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…
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!
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!
