Growing Up in the Upside Down: Youth Horror and Diversity in Stranger Things

Abstract

McDaniel argues that the Netflix series Stranger Things shows youth horror films have entered a progressive era where the old rules do not capture the diversity of human experience. The protagonists’ statuses as outsiders—in terms of gender, disabled, queer, and racial identities, their self-proclaimed “geekiness,” and their adolescence—places them in a liminal space where they are more susceptible to the Upside Down and better able to overcome its powers. Through tactics such as the uncanny, Stranger Things endorses a therapeutic version of rites of passage in youth horror and critiques traditional exclusionary psychological and narrative models of adolescent identity. As a result, the show’s vision of adolescent development is more flexible and inclusive than traditional teen films.