One of the most horrifying moments in Stranger Things 2 comes toward the end of the third episode. Will (Noah Schnapp) is at school, helping his friends look for D’Artagnan, a sentient blob Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) found in his trashcan. Will peeks inside a bathroom stall. The word EVIL is scrawled on the wall, as if to foreshadow what’s about to happen. D’Artagnan, hiding behind the toilet, hisses, and the sound triggers Will, shifting his reality back into the Upside Down. Seeing a dark shape manifest in the hallway, Will runs outside, but then turns to face it. The gargantuan black form invades his body, entering his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, enveloping him whole.
The scene is visually and aurally jarring. The sound effects—a combination of thunder, growling, and robotic beeping—crescendo, as Will is overpowered by the Shadow Monster, the major antagonist of Stranger Things 2. It’s terrifying, but also disturbing simply because it’s so obvious that Will is being violated. And in the following episode, as Will returns to reality and tells Joyce (Winona Ryder) what happened, his language echoes words used by survivors of assault. At first, he pretends he can’t remember. Then, pressed, he tries to explain. “I don’t know, it came for me,” he says, crying. “And I tried. I tried to make it go away, but it got me, Mom. I felt it everywhere. Everywhere. And I still feel it.”
This isn’t the first time that Stranger Things has explored the effects of trauma. The first eight episodes, released in the summer of 2016, were praised by some writers and psychotherapists for their depiction of Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), and how her behavior seemed to stem from her having grown up in a particularly tortured environment. The show, set in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, during the early ’80s, was an homage to the cultural hallmarks of that era—The Goonies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., John Hughes. But it was also rooted in horror, notably the stories of Stephen King. Eleven, like the young protagonist of Firestarter, was given strange powers by a government experiment involving hallucinogens, and gets nosebleeds when she wields them.
Few horror authors are as informed by trauma as King, or as attuned to the ways in which it affects children. Throughout King’s books, the academic Roger Luckhurst has written, childhood trauma is associated with supernatural capacities, but it also tends to reverberate into adulthood and manifest in other ways. Stranger Things 2, which is much darker than the first season, leans fully into King’s exploration of emotional damage and the unknown. Virtually every character in Hawkins is wounded in some way. And the thoughtfulness with which the show’s creators, the Duffer Brothers, portray their experiences is what most distinguishes Stranger Things from its source material.
One of the most maddening tropes within disaster movies is how characters who’ve endured extreme trauma tend to instantly recover as soon as they’re rescued (picture the survivors of Jurassic Park smiling serenely in the helicopter at the end). Stranger Things was guilty of this to some extent in its first season, as my colleague Lenika Cruz pointed out—when Will first wakes up in the hospital, his friends babble excitedly about how rad Eleven was, and what crazy powers she had, without any real acknowledgment that she’s also very much, to their knowledge, gone. Stranger Things 2, though, is inflected from the start with the sense that, even a year later, its characters are still deeply altered by what happened to them.
Most obviously, there’s Will, who’s returned physically from the Upside Down, but who still flickers intermittently back into that dimension. His doctor at the Hawkins government lab (Paul Reiser) assures Joyce that these after-effects are a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that the upcoming one-year anniversary of Will’s disappearance is exacerbating them. This gives little comfort to Joyce, who’s suffering through her own delayed responses to losing her son—fighting extreme panic any time he’s out of her sight.
The loss of Barb is also profoundly felt in the first episode. Nancy (Natalia Dyer) weeps in the bathroom when she visits Barb’s parents, who are dealing with their own loss by denying it, selling their house to give money to a “journalist” who assures them he can find Barb. In the library, Nancy freezes when she sees a girl with red hair, and then lashes out at Steve (Joe Keery), her boyfriend. “It’s like everybody forgot,” she tells him. “It’s like nobody cares.”
In the same way that Will’s friends use Dungeons and Dragons as a framework to understand what’s happening in Hawkins, Stranger Things 2 employs its supernatural storylines to explore trauma in the real world. Some events, like losing a friend or a child, need little translation. Others, like what happens to Will in Season 2, stand as analogies. The treatment of his “episodes” mirrors real manifestations of PTSD: They’re not “nightmares,” Chief Hopper (David Harbour) tells Joyce, they’re flashbacks, which is why they feel so real to him in the moment. And Joyce experiences them too to a degree, freezing when the phone rings. Meanwhile Will, unable to efficiently verbalize what he’s feeling, finds some solace in art therapy, using his crayons to draw countless dark, jagged pictures of the feelings he can’t explain.