What are we running for?
When there's nowhere we can run to, anymore.
-Pat Benatar, Invincible
Well, I'm up there beside The Magic Man
And he laid some tricks on me
He said, "You do need help, my friend."
I whispered, "Obviously."
-Blue Oyster Cult, Shooting Shark
"The lost entity would very soon after death find himself unable to stay in Kamaloka, and would be irresistibly drawn in full consciousness into "his own place," the mysterious eighth sphere, there to slowly disintegrate after experiences best left undescribed.
If, however, he perishes by suicide or sudden death, he may under certain circumstances...hold himself back from that awful fate by a death in life scarcely less awful-the ghastly existence of the vampire.
Since the eighth sphere cannot claim him until after death of the body, he preserves it in a kind of cataleptic trance by the horrible expedient of the transfusion into it of blood drawn from other human beings...and thus postpones his final destiny by the commission of wholesale murder."
-C.W. Leadbetter, "The Astral Plane, It's Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena"
"Thou shalt find
That I shall resume the shape,
Which thou dost think, I have cast off
Forever!"
-King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4, William Shakespeare
Riddle me this, riddle me this, riddle me that,
I'll bet you don't know just where I'm at.
-Toots and The Maytals, In the Dark
"Moreover, you shall eat no blood whatsoever, whether of fowl or of animal, in any of your dwelling places."
-Leviticus 7:26, The Bible
"Now, let's get down to it, boppers..."
-The Warriors
This is part of my ongoing exegesis on the Netflix series hereby known as STRANGER THINGS, specifically the 4th season, although I'm also going to talk about 3. If you want to see my breakdown of season 3, go here: Stranger Things 3! - The Weird. You can start at the beginning right here: The Monster in Stranger Things.
I must warn you the writing style of these exegesis's is based on me talking to you at a bar or in your house. It's conversational. I'm going to wander around, messing with sticks and rope, until you notice we've just built a tent. That's why there are pauses and so many commas. I'm talking to you, not writing at you.
We still are going to discuss STRANGER THINGS 3 some more. It's just that we need to discuss season 4 before we go back in time to fully understand season 3. When we do go back, we will talk about the real meaning behind THE NEVER ENDING STORY, and why it was referenced at the end of season 3.
We are still discussing season 3, it's just that we are engaging in time travel, which is what they will have to do in season 5 to prevent the horrifying gate that opened in season 4, which was a reference to the 80's horror classic THE GATE. The show has been bringing up time travel in some sort of predictive programming method (in the movie theater BACK TO THE FUTURE is showing, and a flaming 11 appears as the Delorean vanishes.
Here are my predictions for STRANGER THINGS 5:
1) There's going to be serial killers, as in, mind controlled murderers, including a cult.
2) There's going to be time travel. This will fix the gate opening up. The Montauk Project STRANGER THINGS references was based on time travel.
3) There's going to be extraterrestrials/UFO's. The 80's were full of films involving aliens from space and all that. So it has to show up for the show to be complete.
4) The evil black mold disease in the house will have an extraterrestrial origin from somewhere long ago back in time.
5) The disease infects people. If they are evil, the get possessed and the disease controls them. It wants to duplicate, just like it told Billy in the warehouse at the beginning of season 4. Once it fully infects a person, they can be transformed. There might be a person that is completely evil and replaced, who has been in the show for a while.
6) Papa was killed in season 1. He was duplicated when Demogorgon killed him. There will be another Papa (Brenner) in season 5.
STRANGER THINGS 4 did it's best to get away from Eleven's problem being a tulpa of her doppleganger, or dark side. That's ok, because I'm here to point out that don't worry, tulpas are still a problem, so was The House in the show (it was always The House, since the first season), and nothing has changed. Demogorgon is still a tulpa, Vecna wasn't there since the beginning, and the Creel isn't The Big Bad, he's a possessed boy that somehow ended up in Eleven's head. Literally.
As previously mentioned your humble writer used to compose these STRANGER THINGS essays, put them up on the Internet, and then watch as YouTube video makers referenced the information without citing the original creator (me). Documentaries cite references. So do college papers and scientific abstracts.
That's why I took so long to write this. To make sure nobody copied my writing. For example...nobody figured out the reference to Molisar in season 4. Or that the Creel boy was possessed by The House. Or why his father blinds himself, and lives, whereas Eleven watched Creel die, and was possessed by him via quantum entanglement through here memories. That's why Vecna isn't looking for Eleven, anymore. He's in her head. Last season, it was the opposite, to take her powers.
Besides, if it was Vecna all along, we wouldn't have a season 5.
CROW SWORDS PUS ILLS
I'd like to draw attention to the crossword puzzle Eleven's father is working on in the first episode of season 4. Look at the answers. They correspond to the names involved in Eleven's strange Kali dream sequence in the previous season, where she was wandering around a warehouse with those odd people.
The warehouse is a cube, with cubes and squares everywhere. That's the crossword puzzle. Maybe it was a telepathic link to Papa. Maybe she was in his mind, or vice versa. Freeze the frame and look for words like "Kali" and the names involved in the dream sequence from season 3. They are the same for a reason.
Papa's symbol is the black cube, a powerful symbol of evil you see in film's like HELLRAISER.
THE KEEP YOUSE PROMISES
I also watched STRANGER THINGS 4, every single damn episode, and suddenly realized, a) no YouTube video maker out there will notice that Vecna looks like Molisar from the 80's horror film THE KEEP, and b) I might not know what the frack I'm talking about. Vecna? Who is he? We've never seen that dude before. So he is the big bad behind everything? If so, have all my theories and essays been for nothing?
Before we go further, I disagree that "...Vecna has been there the whole time." Since episode 1 of season 1. Why? Because when Vecna kills people, unlike The Mind Flayer or The Demogorgon or the young Demogorgon hellhounds, they drain blood. Vecna does something else, leading to horrifically mangled, drained corpses. The audience never saw those until season 4, so Vecna didn't do that until then.
If he was, then the only explanation is that he didn't have Eleven's power, yet. Also remember that the disease is Vecna. To The Shadow, disease, black rot, whatever, the dimension is a personality, and everything it uses to obtain blood and bioelectricity is just a tool, like Vecna, Demogorgon, or Demodogs.
So I went back and watched every single episode while I was writing scripts for Hollywood and realized something. A dirty, dark secret nobody has ever told you. This may break your heart. Like finding out there is no Tooth Fairy. You know the Dungeon Master you grew up with? That came up with all those zany plots you had so much fun playing? Sorry, your DM lied to you.
When a player in your game decides to be a cynical smartass and suddenly announce to the entire plot of your creation to the others so your entire plot is ruined, all you can do, aside from killing the motherless bastard with a rusty knife, is to smile, nod, and completely change your entire plot from the foundation up. Like Carl Jung said, "If they can't take a hero's journey, fuck 'em."
Now the princess is a powerful vampire wizard that pretended to be kidnapped by the dragon. The evil drow elf assassin following the party around is really a spy trying to warn them that their employer is evil. Major villains are dismissed, minor NPC's become the real bad guys hiding in plain sight disquised as the populace, friends become foes and before they know it, your players are playing in an entirely new plot, without even knowing it.
That's Vecna.
Because of the appearance of a villain that has been there all along, it's time to look back at the last three seasons to see if we missed it. We did, in a way. The house Vecna is in showed up before in the upside down. The red, horrific storm in the background was seen in Billy's mind. Even (spoiler alert) Billy's horrific fate at the end of Stranger Things 3 foreshadows Vecan in Stranger Things 4. It's also a clue.
I'll give The Duffer Brothers credit. They showed us the house in the very beginning, staring at us like a skull, and we just forgot. Even I included a picture of it. So here is what happened: The house is full of evil, like a disease or psychic message. It possessed the little boy, because he is a total sociopath who can contain such evil...good people, who feel guilt, are destroyed.
Look at when the father is thinking of when the family moved into the evil house in season 4. Pay attention to the little evil kid. His eyes are rolling up in his head. He's possessed...but because he was a sociopath who felt no guilt, he became Vecna. The House became him. When Vecna tells his story, it's all there. It's not Creel's perspective, it's The House that possessed the boy, who was a natural sociopath, like many serial killers during the 80's.
His eyes are rolling up in his head, the whites are showing, and he's tripping from the psychic link. Yet, he doesn't die. The evil boy is the perfect vessel for the house. Later, he died, and has lived as an image in Eleven's head, trying to get out. Vecna still lives, in her head as cancer, absorbing spirits of guilty people to feed him, trying to find another vessel to possess. Vecna is a prisoner of the house, like Billy was a prisoner, and so was Molisar.
JUST WHAT PAPA BRENNER WANTED ELEVEN TO DO
Speaking of which, notice the sequence. Vecna possessing the person by finding them in the vast darkness where/like Eleven found that Russian spy. He transmits to them, possessing them, the way the house possessed Creel. Their eyes roll up, then they bleed. When the scientists reprogram her memories with VHS tapes, she's getting possessed by that force, getting her powers back. It's quantum entanglement, again.
Look carefully. Creel appears during the sequence, stepping out of the mirror, and also Eleven's head. When she blows him to bits (just like Demogorgon in season 1...which explains the maneuver, she used it before) he goes into the mirror. Except that doesn't make sense. You can't go in a mirror in STRANGER THINGS. So he goes into her head, a last second move to survive, transmitting his consciousness via quantum entanglement.
In THE KEEP Molisar is a powerful entity, probably an archon (fallen angel) stuck inside a, uh, keep (surprise) who can't get out. For all of his paranormal abilities, the entity can never leave because of a barrier comprised of silver T's (Da'ath symbols in the Jewish Kaballah) and so must empower and manipulate others. He is eventually defeated by Scott Glen, some sort of angel, for rather obscure reasons.
For all of his power, Vecna is stuck in the house. That's the secret. The key. We weren't told the history of that house. Who owned it, originally? Why didn't anyone ever talk about that house before? Again, did you notice the little boy gets possessed when he walks into the house? Watch that scene. When the father talks about first entering the place, in the lower corner the boy's eyes are turning milky white and he starts trippin'. That's a clue.
Another important series of clues are given to us in season 3. The Russian guard at the scientific research lab calls the strange, black cloud "The Shadow" and says it enters to bodies of the Demogorgons to reanimate them. Billy's medallion that he wears, even when he is possessed, is a reference to Vecna's human name in season 4, Henry Creel, which is also a clue. Let's put them together.
If The Duffer Brothers changed everything it would make logical sense. Many other people like me have written about the connections to The Montauk Project. The series is still using that conspiracy theory, in the background. My theory is that because (spoiler alert) the house is utterly destroyed by the end of season 3, time travel will be necessary (using Eleven's cool and fruity astral projection powers to visit the past) to find out who lived in that house before the Creel's walked in, and how Eleven's mother is connected, if she is.
Another big arsed clue is the shadow. The Russians call it that. Carl Jung calls it that. I called it that years ago. After Eleven (spoiler alert) blows Creel to Hades (or the mind of someone else...people can go into the minds of other people now, thanks to Eleven's other cool and fruity power, piggybacking) or wherever he goes (now we have another dimension, underneath The Vale of Shadows and the upside-down) Creel looks up and sees a shadow. He thinks he's controlling the shadow. Is it controlling him?
WHERE THERE WAS A WILL, THERE IS A WAY
Which came first, the shadow or the Creel? This is the question. The shadow is the source of everything. It possesses Will and Billy. It animates the Demogorgons in Russia. At the beginning of Season 3, the Russians fire lightning into the crack into another dimension, reanimating the shadow in the warehouse where Billy goes and tingling Will's spider sense. Vecna is stuck in the house. Why isn't Vecna able to go to where Creel used to hang out at as a kid? Because the shadow in the house, and the shadow controls everything.
THE CLOCK WITH THE HOUSE IN IT'S WALLS
By the way, the reason people infected by the disease/possessed by Vecna see the clock, is because he sees the clock. It's also a reference to the sci fi horror kid's classis, THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN IT'S WALLS and Saturn, aka Da'ath, aka death, the spiritual wormhole spirits end up going too, transporting them back to Hades in The Kaballah.
At the same time, I'm not backing down from the theory that the whole problem is because of a tulpa, somewhere inside Eleven's head. The entire sequence where Vecna showed up is goofy. He appears inside of a mirror, inside of her head, while her memories are being manipulated in a sequence eerily similar to when HAL's memories are being altered in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODDYSEY. The entire sequence where Creel is introduced feels like THE SHINING.
Creel even seems like a reflection of Eleven. Considering how goofy the idea is, that The Hawkins scientists can just plug VHS tapes into her head to show her videos that are her memories...huh? In the 80's? Are they serious? Carefully consider what Eleven is told: "We recorded what happened to you, which you don't remember. Watch these VHS tapes and you'll get your power back."
This means they could show Eleven fake images, creating fake memories, gaslighting her into being something she isn't. Something the scientists want...a woman with psychic powers who is evil. Then she would kill anyone they wanted her too, like she wouldn't do before. Hence the tulpa, Demogorgon.
Why does Creel see Demogorgon crawling out of where he's going, when Eleven kills him, and he's walking around some blasted hellscape, similar to Tartarus? Creel is in her head, via quantum entanglement. He's become a memory that haunts her, possessing her like a ghost, connected by Vecna.
Have you noticed that by the beginning of season 4, Eleven is a rather horrible person? Seriously, she's bad. Her first reaction to any sort of bullying isn't changing her clothing, her attitude, her haircut, thinking about how bizarre Eleven is, or anything like that. She screams and tries to kill them all, like a school shooter/mass murderer that kills everyone at their high school because some kids bullied them.
GROWING UP WITH GOOD TELEVISION
Which makes me wonder...is Eleven really in the 80's? Let's look at the children's television shows she would have access too: PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON...as story about getting along with others despite bullying. THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRARIE, an ongoing series about people working together, without violence, to create a good society.
THE CARE BEARS, which avoided violence to get kids to understand that negative behavior, like social bullying, gaslighting, lying and otherwise, had repercussions which hurt others and caused a person to devolve. Isn't she watching those shows?
The answer is that Vecna is in her head. Creel survived after she blew him up, ending up insider her mind via quantum entanglement, possessing her. It's why her eyes were bleeding, like the people Vecna possesses. When the high school journalist nerd gets infected, his noses bleeds, and he sees people taunting him. They are illusions.
So the answer is that Vecna is causing people to tease Eleven, to cause her pain and separate her from the people that could stop him. The disease, that other dimension with all the tentacles and flying monsters, Vecna...can control people and project illusions. We saw all that in season 3. So that is what is happening to Eleven, so it drives her crazy. She's being gaslighted by her own mind. Eleven is literally projecting.
COUNT THE HAUNTED HOUSES
In 80's horror films the house is the problem. People walk in, and sometimes they don't walk about. Remember that in THE AMYTIVILLE HORROR the fathers both get possessed and kill, or try to kill, their families. It's like a disease people get from the house that leads to dementia so they kill people, similiar to rabies or brain tumors. That's what the disease, the shadow, in the house did to little Creel, making them into Vecna.
HOUSE and HOUSE II are about haunted houses that induce hallucinations and lead to different dimensions. THE KEEP is about a giant haunted house. So is THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. The family in POLTERGEIST moved into the wrong house. So is BURNT OFFERINGS and THE CHANGELING. The Japanese horror film THE GRUDGE is about a house you should never go into. The real problem with any haunted house horror film is why people don't leave the damn thing. The Creel's obviously left too late.
I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE is a Netflix film almost created for Stranger Things 4. I suggest it. It's practically the plot of Stranger Things 4 if my theory is correct. The Netflix horror film is about (spoiler alert) a woman who gets her head whacked off in a house her husband built. The woman's body is then hidden in the walls of the house, becoming black mold. This black mold infects people, who see the ghost of the murdered woman before they die of a heart attack.
My theory is that is what happened to Creel as a young boy when he walked into the house. Everyone else ends up the same way...their eyes turn white, they levitate, blood runs out of their eyes, their bones break as their bodies contort and they die, drained of...something. What is it? Bioelectricity? Their memories? Their souls?
BUSTIN' LOOSH
In the occult, "loosh" is a phrase for the bioelectricity, or chi, evil entities and psychic vampires (or just vampires) drain out of you when they drink your blood or just cause suffering. In David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS, his term for loosh is "gorgonzola," and it's usually depicted as creamed corn. Although clumsy, the metaphor is about pain not just being a torturer's pleasure, it's their food.
THE OCCULT AIN'T CUTE
The Theosophy quote we started this whole conversation with above about vampires explains every horror film villain you see. They are demonic entities that were either never human, or partially. They exist in The Astral Plane...The Upside Down...The Kamaloka...possessing people, obtaining loosh, and then they are gone. Mass murderers? Werewolves. Cult leaders? Vampires. Serial Killers? Either or. Who cares? It's all bad.
When you read dusty occult manuals regarding ghosts, demons, haunted places and the realms of the dead ("The Realms of the Dead" would be a great name for a goth industrial band. Lol! Sorry, just trying to lighten the mood) like C. W. Leadbetter's "The Astral Plane, It's Inhabitants, Scenery and Phenomena" (aka Theosophical Manual No. 5) there's a scary warning about the afterworld: it wants you...and it wants to be you.
When Billy communicates to his double created by the Thassalhydra, it says it wants to build, revealing copies of other beings it has consumed. Remember, in STRANGER THINGS the entity is a collective. The beings that allow it to feed from wherever it is are just mindless appendages. There are like masks for a villain with a thousand faces. It's also a disease...which mindlessly wants to spread, duplicate, and is a mass consciousness on a micro level.
A SIMPLE OCCULT REASON(ING)
C.W. Leadbetter's book describes ghosts as being like recordings, or etheric shells, similar to Russian dolls. Necromancy and really black magic is really bad because nasty entities like vampires, werewolves, necromancers and worse can wear ghosts like a costume, manipulating you, using you for your loosh, through the shedding of blood or otherwise.
Whenever you hear a story in the local news about Ouija boards being around mass suicides, or when a parent goes berserk and kills their family (and themselves) that's a werewolf or vampire. Sure, you think you are talking to a dead friend or relative, but underneath that etheric shell is a thing that will use people long enough to use them up, leaving blood in their wake.
In FREDDY VERSUS JASON, it's finally revealed that Jason Voorhees also kills people and stores their spirits in some bog, keeping him around. Freddy mentions doing that in the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series, too.
That's Vecna...and the consuming force behind him. It's important to remember, throughout the entire STRANGER THINGS series, that the biggest problem the good guys face is the bad guy is never really dead, just defeated, like the Eye of Sauron. They whack entities left and right, or drive it away like the cloud/shadow that possessed Will, yet the really Big Bad is behind the violence and untouchable from their dimension.
All the monsters in our horror films, whether they are slashers, vampires, demons, draugars (that's Viking for a talking zombie that can use weapons and eats animals/people) are all just entities slaughtering the actors we see on film and TV are really just feeding another entity...the audience. Us. We are the dark, blood-drinking force the director feeds.
The monsters in horror films kill for us, and the characters in their stories can do nothing to stop us. We are in a different dimension, drinking deep with our eyes and ears. Draining "loosh," or "gorgonzola" in the films of David Lynch.
The real problem is that damn cloud, in another dimension, filtering through the house, looking for people to possess. Notice how the entity describes the boy as having no empathy. Meanwhile, when Vecna is looking around for people to feed on, he looks for guilty people. So the boy he possessed grew up to be the perfect predator.
When Eleven destroyed Creel, where did he go? The mirror. Where did Creel come from? As they manipulate Eleven's memories, i.e. gaslight her, i.e. reprogram her, Creel appears out of the mirror, like a double. Eleven's double. Here evil alter ego. Her id. The demon she's been fighting in another form. That's my theory. The problem isn't Vecna. It's the cloud, the house, and whatever is in that house that possesses people. It's also related to seeing the image, which is why Creel's blinded father lives.
Notice how Vecna is constrained by the tentacles. Held in place. Look familiar? Like Billy ended up from last season, right? Because Billy was a prisoner, held in place, forced to do the bidding of a greater evil, just like Vecna. Besides, by the end of season 4 Vecna is smoldering dog food.
So if it was him along, who will be the villain in the next season? The same villain it always was...Eleven's dark twin, the cloud, the house and the gate...they will just send another monster, another Yellow King to represent Hastur the Unspeakable, just like last season and every season.
What about Demogorgon? It's simple. Let's look at African voodoo. When Eleven absorbed Creel, he ended up as an image, or memory in her mind because of quantum entanglement...the concept that an image of an object can be linked, by electrons, to a copy.
His soul, the gros bon ange, is stuck in her head, and The House. His spirit, or ti bon ange, ended up as Demogorgon. That's why he watches it crawl away, from where he is in her brain. It's starving, so it feeds on the guilty, temporarily possessing them to be drained. Or it could be he saw the tulpa appear when Eleven though about it, when she found the Russian spy Eleven was sent to kill, just like Vecna does.
Now, for my last confession.
