The trailer for the new season of Netflix’s hit series, Stranger Things, was recently released, and the audience once again gets transported to the little town of Hawkings. In the aftermath of the third season, the young friends seem more separated than ever before. With an impending supernatural war on the horizon, they will have to face more than they could ever imagine.
The series has always been broad concerning the genres and subgenres it inhabits. There is a lot of coming-of-age drama, some comedy, and the various sci-fi elements, a combination that makes the series stand out. However, the trailer for the new season showed a darker side of the characters and the Upside-Down (and the things that lurk there). Sci-fi and horror genres get mixed more frequently than some might notice, and Stranger Things is no different.
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With a harsher tone in the new season, the grown-up characters (who are not kids anymore), and the stakes of a war piling up, things are about to get serious in Hawkings. The series has been using more horror elements in every new season, and this appears to be the climax of the mixture between horror and sci-fi. Here is how the genres correlate and how Stranger Things used them to create a compelling narrative.
Sci-Fi and Horror
Netflix
Science fiction and horror are very similar genres, even though their cores are different. Horror focuses on creating and exploring fear, while sci-fi deals with the repercussions of the advancement of technology in society. When looking at their definitions, it may appear that they have little in common. However, they arguably have a mutual origin: the novel Frankenstein. Mary Shelley introduced pseudoscience into scary narratives while also helping solidify sci-fi as a genre. Because of this, she is considered one of the founders of the sci-fi horror subgenre.
Technology has been advancing so fast for the past couple of decades that the uncertainty and helplessness which comes from not knowing or understanding what that means to humankind, in the long run, can generate a lot of fear. When Darwin used scientific methods to explore evolution, people were terrified that it could signal the death of religion and end the perceived uniqueness of the human species. When humans started to go to space or explore the seas’ depths in the 20th century, the vastness of unexplored spaces continued to make us smaller and smaller, creating a terrifying unknown.
The unknown factor that sci-fi has in its stories brings it closer to the fear-inducing genre. Science goes after what we don’t know, the answers we can’t seem to find; horror uses that unknown to create fear, and sometimes shows that actually discovering the unknown could be the most terrifying thing of all. As one progenitor of modern horror, H.P. Lovecraft, writes in The Call of Cthulhu:
The unknown that is discovered in Stranger Things is more terrifying than the characters could have imagined. The show is not the first to explore these two genres, but it is one of the most successful contemporary examples of how they can work together to create a complex story. There is one element of the series that solidifies this combination: the Upside-Down. The visuals and monsters are horror and could be elements from a horror story, while the concept of another dimension accessed through modern science that looks exactly like our own, but at the same time, is set in a post-apocalyptic scenario couldn’t be more science fiction.
Stranger Things Built Up To Horror
The series is mainly considered a sci-fi tale, even if most people agree that it could be classified as sci-fi horror; however, the trailer to this new season hints at a much more horror-oriented season. The series has been building up to a horror climax since season one. The scene where the Demogorgon is coming from the walls of the Byers’ house, and the lights keep flickering on and off, is one of the most intense in the first season, and it is explicitly horror. The desperation to find where Will is and information about Eleven’s childhood are undoubtedly scary movie-worthy storyline. There is more than one character who becomes possessed as the seasons developed: Will in season two, and Billy in season three. These are just a few examples; the show even uses jump scares in a few moments.
Assimilating horror movies of the 80s throughout Stranger Things, there are some clear homages to the monster movies that were so popular. The Demogorgon, the disgusting monster with rows of teeth, could have come out of almost any monster movie from that period. Then, Nancy and Jonathan’s attempts to study and understand the monster is an homage to many sci-fi tales. They look at it as serious research and try to compare the monster to animals they can comprehend.
Other Examples
20th Television
Besides obvious examples, such as the Alien franchise, the sci-fi horror genre mix has been successful over the years. One of the main series that started to play around with the limits of these genres was the ’90s sensation The X-Files. Mulder’s alien obsession combined with Scully’s skepticism worked so well that the series had a spin-off season years after it ended. The show tackled every science fiction nightmare imaginable, and often in very frightening ways.
A huge inspiration for Stranger Things is the king of horror, Stephen King. Even the title font of Stranger Things is the iconic one used in his paperbacks in the ’80s. The author has also dabbled his toes in this mixture of genres in novels like The Mist, Under the Dome, The Running Man, and The Dark Tower novels.
Stranger Things season four will come out on May 27. There is only so much we can try to figure out from the trailer, but one thing is certain: there will be an epic war between our beloved characters and the place the viewers’ nightmares are set since first arriving in Hawking back in 2016. And there will be horror.
