Horror Films of the Inland Empire - Film

Home sweet, uh, I mean, sweet and sour, home.

Although I was born on a nuclear Air Force base in Michigan, most of my life has been spent in the Inland Empire. Between growing up punk there to eventually working as a law clerk and then finally as a process server for the San Bernardino County legal court system, as a veteran of the landscape my opinion is that the I.E. is best described as a massive, dusty yin-yang. 

The yang being the wealthy parts of the place that make money juxtaposed by the rather horrific, yin regions that end up making criminal statistics swell. It's the 14th most dangerous city in America, and dozens of people die there every year. I tell my friends the worst parts of the I.E. are basically Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome...but there ain't no Thunderdome. 

I still miss you, Spanky's!

Inland Empire Weekly called me one merry October and requested that I write a whole lot of words about horror films made in the I.E. "Sure." I said. "But it's going to cost you so much money you won't even be able to keep your website going by 2019." They laughed at my weird prediction and basically left me to my own devices until I hit the deadline weeks later. Vita brevi, ars longa!

www.ieweekly.com

While Halloween occurs only once a year, horror films are something we can celebrate every season…as long as we don’t die before the arrival of that next blockbuster. An oozing chunk of the gruesome delight in watching all of that screaming on celluloid is the thrill of witnessing your own town host all of that terror…if you dwell within a place Hollywood finds fearsome.

The scary news is, when it comes to terror Los Angeles gets more film than the thriving metropolis known from here to hell as the Inland Empire. Maybe it’s because of the cancerous smog, the deadly traffic, or just the constant, eerie Kafkaesque dread of being face-to-visage with LAPD. 

Occasionally though, all of the omens line up and some lost, mad soul does decide to shoot something sinister amidst the haunted hills and dusty domiciles of the Inland Empire, where even the blandly bright suburbs have gutters that can stream scarlet, thanks to monsters, malefactors, or everyday murder.

Invaders from Mars, Palomar Observatory, San Diego County

Invaders from Mars, made in 1953 and directed by William Cameron Menzies, is a cosmic sci-fi thriller that is radioactive with paranoia since it was made at the height of the Cold War. Decades ago every adult knew that if WWIII happened it would be nothing but nukes from Rhode Island to Russia, and until then every American citizen was a secret communist spy, sent from the USSR to infiltrate and destroy.

In this silver screen screamer, evil Martians invade a small town and start to mind control the populace, brainwashing their leaders into cold, sadistic drones trying to enslave humanity for their monstrous green masters. Before they succeed the good guys find out, the bad guys get taken out, but the space age menace remained, spawning numerous 50’s flicks that promised moviegoers everything in the universe couldn’t wait to journey across the cosmos to slay us all.

Palomar Observatory is a part of San Diego worth stitching on to any piece of cinematic excellence. Before the place was hit by Invaders from Mars film noir got there first in the form of 1947’s Nightmare Alley, a brutal story about one man’s sadistic greed and the mayhem he leaves in his wake. Not exactly a cauldron of gore, through.

In 1977 this beautiful section of San Diego County ended up on the big screen again, thanks to 1977’s Crater Lake Monster, a tale about a dinosaur that wakes up from suspended animation and tries to destroy and devour a city. The legendary David Allen supplied the claymation magic that made the monster, but after watching space marines fight acid-spraying xenomorphs in Aliens or seeing Godzilla stomp Tokyo concave, the fear you’d normally feel is far, far away.

Slaughterhouse, Lakeside, San Diego County

This cool little chopper hits the road red for fans that that demand large men with cutlery turning small ones into hamburger. Slaughterhouse, filmed in 1987 within Lakeside (also in the county of San Diego) is about a small business owner who goes insane when evil bankers threaten to take his property. Instead of filing a civil lawsuit he tells his muscle-bound, 300+ lb. mentally challenged son to turn the opposition into crimson coleslaw with anything heavy and choppy that will do the job.

While this movie is dreadfully acted, a little bit awful and rather low budget, the fact that Lakeside ended up in this bucket of gore is not surprising. A cyclopean, rural domain containing several bodies of water (including Lindo Lake and Lake Jennings), and vast stretches of brooding forests sliced into sections by running rivers, those deep, dark environs are also stalked by woodsmen who like it wild, scary and far from safety.

Rick Roessler, who also wrote Slaughterhouse, made a monster that transplanted the Inland Empire into the blood-streaked mausoleum of cinematic history while at the same time introducing a villain with a motivation more intricate and fathomable than, “I’m a killing machine.” If evil bankers were attacking and your kid was roughly the size, shape and mental intent of Jason Voorhees, wouldn’t it be fun seeing them end up like meat on a hook, instead of watching our politicians keep them off of it?

Hell Night, Redlands, San Bernardino County

Films about teenagers and co-eds going someplace awful to get brutally slaughtered one-by-one are a proud tradition in American horror. Whether it is camping near Silverlake or ending up in the wrong house in Texas where chainsaws are standard-issue, wacky kids are always going to somehow end up on a chopping block somewhere when it comes to entertaining the masses. Everyone appreciates it when someone improperly adventurous dies.

A group of teenagers are challenged to spend the night in a gigantic mansion, only to be murdered by the survivor of a massacre that happened there decades before. Filmed all over Southern California for a horror-hungry public who weren’t content just seeing Linda Blair possessed by the devil, Hell Night was made not only in Los Angeles and South Pasadena but also throughout the County of Redlands within the Inland Empire.

It’s unusual how the Inland Empire hosts so many movies about homicidal maniacs. When crazy meets cutlery, the blood usually flows if there are unaware victims nearby, and the screams sound better against the quiet, rough hills and suburban sprawl Redlands is heir too. Even the name of the place sounds lethal, as if the ground itself was carmine from slaughter. Someone needs to write a script for a slasher flick called Redlands.

"REDLANDS." Sounds like a title to me.

Hell Night is replete with affordable fears and fun kills, but watching one psycho just whack a bunch of young, dumb trespassers gets kind of lame, quick. I’m sure every foreboding, dilapidated mansion deserves a mass murder, but in an age of pepper spray, smartphones, MMA training, a proliferation of firearms and a militarized police force armed with APC’s, it is hard to imagine a lone suburban maniac successfully stabbing so many ignorant kids to death uncontested without anyone calling 911.

The Hills Have Eyes, Victorville, San Bernardino County

In 1977 a fun-loving family went camping in the desert, only to encounter a fiendish pack of violent, radioactive cannibals. Wackiness ensued. Wes Craven, the writer and director of this gritty, bloody beast, made cinematic history with an almost plausible story about a road trip gone so horribly wrong well before he created A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Shot in the brutal, rocky landscape anyone in Victorville can find if they wander into the wilderness miles from their backyard, it doesn’t take long for the film to fill you with fear as our hapless, lower middle-class family realizes they aren’t alone in the lonely, dusty hills they camped out in. By the violent end they are fighting for their lives against gruesome thugs that look like they wandered in from The Road Warrior.

Apart from the wonderful casting choice of using the big, bald, terrifying Michael Berryman as Pluto, the meanest-looking mutant in the movie (Berryman’s career is the envy of any professional…he’s also in The Devil’s Rejects, directed by the immortal Rob Zombie), some of the sorcery of this film is its realism. Anyone who has camped out in the boonies knows that there just has to be evil people out there, licking their chops, and they’d be your bogeyman, if unleashed.

The real horror, however, is observing the family debase themselves in an orgy of violence to beat their aggressors. As mom, dad and the kids start to get their murder on, too, there’s a feeling by the end of the creation that although the monsters have been fought and brutally beaten down, new ones have replaced them.

Inland Empire, Los Angeles County (?)

While David Lynch (the director of masterpieces such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Lost Highway) is always lurking on the bleeding edge of modern cinema, Inland Empire, created in 2006, has one very serious hang up: the film wasn’t made in the Inland Empire at all, despite its name.

While it is a psychological horror film (which means its more like Angel Heart or Psycho instead of Scream or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) about a young woman relentlessly pursued by an evil, murdering ghost haunting a cursed screenplay, Inland Empire should be called something else because it was made in Los Angeles, Hollywood and Poland. Imagine if Chinatown took place in Sacramento. It may as well be called Southern California, sans San Bernardino. Thanks a lot, Lynch.

Paranormal Activity, San Diego County

Unliving proof that low budget can still equal big box office bucks, 2007’s Paranormal Activity is a work replete with dread because of the fact the horror happens in a suburban home, not in a graveyard, mansion or mausoleum. Directed by Oren Peli and shot in the thriving metropolis of San Diego, the film contains scares anyone living in the modern era can relate to because the demonic nightmare happens in a seemingly normal house. When the familiar becomes frightening, nowhere feels safe.

A young couple is haunted by an evil spirit, eventually leading to insanity and murder. The documentary nature of it merges with the sensation that what you are seeing really happened, as supernatural occurrences surmount, dark shadows move in the corners, and something wicked comes their way until fear and madness gives way to gore. Pass the popcorn, please.

Let's just say after Poltergeist III the girl who played little Carol Anne was done with horror flicks.

Not that it’s the first time suburbia got it’s slay on in the cinema, but when Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg teamed up for Poltergeist (if a cute little blonde girl tells you, “They’re here,” leave), the fear came from having an electrically-charged sledgehammer of big-budget special effects pound your psyche into oblivion. By contrast, the more sedate Paranormal Activity has still waters that run deep, lulling you down into the calm before a corpse reaches up from the murk to drown you.

The young couple in the story doesn’t always see the unnatural darkness lurking dangerously behind them, but the audience does. As their doubt dies when they realize the terror is real, a small part of your mind wonders if this is film footage left over from a real demonic attack. The fact it takes place in a house like yours, instead of the skull-like domicile in The Amityville Horror, makes it uncertain if going home is safe at all.

Why aren’t there more horror films made in the Inland Empire? It has to be way cheaper than it is in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Wouldn’t you like to see a werewolf roaming the marble halls of the San Bernardino courthouse, or witness vampires feasting under a freeway overpass in Fontana? 

Here’s to hoping the Inland Empire has a cinematic future far ghastlier than before.

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

The Monster in Stranger Things, Part II - The Weird

This is Part II 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 the first part here. Spoiler alerts will follow.

Rather than just tell you what it is, I am using the film and literary references made by the show to prove my case, step by step, fact by fact. I’m also going to explain how modern conspiracy theories, quantum physics, string theory and that sweet, sweet black magic all contribute to create the horror at the heart of the show.

MEET THE MONSTER

When we first encounter The Monster in Stranger Things, it is not in chronological order within the complete time of events leading up to the final showdown of the sci-fi/horror series. A scientist is running down a corridor within the Hawkins facility. He is trying to get away. A light bulb smashes down the hall as he looks out from inside the elevator. The scientist suddenly looks up, screams and gets grabbed, vanishing.

These are the first clues we are given about the nature of The Monster. The lights break as it gets closer. The Monster is rather large, and yet doesn’t grab the scientist as it enters the elevator. The light breaks and it grabs the scientist, who is suddenly able to see it. If the scientist could see his killer down the hall, he would have had different body language. Cowering in fear, gibbering in horror as he hid around the wall, hoping the elevator doors will close (in films the doomed protagonist will usually push the buttons on the elevator as fast as possible, hoping to save himself as the bad guy stomps down the hall). But he doesn’t act that way. He stands nervously, waiting, until he looks up and gets grabbed. This tells us that The Monster does interact with the environment around it in some way, which causes electrical lights to flare and explode. It also tells us that it moves through the environment, but isn’t entirely in sync with our reality.

Later, poor Will rides his bike, and the light on his bike blows up. He sees The Monster, but he can only perceive the outline of it. He is pursued relentlessly until he gets inside the shed in the back of the house. The light goes out and Will is grabbed.

This is not the first time The Monster first appears, however. The real story starts with Eleven. She is told she has to track down a spy from the U.S.S.R.  Within “The Upside-Down,” she does so. As she gets closer to the spy, who is rather calm and completely unaware, Eleven seems pensive until something bestial is heard behind her. That is the first time The Monster is sensed, if not seen, in the chronological order of Stranger Things.

What is confusing is that we never see Eleven escape from the Hawkins facility. We know that she was wearing her white hospital gown when she did, because that is what she is wearing at the diner where she enters to steal some fries. When she first touches The Monster, she is wearing that kooky tan diving suit. This means that she did not escape at that moment. If she had done so, the Sheriff and his deputies would not have found the shred from her hospital gown, instead of the kooky tan diving suit, in the pipe outside the facility which indicates where she escaped from and what she was wearing.

For a short time I believed certain false things about The Monster, based on the show. I thought that it traveled through light bulbs and light sources. I also believed, for a brief time, that Eleven turned into The Monster when she was asleep. I was wrong. When the Sheriff and Winona Ryder are in The Vale of Shadows, the horrified teenagers watch as Christmas lights activate as the two adults walk through the hall in the house’s counterpart. Since the adults can’t travel through light, The Monster probably isn’t, either. When the scientist in the very first part of the show sees the lights flare up in the lab’s hall, The Monster is causing the lights to flare up as it walks. Eleven can’t be The Monster when she is asleep or whatever, because she confronts the demon that has been stalking her friends in the end, which is the climax of the show.

This is one of the reasons why the nature of The Monster is so confusing. When you see a movie with Dracula in it, there is going to be an expectation that Dracula is going to follow the usual rules. That also means that the characters opposing them are going to have to also follow the same rules to defeat the vampire. Garlic, holy water, fire, decapitation, LAW rockets…the usual arsenal. If the movie did not follow these rules, as an audience we would be unhappy because the formula was off, unless a suitable explanation was given.

Imagine if The Monster in Stranger Things was just a werewolf. Worse yet, imagine if we were given a complete explanation of what it was in the first fifteen minutes? It wouldn’t be as fun. We would feel let down. Watching the rest of the series wouldn’t be as intellectually challenging. The Thing seems to do this, because the scientists seem to figure out how their adversary works, and how to bring it down, somewhat midway through the film. This doesn’t ruin the fun because The Thing is so stealthy, cunning and capable of shifting shape. It is also so horrifying that every time we see it, there is something new that horrifies us. It is not the same Thing, every time.

I also have to admit to another theory I eventually threw away: I thought The Monster was a phantasm that could only be seen in the minds of its observers, similar to Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street or the horrifying stalker killing young kids in the very modern horror flick, It Follows. The Monster is real because, after the fight in the house with the teenagers who use bullets, fire and a kit-bashed spiked mace to fight it, the bat is covered in black goo and there is a definite meaty, bubbling residue on the bear traps the teenagers employed in the fight. So much for my theory.
You don’t even see The Monster in Stranger Things, most of the time. It is there, but not there. Why doesn’t it stomp around visible all of the time? How does it get into our world? Keep reading, Young Grasshopper, there is more to your universe than you can see or imagine.

MORE MOVIES

Some people have said that The Goonies is a big influence on the show. I disagree because a) the adversaries in the film are not monstrous and b) there is nothing really supernatural going on in The Goonies, although Sloth kind of looks like a post apocalyptic mutant cannibal. Who are, of course, people, too. So don’t judge. Observers probably make the comparison because the teenagers and children all team up to explore One-Eyed Willy’s trap-laden cave, but beyond that there is not much to work with, for our theory on the film.

Alien, however, is a big reference. Almost too much so. The Monster we are discussing seems to devour people whole and then barf up a big egg. This egg seems to extrude a long tentacle which is inserted into another victim’s mouth, after they have been tied up in some ectoplasmic goo, similar to the xenomorph in Alien but also like a wasp that constructs a nest with a similar gooey material which hardens into matter that can hold eggs. You’ve already seen Alien, you already know what happens and understand the obvious parallels to Stranger Things, so we can move on.

Spoiler alerts, everyone. The Entity is an 80’s horror film based on a real-life event that is more horrifying than the film it became. I believe this film is a reference to Stranger Things, like Poltergeist, even though the audience never sees a poster for either movie anywhere in the show, just like E.T., which is also an influence. You’ll notice by now that as we study the films that influence the show, we are also studying the chaotic elements that make up The Monster. The Entity, like Poltergeist, deals with science trying to study the paranormal and basically getting its ass kicked.

A young woman with children living in a house in the suburbs starts to become haunted by an invisible, monstrous poltergeist that doesn’t just throw stuff around, it beats her up and rapes her. Yup, straight up, as evil as hell. This goes on and on until she brings in a team of scientists to study what is happening. This culminates with the woman volunteering to live in a fake house within a large lab that has a chemical solution above it similar to liquid oxygen, to freeze her invisible attacker in place. Eventually, she is assaulted, but she jumps out of the house as the scientists spring the trap. What they see is a huge, demonic-looking spectral shape that is able to affect our reality, but is invisible and impervious to physical harm. It escapes, but everyone in the lab knows there is another evil place out there, and the denizens within are not our friends.

More spoiler alerts! Yet another damn reference for Stranger Things, The Mist is a short story by Stephen King that is a reference to the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, who is also a gigantic influence on the show. It was later made into a terrible film with the guy who played Punisher in the kind of bad film by John Travolta. What is important is that in The Mist (literary or otherwise) nobody really knows what is going on when their small town is hit by a serious case of Call of Cthulhu WTF?

There are tentacles and beasties and long-leggedity ghoulies and all manner of odd, freakish monsters, but what the good, normal people of this small town figure out is that nearby, scientists have been performing dark experiments using radiation, electromagnetic energy and Satan-knows-what to try to punch a hole in the fabric of reality. When the group of intrepid townsfolk reach the lab, all of the scientists have committed suicide because the experiment worked.

No explanation as to why the town has been invaded is given, except that very intelligent people understood the ramifications of their actions and whacked themselves to avoid the future. Yup, Stranger Things makes a reference to this work as well, although the scientists in the Netflix series don’t entirely understand what they are doing because after the portal opens up to our world (replete with all of its slimy, tentacle-waving otherworldly biological weirdness) they can’t close the portal, and don’t even know where it goes.

TIME FOR A MONSTER

As I’ve mentioned before, Eleven encounters The Monster when she is about to kill the Russian spy, who is probably also psychic. The Monster appears with a growl behind her. Later, the scientists in the lab, led by her father, induce the young girl into confronting The Monster in the Upside-Down. As she approaches, it is creating some sort of egg. They were not in The Vale of Shadows. There were no slugs or tentacles or trees or ectoplasm. It was just pure, reflective black.

The Monster seems to devour its prey whole (with a head shaped like a tulip with teeth the point inward, it certainly seem capable of doing so) which means we can safely say that the egg is the Russian spy, or what was left of him. This also tells us that after The Monster devours people, it also barfs up the leftover matter as the gooey ectoplasmic substance Will was trapped by when the Sheriff and his mother find him at the end of the show. Yes, this is another reference to Alien.

What happens next? We'll talk about it, next time! Until then, sleep tight, and don’t let the bogeyman under the bed bite!

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