The Monster in Stranger Things, Part VII - The Weird

This is Part VII of an exploration into the nature of Demogorgon (or The Monster, as I prefer to call it) in the Netflix sci-fi/horror masterpiece, Stranger Things. You can read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here, Part V here and Part VI over here. Spoiler alerts will follow.

NOTHING MIGHT NOT MATTER

You've seen the ad for season two of Stranger Things. I really love how there is a shot of Eleven's mother getting electroshock therapy. That gives us a source for her power. Her mother took some experimental drug, eats a dose of human-made lightning and ta da! We have Eleven. 

What's incredible about the explanation for The Monster, aka Demogorgon, is that we don't need to understand where it came from, or how it works, to enjoy the series. Stephen King's "The Mist" and the works of H.P. Lovecraft operate in a similar capacity. The Unknown doesn't give a damn if you don't understand it. You aren't important enough to the vast darkness of the universe to get an explanation. As I've mentioned before, there is no point where anyone in the series explains the origin of The Monster, and that is OK. 

FEAR OF THE (UN)KNOWN

It's important to remember that what The Duffer Brothers did was create a monster out of concepts that have always existed in modern horror, occult literature, Stephen King's books, Dungeons & Dragons and conspiracy theories found on the Internet. Eleven didn't go into The Vale of Shadows when she encountered her own personal demon. She went into her own mind, a black space referred to by her as The Upside-Down. 

Eleven, just like the USS Eldridge in The Philadelphia Experiment, released an electromagnetic pules that sent her into another dimension. She switched places with The Monster, which escaped from the lab. Nowhere in the series does The Monster seem to show any ability to use telekinesis. When Will is hiding in the shed with a rifle, it is Eleven that opens the door to the shed. She's following light sources, which use electricity and can therefore be seen in The Vale of Shadows. That's why she knows what the boy looks like and feels guilt. When The Monster released an electromagnetic pulse to catch the boy and drag him into the next dimension. Eleven ended up in our world.

Later, when Eleven made The Monster vanish, she basically released an electromagnetic pulse that put it back into the black space that was her inner mind (sounds like the title to a Death Metal album) while she ended up in The Vale of Shadows. The ad for the second season clearly shows Eleven in that place, using a hole The Monster created to go into the real world (which we've seen before with the portal in the tree in the forest), so I'm probably correct.

NO OCCULT AT ALL

Another thing I've noticed is how nowhere in Stranger Things does a person talk about the occult. Will's mother doesn't even talk about ghosts. No demons, no witchcraft. Instead you have teams of scientists working for some evil, deep state section of the government, and that makes the horror all the more realistic. Even The Exorcist had parts where modern science took a stab at what was messing with the girl's mind. When Carol Anne vanishes into the television in Poltergeist, maybe she went to The Vale of Shadows.

"IT" 

Spoiler alerts! I've sure by now you've learned about It and have maybe even see the movie. Although I can't tell you how the second movie will end, I can tell you that after reading the book, it is pretty clear that It is actually a tulpa. Case in point, "The Ritual of Chud", which the children use to banish the monster. This is an obvious reference to Tibetan occult mysticism. As I've mentioned before, Alexandra David-Neel, in her book “Magic and Mystery in Tibet,” discussed how she was taught by practitioners of magik during her 14 years in Tibet how to create a tulpa using another ritual, “The Dubthab Rite.”

In order to teach their students that all reality is an illusion (an observation shared by modern science, the theory of relativity, quantum physics, string theory and probability) Tibetan holy lamas would train practitioners to summon a “real” illusion with “The Dubthab Rite.” David-Neel did so, and according to her created a man dressed like a Medieval friar, believe it or not.

After a while David-Neel claims that the friar became “sly and malignant,” forcing her to banish it with “The Dance of Chod.” She basically sat in a circle, concentrated on the monk, summoned demons from her own mind, and commanded them to destroy the monk. Scary, real or not, according to David-Neel the evil friar was banished and stopped bothering anybody.

It seems to be a tulpa of the violent, horrifying, sexually abusive world that the kids in the book inhabit. Pennywise the Clown is really just a name for an elemental force from another dimension (the book gets really weird by the end) that shows up to kill a lot of innocent people in a regular cycle in order to terrify the survivors enough to feed off their fear. The children banish It with The Ritual of Chud, just like David-Neel banished her own personal demon.

A FRACTURED WHOLE

Eleven was repeatedly abused and ordered to kill the Russian spy with her mind. Similar to the children mentioned in conspiracy theories such as Project MKULTRA, MKOFTEN and Project Monarch, she basically created a tulpa, a splintered personality based on her negative experiences, which killed the spy. The scientists ordered her to make contact with it, so she went into her own mind. After confronting her personal demon, she screamed, creating an electromagnetic pulse that placed the monster in the real world but put her in the Vale of Shadows. 

At the end of Stranger Things, Eleven does the opposite, confronting her personal demon again but this time putting it back in her mind (the black space she calls The Upside-Down) while she ended up in The Vale of Shadows. In the latest ad for season 2, she is seen going through a hole in the wall, probably the same one The Monster/Demogorgon made to enter the real world in the final episode. It all makes sense.

THE COLLAGE TAKES FORM

If The Duffer Brothers wanted to create a visual representation of a character's personal demon, what would it look like? There are numerous clues that can be seen as to why the Monster appears the way it does.  When Eleven contacts it for the first time, she does so in a flesh colored outfit that looks a lot like The Monster when it stands upright. It crouches like the lion doll in her cell. It's head spreads open like a tulip (tulpa/tulip) from the plant that is also in her cell. Compared to the boy fighting it, The Monster seems like a naked adult towering over a child. The flesh colored baseball bat is another Freudian clue. The Monster's head also resembles something else Freudian, from a female perspective.

THE SHINING AND MONARCH

The concept that abused children have psychic powers can be found both on the Internet, the works of Stephen King, and The Shining by Stanley Kubrick. The concept is that an abused kid ends up with a fragmented personality, with each shard, or splinter, having a distinct personality. According to many sources online, Project Monarch was designed to do this. 

"Firestarter" features a child that can control fire because of government experiments that have been done to herself and her family. The little boy in "The Shining" has psychic powers, just like many children with the shining throughout King's books, including It (a careful reader will notice that the children in It have not only all been abused, they also all have psychic powers). The girl in "Carrie" certainly has telekinesis, and she was certainly abused as a child, too.

Eleven may as well have stepped out of these sources. In Stanley Kubrick's version of King's book, Danny not only shines, he does so because his father has been sexually abusing him. Clues leading up to this horrible truth can be found throughout the film, and the subject has been discussed and explored by many film analysis types who know what they are doing. 

Why does Eleven have powers? Because of the drugs her mother took ("Firestarter," Project MKULTRA, "The Girl with the Silver Eyes"), and because she has been abused (The Shining, Project MKULTRA, "It", "Carrie"). What is Demogorgon/The Monster? An alter created to kill people with her mind because Eleven wouldn't do it herself (Project Monarch, Project MKULTRA, MKOFTEN, The Bourne Identity). This monster is an incarnation made flesh, a tulpa ("It", "The Dark Half",  Project Montauk, Tibetan occultism, The X-Files).

The Duffer Brothers didn't make up a monster out of nowhere, they gave us something we have seen before, crafted from horror films, books and conspiracy theories on the Internet. Don't believe me? Google “tulpa” and you'll see more of the evidence I've described. 

THE MONSTER’S RULES

There is a part in the series where Eleven opens the door to a market, walks inside, gets Eggo waffles, leaves with them and then closes the door behind her. Just like The Monster. That scene was there for a reason, to show you the parallel. Remember, as I've mentioned before, Eleven even said that she was The Monster. It certainly seems to follow her around, as if it has to be in orbit around her body even though it is in a parallel dimension.

What does The Monster eat? Electricity. It used to get it inside Eleven's mind. Outside of that, it must still getting what it needs to eat to live. That's why it is attracted to lights, blood, people, etc. It doesn't tear people apart...it swallows them whole to get to the electricity inside. After the biological matter gives up the energy, The Monster spits it up as some sort of egg...a twisted mockery of the human birth cycle (Alien). 

Later, we also see people being glued to walls (like Alien and Aliens) with tubes coming out of their mouths. After they die slugs crawl out of their mouths, which seem to generate an electromagnetic field to get back into The Vale of Shadows, just like The Monster. Touching a light socket can't work. It needs a body to generate the electricity, which Eleven used to do when it was inside her. Aside from the strange way it eats energy, The Monster can only detect what it eats. It doesn't seem to see, hear or smell. Otherwise, it is all very, very Id, and that is the dark side of our psychology, our own personal demon. 

CONCLUSION


The Duffer Brothers could have just used a vampire, werewolf, zombie or otherwise to be the monster in their series. What I've tried to show in this long, drawn out, hopefully not too boring exegesis is to prove that they chose a creature that did indeed exist, drawn from the various sources I've already mentioned. If The Monster turns out to be just another creature living in The Vale of Shadows, so be it. If there is another theory that is completely different yet equally plausible, I'd love to see it.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80057281

The Monster in Stranger Things, Part V - The Weird

This is Part V of an exploration into the nature of Demogorgon (or The Monster, as I prefer to call it) in the Netflix sci-fi/horror masterpiece, Stranger Things. You can read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here and Part IV over here. Spoiler alerts will follow.

MKSEARCH

Early on in the show, Eleven is tracking Russian agents with her mind while scientists study the results. This whole scene is a reference to Project MKSEARCH, which was another program that came out of MKULTRA. It was primarily intended to program people to have ESP, telepathy, and all that other psychotropic funky mind trip stuff. Just like the Russians, the American government wanted to make sure they could either do it themselves, or that it couldn’t work.

What they found, according to conspiracy theory investigators who give more a fuck about it than we do, is pretty horrific. Dr. Cameron was involved, once again, but so was a new mad scientist, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Together they performed more than 150 experiments using chemicals to control the minds of “expendables,” homeless people, children from foster homes, etc. that the government had found to test the chemicals. In 1972 the CIA destroyed all files related to this project. What exactly they discovered, we will never know.

You’ll notice that in the show there is mention of how Eleven’s mother took drugs as part of the government’s investigation into psychic behavior. This is one of the common threads that runs throughout the horrifying story that is our government’s investigation into psychic behavior, according to the conspiracy theories…that the government is testing a drug that will give a person psychic powers, whenever the government wants them to.

Sure, having a mind controlled, programmed wind-up toy is fun, but the ability to give a person, any person in the government psychic powers is something that any government would have to be insane to not want to have. Imagine the potential if you could give a diplomat, politician or spy telepathy or the ability to kill with their mind. It would certainly be better than mind controlling a person who already has psychic powers naturally. You could affect politics on a global scale. 

COMMON CONCEPTS

Running through all of the MK programs that deal with the study of mind control, paranormal and psychic behavior are two important concepts that explain what the government was up to, if the conspiracy theories so many people have written about are to be believed. One is drugs. Over and over, drugs are used to induce behavior, control minds, etc. Go ahead and research all of these programs for yourself. From the Nazi’s to the modern era, you will find that the Powers That Be apparently really want to study drugs, almost as much as the human mind.

The other common concept is systematic sexual abuse, especially in regards to children.

MORE MKOFTEN THAN NOT

I have already mentioned MKOFTEN, and don’t worry…all the usual evil mad scientists end up involved in this conspiracy theory. What is very important is that authors who have worked on the subject like Peter Levenda mention that in this project, and other projects, people with psychic powers were locked in copper lined Faraday cages. Science often uses these cages to block out electromagnetic energy in order to sterilize the environment for outside influence in order to work on very precise, sensitive electronics. Apparently, Faraday cages also increase pyschic power.

When Eleven is forced to hide inside a closet, she has a flashback to when her own father had scientists drag her away from him, traumatized and screaming, into a dark room of sorts. Look over her left shoulder as the image fade to black. The wall is copper. She is in a Faraday cage…a reference to all of the conspiracy theories we’ve just gone through to figure out The Monster.

At one point in the series, Eleven is told by the scientists to kill a cat with her mind, but she doesn’t do it. Think carefully…we are given precious little information about the experiences the little girl had in the lab, so that scene is important. It shows us she won’t take innocent life. But a fragment of her personality, a shard of her psyche, a splinter personality, based on brute-force survival programming, fight or flee psychological instinct…maybe that would. When she first contacts the psychic Russian agent, she walks up to the man and then turns around when she hears The Monster, becoming aware of it.

In the next scene, an obviously upset, traumatized Eleven is alone in a room with her father, a stuffed lion and tulip (tulip/tulpa) flowers. He tells her it chose her, whatever that means. After that, she finds it, touches it, and screams, opening a wormhole into time, space and her own mind, pulling The Monster into the real world, where it destroys and kills with bestial abandon.

By the way, did you notice the time gap at this point? When Eleven summons The Monster, she is wearing a strange, flesh-colored diving suit. When she escapes, she is wearing her hospital gown. Right after she screams, and the massive crack opens in the wall of the lab, we don’t see anything else for a while. The Monster escaped, later. Eleven escaped, later. Time passed…but we don’t know how much. I think we are all going to see more from this missing section when we watch Stranger Things 2.

You have probably figured out by now that the flesh-colored diving suit is a nod to the audience that The Monster is her. Even the helmet makes her head look bulbous and strange. If she had been put in a blue diving suit, The Monster would have been a different color.

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

Modern psychology believes that a human personality is comprised of three sections, the ego, the superego, and the id. The superego is the idealistic part of your brain. That section handles ethics, conscious and morality. If you feel bad because you betrayed an old friend, your superego makes you feel that way. The ego is you, your personality…your self. The id is all of your basic instincts. Anger. Sex. Hunger. Fight. Flee. When you were a little baby, you were basically a screaming id. The ego and the superego came later.

I find it very horrifying, but equally important, that Eleven is always seen with a hospital gown. She doesn’t ever seem to wear normal clothes when she is inside the lab. A hospital gown isn’t exactly a great thing to wear for a long time, seeing as how it doesn’t protect or cover up your body, south of the belt buckle. It is also eerie that she is so willing to strip naked in front of the boys, when she thinks she has been told to strip and change. What kind of terrible environment did she grow up in?

There is also something else…the strange absence of images and visual influences around Eleven in the lab, especially in her cell. Aside from her father, the tulips, the stuffed lion and a few other things, she really doesn’t have a lot to look at and influence her imagination. This was probably done on purpose.

Right before she is dragged away from her father, she is wearing a hospital gown and has been traumatized. Right before she is told to contact The Monster, Eleven seems traumatized, wearing a hospital gown, alone with her father. Even her father’s behavior when he finally gets Eleven is odd. It doesn’t exactly seem like a healthy father/daughter relationship.

There is another thing. Eleven’s father’s skin tone is the same skin tone as The Monster. During the fight with The Monster inside Will’s house later on in the series, when the teens attack it with fire, bullets, a bear trap and a phallic baseball bat, the teens aren’t as tall as The Monster. Compared to it, the teens are almost half its size. Compared to her father, Eleven is almost half his size.

Because The Monster is a reflection of her id, and it looks like things that are in her imagination, combining the images of a tulip, a naked man, sexual imagery, a stuffed lion and raw, animal biology. Was there ever a conspiracy theory that featured a rampaging id monster conjured from a person’s mind, like a scientific tulpa? Of course there is…everything is on the Internet, even pure evil. Maybe if we can find a conspiracy theory about an, “id monster,” for lack of a better term, we could prove my wacky theory…

To be continued!

https://www.netflix.com/title/80057281

The Monster in Stranger Things, Part IV - The Weird

I am sorry I took so long. Halloween is always very busy for me, and by the time I was done, there was no time to post anything on my humble website because I had to make money doing freelance writing, the moonlight was in my eyes, and I had to see a man about a hearse. Here is more information to back up my awesome theory. 

This is Part IV of an exploration into the nature of Demogorgon (or The Monster, as I prefer to call it) in the Netflix sci-fi/horror masterpiece, Stranger Things. You can read Part I here, Part II here and Part III over here. Spoiler alerts will follow, as usual. 

(HELL)O AGAIN

I dropped da bomb regarding my theory several weeks ago. Instead of debating with people who do not believe my theory, it has been more enlightening to read the ideas of others and see if their ideas were more bullet-proof than what I came up with. So far I am quite pleased. In discussing their own ideas, nobody has dived into the conspiracy theories that make up the mythology of Stranger Things, which is very important to the work, in order to explain what The Monster is. 

I’d like to apologize if I mislead anyone into thinking that The Monster in Stranger Things is Eleven’s alter ego. It is not. I referenced other films that dealt with similar themes regarding spontaneously appearing imaginary beings in order to show that the Netflix series was dealing with material that actually had roots in previous film and literature. Now I am going to talk about a few more films, and then I am going to dive into the conspiracy theories that make up The Monster.

That being said, throughout the first episode X-Men #134 is mentioned a lot. In this comic, Phoenix, a female character with awesome psychic powers (including telekinesis) has a dramatic personality change (mind control is involved, of course) and becomes an alter ego, Dark Phoenix, turning evil. The Duffer Brothers would not have mentioned this comic without a good reason.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

The Duffer Brothers did not just reference other films when they were creating the series. They also referenced conspiracy theories on the Internet. Sure, the cinematography, subject matter and other themes draw from serious literary and film influences, but the writing goes beyond that to fulfill its objective. The Internet is a gigantic library of logic and instinct, magik and science, business and entertainment. While wacky conspiracy theories make up much of Stranger Things, so does quantum physics, forbidden science and black magik.

RANDOM CHAOS

The fantastic yet horrific story the Duffer brothers told to entertain us did not include a creature that had no rules whatsoever. If it did, the audience would notice and the story would suffer. Most horror films deal with adversaries that have supernatural origins. However, the supernatural elements still follow guidelines, either because a proper authority tells us the rules, or because the monster in question is based on some cultural mythology that has rules we already understand since we are familiar with the legend, thanks to previous sources. Werewolves can be killed by silver bullets. Vampires can be killed by stakes through the heart. You know the drill, once reminded.

THE RING

The Ring is a horror film about a little girl who dies, becoming a ghost that kills people. In life she expired because her parents dumped the little girl into a well, leaving her to die. Now, anyone who doesn’t share the videotape of her insane, macabre mental images is doomed to be killed by her avenging, somewhat digital image. The bodies seem to be dead because of a heart attack induced by fear. This makes sense. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House features a similar series of circumstances. In The Ring, you have to share the videotape, or you will die. Think about it. The little girl was ignored. Now everyone has to pay attention to her, or they die. Too bad the whole world abandoned VHS for DVD a long time ago.

THE GRUDGE

In The Grudge, a father killed his wife, his child and a cat in his house, somewhere in Japan, right before he committed suicide. Because of this, anyone who enters the former docile of the murdered, doomed family is under a curse. No matter where they go the person sees images of the family until they are killed by the angry ghosts, usually because they have lethal heart attacks induced by fear. While the haunting that kills people seems to have random elements, there is still a pattern by which the narrative is still infused with drama. People walk into the house where the murders occurred. They see something horrible. Bad stuff happens to them in the form of hallucinations that are reminiscent of the members of the family until either the father or the mother kills them. Simple rules. Don’t go in the house, unless you don't enjoy terror, hallucinations and death.

NO RULES?

Just as the Duffer brothers looted past films for Stranger Things, they looted the Internet in a similar way for The Monster. Eleven has rules. So does the splinter from her personality that has incarnated from her mind to terrorize the world. Imagine a series where the monsters had no rules? 1977’s House, a Japanese horror film, seems to be this way. A pack of young girls go to a house where a crazy old woman is hanging out with her cat. Without explanation, bad stuff happens.

A chandelier shoots crystals at people. A young girl loses her head in a well, and it flies around and bites people. A piano eats a young woman. Stacks of flaming wood attack people. People look into mirrors and see monstrous versions of themselves until their face shatters like glass. Monstrous phantasms appear. Chandeliers eat heads. Turns out it is the old woman, but if you destroy her painting of a cat blood shoots out and people burn alive. WTF. Don’t go in the House. 

Watching a series like that would become the opposite of fun, fast. Why is this stuff happening? Why should we care if everything seems so random? Why get attached to characters that randomly die in hallucinogenic ways? The Walking Dead has gone on for many years using the same old rules for their zombies. As an audience, we can handle mystery early on when we are enjoying our monsters, but after a while the novelty fades and somebody who seems to know what they are doing appears and explains all the chaos.

DEMOGORGON

Eleven has telekinesis, controls electricity and can open wormholes into another dimension using electromagnetism. The Monster detects electricity, follows it, devours the energy, can open wormholes into another dimension  and also has electromagnetism. (Sharks can also detect electricity, using a process called electroreception.) It can manipulate objects (before Will gets grabbed, it uses telekinesis to open the lock on the door). Then, it creates a wormhole to suck the person into The Veil of Shadows. It is also large, strong and somewhat invulnerable. It can be slowed down, fought off or temporarily evaded, but Demogorgon seems to be pretty unstoppable, according to its own rules. Where did those rules come from? At one point the characters have a meeting about The Monster, and compare the thing to some sort of primordial beast or roving animal. There is a sense that it is not evil, just doing what it does to exist.

There are many fascinating blogs and YouTube videos that attempt to figure out more about it based on the show itself, which is an intelligent approach. My plan is to use the Internet and explore other angles by using conspiracy theories, the occult and quantum physics, plus some weird, evil science stories, to give you all more information to help back up my theory, and show that the Duffer brothers really have done an amazing job of explaining a demon in a story by avoiding the occult and embracing the darker side of scientific experiments our world is heir to, all the way back to WWII.

CONSPIRACY THEORY CHAOS?

The heart of the argument is the combined conspiracy theories the Duffer brothers accessed to make their monster. Yes, there are many old influences affecting the cinematography, the casting (I am sure you noticed the Sheriff looked like Jack Nicholson in The Shining), the credits, etc., but brand new influences kept it all fresh. Instead of basing The Monster on Germanic legends of the Black Annis, myths about werewolves or stories about zombies, the Duffer brothers mined conspiracy theories found on the Internet. Each of these modern myths provided a piece of the overall idea that made Demogorgon. I am going to run through them, pointing out the pieces as we go. Without these conspiracy theories, you don’t have Eleven, you don’t have The Monster, and you don’t have Stranger Things.

MKULTRA

Back during WWII the Nazi’s had a lot of disposable people, some really evil individuals running the show, and a scientific drive to do anything, and commit atrocities of any nature, to control everybody Adolf Hitler wanted controlled. People were chosen from concentration camps for Nazi scientists to experiment on. There were no rules, no ethics and no limits. Massive funding, unlimited bodies, anything goes. Only Satan knows what they came up with.

At the end of WWII, many Nazi scientists ended up in America, thanks to Operation Paperclip. The American government wanted the knowledge these scientists possessed, especially because the USA thought fighting the USSR was more important than anything. One of these scientists, Dr. Josef Mengele, ended up in our country where the CIA put him to work experimenting on people the same way the former Nazi experimented on Jews in the name of science, fascism and evil.

MKULTRA is discussed in Stranger Things. What is important is that this program led to many, many other programs. The scientists at Hawkins are certainly cut from the same bloody cloth as the Nazi’s that worked on mind control project for der Furher, and Eleven is certainly the product of these horrific experiments. Just ask her mother. The work that is being done at the lab goes much further, leading to other, darker projects. Sure, Eleven’s mother was the product of MKULTRA, according to the series, but what is going on at the Hawkins Lab is not that project.

PROJECT MONARCH

Mengele wasn’t the only wacky Nazi scientist engaged in hijinks and goings on involving the torture and experimentation of human beings. Another evil expert on the subject was a very terrible guy named General Reinhard Gehlen, who ended up in America in 1945 after helping Hitler spy on Russians using scientific experiments best described on Reddit under the Horror section. According to researchers on the subject that specialized in conspiracy theories, anything Mengele didn’t do, Gehlen did, and they continued their work in America, torturing human beings while Americans paid the bill.

For decades experts agree that Gehlen continued to explore the human mind for the CIA, dedicated to creating the perfect spies and assassins using hypnotism, the occult, drugs, electroshock therapy, sexual molestation, trauma and everything else they could think of to break a human mind, splinter it into fragments, so that each piece formed a shard, or alter, that was programmed to do different acts according to their subliminal control. Crazy, fun stuff, right?

Later on, another name pops up: Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron, a psychiatrist whose favorite method was to attach metal helmets to the heads of his subjects, electrocuting them into comas so he could remake their personality. ‘Member the strange, wire covered helmet Eleven is wearing in some of the flashbacks?

Monarch programming consists of several layers. Beta programming turns the person into a sex slave. Omega programming makes the person kill themselves if captured or questioned. Theta programming was based on making psychic assassins by stimulating their brains to develop psychic powers to make them trained, lethal, programmed killers. Bingo.

There is a lot of material available online, written by attorneys, survivors, psychiatrists and investigators, about Project Monarch and how it still might be going on to this day. What is disturbing is that, according to researchers, the project used a lot of black magik symbols, Satanic imagery, occult iconography and other unpleasantness to make the programming as nightmarish as possible to the child involved, in order to make sure their normal personality is smashed to pieces so the alters can be programmed to do their work.

Have you noticed that there is no mention, whatsoever, of demons, ghosts, the occult or anything else like it in Stranger Things? Nothing at all. The Duffer brothers used the Internet to make their monster, but they completely took out references to magik and the occult. You are only getting the science side of this horror story, which is a very Lovecraftian approach, when you think about it.

Eleven doesn’t have a split personality. She doesn’t become another person when somebody says the right code word. But there is a fracture in her psychology, and shard that has been taken from the greater whole, which explains why the poor girl doesn’t have much of a personality in the show. She has been raised all alone, with minimal outside contact, and she has been giving a cocktail of drugs and other psychosurgery for who knows how long. That would probably explain her odd, distant demeanor.

 ‘MEMBER THE DARK CRYSTAL?

At the climax of the story, a splinter is united with the greater whole and, in a brilliant flash of light, they are united, opening a rift in time and space that allows the merged being to move on to another dimension, whole at last. The end. Did I just describe the climax of Stranger Things? Nope. That is the end of The Dark Crystal.

When Eleven recognizes Will in the photo on the wall, The Dark Crystal is on the wall next to her. We never see her talking to Will. We never see them together. She recognizes him, though, because the splinter that has been shattered from her mind saw Will, and is running around, doing that evil. In The Dark Crystal the two separated beings unite, becoming a being of spiny, brilliant light. I am not saying Eleven’s dark half is running around. It is supposed to be her id. We will get to that, later.

In a few days I will give you another post about this subject, after I post something else for The Man. You know how it is, Bills have to get paid. Money has to be made. See you soon!

The Monster in Stranger Things, Part III - The Weird

This is Part III of an exploration into the nature of Demogorgon (or The Monster, as I prefer to call it) in the Netflix sci-fi/horror masterpiece, Stranger Things. You can read Part I here and Part II over here. Spoiler alerts will follow.

AS WE CONTINUE…

I am going to tell you about a few more films that relate to the nature of The Monster in Stranger Things. After that we will discuss a few conspiracy theories that relate to the same subject. After that you will be given a theory about what the true nature of The Monster is, with proof. So let’s go.

THE DARK HALF

Myth, literature, film and psychology are full of references to The Shadow, the id, the ti-bon-ange, the personal demon, the qareen, the familiar spirit, an imaginary friend, etc. It is the part of us that is bad, selfish, evil, animalistic, certainly violent, sexual and mostly hidden from our conscious mind. We don’t like to face the fact we can be bad, bad people. The part of us that does evil that hides from the light? That is your shadow, and it is hidden for a reason.

The Dark Half is a flick about an author that likes to write as an alter ego. As his alter ego, he writes a series of books about a character named Alexis Machine who is a vicious, cold, evil gangster. These books become popular, but when the author decides to stop writing the books, his alter ego literally rises from the grave to kill everyone responsible for his retirement and make the author write about him, again. At the end of the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the main character also meets his own dark half.

Authors like Helena Blavatsky and another author on the occult, Alexandra David-Neel, talk about a thing called a tulpa, which is an incarnation of a thought form that eventually becomes real when enough people believe in it, or one person concentrates on it enough. Alvin Schwartz, the creator of Superman, claims he ran into Clark Kent in a taxi one day in New York City. Even Alan Moore, author of the Hellblazer comic book series claims to have met his own imaginary creation.

According to Tibetan mysticism, a tulpa is a sign that the universe is just an illusion. What is in the world is in the mind. What is in the mind is in the world…or can be put there if there is enough horsepower to make it happen. In The Dark Half the character created by the author is partially him, but partially Alexis Machine. The author made the tulpa perfect in his head, so he is. Eleven was probably goaded into doing just that.

If you were to combine the concepts of a tulpa with Jung’s Shadow, the combination would be monstrous, indeed.

CLOAK & DAGGER

But before that film there was Cloak & Dagger, about having an imaginary friend that is real. A young boy who plays a role playing game based on James Bond stories (which is very similar to an RPG I played growing up called Top Secret S/I) has an imaginary friend named Jack Flack, who is the ultimate spy, replete with military uniform, black beret and all the right moves. The spirit is a lot like the boy’s own father, who is just a pilot that flies 747’s for a large airline.

The boy and Jack Flack are drawn into an adventure of global national espionage with dire consequences if the bad guys get the MacGuffin. At one point, (spoiler alert) Jack Flack dies, and the boy must confront the fact that his imaginary friend never existed as his hero vanishes. Only the boy can see this tulpa, not other people, and it is during a grim time in the film when the harsh reality of real life death sets in.

Jack Flack, of course, represents the boy’s image of his father…perfect, unstoppable, unreal and daring. Later, his father performs a few heroics of his own, and you get the idea that the tulpa has somehow infused his being, making him better, as if the combination of his boys faith in his father, and the energy released from the discarnate tulpa, has given him the power to save the day.

Now that we’ve studied the occult, we all understand that Jack Flack and the villain in The Dark Half are the same thing, right? A tulpa, which is basically a demon you summon out of yourself.

We’re all familiar with the literary horror masterpiece, Doctor Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Edith Wharton’s Triumph of Night has a scene where a character encounters an image of his own fiendish evil, standing across the room by a chair. The audience loves seeing this phenomenon at work on the page or screen. Did you notice that Dracula seems to be the exact opposite of Van Helsing? He is an incarnate, utter refutation of everything Van Helsing believes when he devotes himself to science. Van Helsing is benevolent, scientific order. Dracula is supernatural, occult evil.

ALTERED STATES

One final film to discuss before we go back to the Upside/Down is Altered States, a 1980 sci-fi film about a man played by William Hurt who goes through a series of scientific experiments to find out what happens when you use drugs, hypnotism, sensory deprivation, human isolation and psychology to see how far you can send a man down his own subconscious rabbit hole.

Aided by the power of ayahuasca, he at first experiences intense, primal hallucinations that seem as if he is looking into different worlds of existence until his body starts to transform into different forms representing human’s evolutions back into the beginning of time. This eventually results in the man becoming a primal, blob-like mass of bioplasma that destroys the lab with waves of psychic energy. At the end of the film he says nope to dope and "ugh" to drugs, evolving back to normal.

This concept of science studying psychology only end to end up high on drugs studying the paranormal, is again very similar to the concepts we see at work in Stranger Things. I still haven’t explained why The Monster looks the way it does, where it came from, how it came from there, where it is and how Eleven ended up meeting it. Follow me, we are almost there. Step carefully…the Qliphoth is all over the place.

BACK TO THE DARK CRYSTAL

When Eleven recognizes Will, she just sees his photograph on the wall. She then flips over a black game board, says the boy is in the Upside/Down, and places the boy’s figure (represented by a wizard) on the game board. She then grabs the figure of a demon, Demogorgon, to represent The Monster chasing Will. Did she run into Will in The Vale of Shadows? No, because she never went there. How does she even recognize Will at all? She isn’t told what the boy looks like. Will isn’t in the same place as Eleven, though, but later on she tracks the boy with her mind to the clubhouse in the woods for his mother. How is this happening?

PLANE TRUTHS

The boys describe this evil, dreadful place as The Vale of Shadows. We see the place as a dark, lightless place that resembles a nightmarish copy of our world. It seems to be haunted by shimmering motes, and entities contained within can interact with electrical devices. The Vale of Shadows seems electrical. Even The Monster seems to travel through things that contain bioelectricity, electricity or things that can transmit electricity. That is Eleven’s power, after all. She controls electromagnetism. Similar to the girl in Firestarter, who controls fire.

The interesting detail is that in old skool Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, there is no Vale of Shadows. In the game reality is comprised of many dimensions, organized like clockwork, containing heavens, hells, other planes of existence and everything in between.

The Manual of the Planes is a book released by TSR back in the 80’s that defined this multiverse for adventurers who apparently couldn’t get enough. It even came with a handy-dandy chart. My players didn’t like this book. My pit traps used to drop you down five levels deeper into the depth of the dungeon. Once I read The Manual of the Planes, my pit traps dropped you into Hades.

The Demiplane of Shadow is a close contender. Like most “evil” dimensions in AD&D, going there would probably kill you. A gloomy, disturbing place comprised of shadow where mysterious, energy-draining creatures lurked, anyone going there probably wanted to leave, because the realm was indeed poisonous. Things lived there, but it was otherwise a dark image of our world.

The Negative Material Plane is also similar. A nasty place just as bad as the one we just talked about, undead spirits lived there, and if you stayed too long the place killed you and turned you into an evil ghost. Thanks a lot. Necromancers, demons and devils also hung out there. If your Dungeon Master arranged for you to be there, he was probably a jerk.

The Ethereal Plane is a plane that helps us understand what is going on when characters enter The Vale of Shadows in Stranger Things. Gloomy, shadowy, foggy and creepy, The Ethereal Plane didn’t seem to be as intrinsically evil as the other places we just looked at. But a lot of bad things could come out of this place to get you. An odd dimension that was somehow connected to all other dimensions, it consisted of several levels.

The Border Ethereal was where creatures went when they wanted to interact with our world. Like standing in the ocean close to the shore, being here meant you were in the Ethereal plane but you could still interact with the normal world. This is where ghosts hung out, and it was a pain in the ass when the Dungeon Master attacked you with something from here. Usually, you couldn’t hurt them but they could hurt you.

The Deep Ethereal went even further. Things here couldn’t be seen in our world, at all, and this dimension went even deeper, touching all planes and containing its own denizens and wild, illogical, unstable geometry. Of course it was very, very dangerous and if you went there, something really powerful and bad eventually found you and taught you just how badass things got in AD&D. The Vale of Shadows, in Stranger Things, is a lot like the Ethereal Plane. There is this sense that it is a duplicate of our world, but colorless, alien and evil. One very important thing to remember, however, is that The Vale of Shadows is not The Upside Down. Eleven has never even been there. Where has she been?

The Upside Down is the term she uses for the vast, glossy black realm where people and objects appear and vanish in her mind’s eye. Eleven first uses her telepathy to track a Russian spy that is in the process of reciting a message. This makes sense…unclassified documents prove the U.S.S.R. was working on a study of ESP, telepathy, the sixth sense and all of that under the umbrella pseudo science term, “psychotronics.”

After she tracks the Russian spy, The Monster appears. Later, Eleven finds The Monster and makes contact with it. She also finds Will and the clubhouse.  But she never goes into The Vale of Shadows, and no other character goes into the Upside Down. The psychosphere is what The Upside Down is. This is an occult term used by many different writers on the subject, including Brian Lumley, Roland C. Wagner, William S. Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft. The Oxford English dictionary defines it as, “The sphere or realm of human consciousness.” Carl Jung called it The Collective Unconscious. In Marvel Comics, it is their equivalent of the Astral Plane. According to books on astral traveling and projecting your spirit and all of that fun occult stuff, when you dream you enter (at least, mentally) the psychosphere.

In this place, ideas, spirits, concepts and the imagination form the landscape. In stories by H.P. Lovecraft like “The Dreams in the Witch House,” and “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath,” characters enter into these realms while sleeping or on drugs and see kaleidoscopic images beyond imagination, thought, space and time that they find hard to describe. My theory is that Eleven sees things with a much better focus, which is why she sees the place the way she does.

Think of the psychosphere like the Internet. When you use Google to search for something, you do it either by directly entering the name of the subject, or ideas related to it, like titles of songs or albums. You can find an author by a book, or a book by an author. Ideas connect to each other, the way Paris is in France, but also in the same way the Eiffel Tower is in Paris, or Ratatouille is a film about France, but is also a French dish, and then there are of course French fries and berets and mimes and art films and…

…you get it. Things connect in abstract ways. Eleven, however, finds people with great accuracy and focus. The Upside Down is also the place where she finds The Monster.

ELEVEN = MONSTER

At one point Eleven says, near the end of the series, “I am The Monster. I opened the gate.” We know what The Monster is. What is the gate? Is she The Monster? Yes, she is. Remember, Eleven controls electromagnetism. This scientific phenomena is at the core of a lot of conspiracy theories and occult research, including the creepy teleportation story about the aircraft carrier in The Philadelphia Experiment. Eleven did open a portal, or wormhole (or…vale), into the psychosphere and pulled out The Monster inside her head.

The problem is The Vale of Shadows is another dimension, not quite in synch with our own. It is not the psychosphere, where The Monster came from. It is a new place created by the wormhole created by Eleven when she confronted the beast the kids call Demogorgon in her own head. It is an image of our own world. The Monster is basically in orbit around Eleven. He (or, she) can’t go back to the psychosphere. She can’t go back to Eleven (and when The Monster does in the last episode, they both vanish). She can’t stay in the real world for long. So The Monster roams around wormhole, tracking electrical signals, traveling through animals and conductive materials, killing people, consuming blood and perpetuating itself.

Remember the story about the flea on the rope? A wormhole is like a rope, and The Monster is attracted to blood, like a flea.

That is why Eleven says she is The Monster. She is, and she opened the gate that let it out. You’ll notice that the areas in the lab where the rift first opened are getting worse. There are also living, biological tendrils around the rift. Inside, electrical motes drift everywhere. The Monster travels through electricity, overwhelming devices it comes across. Like Eleven, The Monster can perform the same effect, opening a wormhole in the same way an electric eel unleashes energy to stun prey to eat. She then pulls her prey into The Vale of Shadows. It used to be in Eleven’s head. Now it is in a place that still looks like the inside of a human brain, full of blood vessels, nerve synapses and dreamlike images of the world Eleven encounters, consuming the electrical energy to survive.

A COLLAGE OF CONSPIRACIES

Project MKULTRA is one conspiracy theory that is mentioned a lot in Stranger Things. The horror film Jacob’s Ladder dealt with a similar issue, which is that nefarious elements within the government and CIA are grabbing people and performing mind-control experiments for the purposes of espionage, mass manipulation, and murder. It is just one of many, however. The Duffer Brothers went further and farther than anyone. After I give you the answer I shall further explore the conspiracy theories, occult references and literary ideas that make up the mythology of The Monster. But first we have to talk about Project MKOFTEN.

PROJECT MKOFTEN

There are many conspiracy theories out there. The people who write about them vary in sanity, intelligence and credibility, but some names stand out in the dark that the industry rates higher than the others. Jim Marrs, Douglas Hoagland, William Cooper and, finally, Peter Levenda, who is an author of many books about the occult and evil government hijinks including Sinister Forces and Unholy Alliance. One of the lovely things about Levenda is how he connects the shadowy experts in the occult world with hidden government agents that operate with technocratic impunity.

Amateurs discuss Project MKULTRA. The awesome discuss Project MKOFTEN. According to these theories, there were many projects conducted by the CIA, in conjunction with the military under the auspices of the government, that were performed specifically to use magik and the paranormal to fight communism. Project MKOFTEN is important to Stranger Things because of a few key points Levenda and other authors repeat.

These points are that Project MKOFTEN was intended to find spies working for the Soviet Union that had psychic powers using the mind to do it. The government wanted to locate them and kill them from a distance by unconventional means. One of the final goals was to summon demons. MKOFTEN used everything to do this, including black magik. CIA agents consulted with experts on the occult, according to Levenda and other authors. After many years of playing with spells, hypnosis, drugs and sensory deprivation, they found a technique that worked which included taking people with psychic powers and putting them inside Faraday cages.

A Faraday cage is a copper-lined cell that blocks out electromagnetic interference so that the person inside can focus without any other energies affecting his work. According to the conspiracy theory, psychics locked in Faraday cages ended up with amplified powers, similar to Professor X when he sits in Cerebro. Scientists studied their powers and worked with them to improve their abilities. When you combine this detail with conspiracy theories about other operations including The Philadelphia Project, Project Spellbinder, The Montauk Project and Project MONARCH (which deals with the concept of torturing children to create multiple personalities for the purposes making programmed assassins), you end up with the answer to the true nature of The Monster.

THE FINAL ANSWER

Eleven is psychic. She controls electromagnetism. Eleven can also use the psychosphere to find other psychics. The scientists running the project want her to kill spies, but she won’t. So she was psychologically and sexually tortured to create a splinter personality, or alternate identity, to kill the Soviet spy. Part of this torture involved being put in an isolation chamber that was also a Faraday cage (pay attention when she has a flashback about being taken from her father and locked in the prison…the walls are lined with copper). Deep in her subconscious, a tulpa (or demon) formed, and when it appeared The Monster looked like her father, a tulip (tulpa…tulip…get it?), a lion and a nightmarish beast. It killed the Soviet spy, and the scientists decided to make her contact it. She did so, but the horror of confronting her id, her shadow, her personal demon, caused her create an electromagnetic pulse that opened a gate AKA the wormhole into The Upside Down AKA the psychosphere, forming The Vale of Shadows. This is why there is a crack in the wall of the lab. The Monster needs electrical energy and blood to survive. It eventually escapes and proceeds to do just that. Eleven recognized Will because The Monster found him, first, and she is it. At the end of the series, Eleven touches it and they are fused together, but as a result she is thrown into The Vale of Shadows.

Now you know why Demogorgon is important. He is a demon, because that is what The Monster is. By the way, it is technically a she.

IN (TEMPORARY) CONCLUSION

Yes. I know. That is a lot to consider. Be back next time as I continue to explore the worlds of Stranger Things using the occult, quantum physicis and modern conspiracy theory mythology as our guide. Until then, be careful what you think about, you never know what might come out!

https://www.netflix.com/title/80057281