor while dying children wailed for mercy offscreen. Uvalde police refused to release body-cam footage.

I’ve written before that I can watch horror flicks and sleep like a baby. I actually found A Nightmare on Elm Street tedious and dated. So when I say Episode Seven, entitled “The Massacre at Hawkins Lab,” kept me awake, I’m not exaggerating. Not only because of its content, but also its real-world relevance. The show’s creative team couldn’t possibly have anticipated the most chilling words to emerge from Uvalde:

“The screams of children have been edited out.”

A recurrent theme this season is the suffering people endure when they don’t take responsibility for their actions. The first victim, Chrissy Cunningham, dies while attempting to purchase cannabis to numb the vicious criticisms in her head. The second, Fred Benson, is literally running from public judgment when the still-faceless monster catches him. Ensemble member Max’s secrets, concealed carefully even from herself, dribble out slowly.

Most importantly, as Dr. Brenner explains in Episode Five, “The Nina Project,” Eleven herself blocked the memories of the broken-glass incident. She made her subsequent life all about denying responsibility for the numerous deaths, the suffering inflicted on other children, deaths and suffering for which she does hold partial responsibility. She denies this event so thoroughly that she forgot everything in life to that point, even her ability to speak.

The moment Eleven discovers the truth

While America watched Stranger Things on evenings and weekends, facts dribbled out about Uvalde incrementally. Official statements claimed the shooter was, then later was not, impeded by school staff. Similarly, early press releases claimed that police rushed boldly into the building. We now know that, though police endered the building only three minutes after the shooter, they dithered in the hallway, permitting the shooter 77 minutes of unrestricted access to children.

As a more comprehensive narrative emerged from Uvalde, Twitter users leapt onto one iconic image: one police officer apparently answering his phone, which had a Punisher logo lock screen. The entire Punisher mythology derives from a post-Vietnam reactionary narrative that America is rotting from within, and needs a muscular, morally untainted superhero to save it. Punisher mythology isn’t necessarily racialized, except yes it damn well is.

Stranger Things 4 has a massively braided narrative, and several characters never meet face-to-face until the final episode. But one narrative strand spotlights Eleven, possessor of massive psionic abilities, striving to regain the superpowers she lost last season. Like Neo in The Matrix, Eleven is already the Chosen One; she simply needs to claim her abilities. Mike and Will do their part, sure, but they’re essentially Eleven’s cheerleading section.

Contrast this with Steve, Nancy, and Robin, who literally venture into Vecna’s lair, bearing Molotov cocktails and a sawed-off shotgun. While the officially designated Chosen One lingers in an off-books desert laboratory, struggling to regain her powers (and Dr. Brennan wants to keep her there even longer), those who actually live with the carnage show courage enough to confront it. The question, then: is rescue (salvation) something you have?

Or something you do?

Throughout, a continuing subplot features golden-haired, exquisitely Aryan basketball captain Jason Carver seeking someone to blame for the murders. Faced with the evidence that the violence in Hawkings is systemic, not individual, Jason chooses to ignore this, placing responsibility individually upon Eddie Munson. Fixing Hawkins would require rooting out corruption throughout the down, but that’s just too hard.

Stranger Things 4 couldn’t have possibly been commenting on Uvalde, because Uvalde happened later. Yet the parallels are remarkable. Which leads me to conclude that the cultural threads underlying both stories already existed in American culture, and probably aren’t expunged yet. Watching Eleven walk across bloodstained, broken glass, I felt legitimate terror. And I suggest I felt that because the monster is still in the room right now.