The Gothic Pasts of Stranger Things

ABSTRACT

Critical analysis of Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things has largely emphasized its nostalgic engagement with 1980s Americana, and particularly that decade’s science fiction and horror films. However, trappings of the Gothic in Stranger Things do not merely align it with the twentieth century’s recent past; they also function in ways that demonstrate Stranger Things’ connection to the more distant past of the Romantic period’s Gothic novels. This article extends the Gothic inheritance of Stranger Things beyond 1980s’ science fiction horror to the Romantic Gothic novel’s investment in the found manuscript, the departure point for examining the use of Dungeons & Dragons in Stranger Things alongside Mary Shelley’s use of found manuscripts in Frankenstein and The Last Man. This article reads the found manuscript as a collaboratively produced parergon (a framing device sitting both inside and outside of the text), which works through acts of translation and recreation to bring the past to bear on the present. Through examining Stranger Things’ conceptual framing of its alternate dimension, the Upside Down, and the monstrous Demogorgon through Dungeons & Dragons, this article argues that Dungeons & Dragons functions in Stranger Things as a Gothic found manuscript, drawing literary and Gothic pasts into the show’s present.

Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel, The Last Man, begins with a fictional introduction that provides a detailed account of the unnamed narrator and their companion’s discovery of a fragmented manuscript prophesying of the end of humanity. While touring Naples and Baiae in 1818, the companions wander through a series of caves and tunnels in search of “the gloomy cavern of the Cumaean Sibyl” (3). When they eventually find what they believe to be the Sibyl’s cave, it is littered with “piles of leaves, fragments of bark, and a white filmy substance,” all of which are “traced with written characters … in various languages” (5). The companions determine that these writings “seemed to contain prophecies” and the product of the narrator and their companion’s efforts to translate and “decipher these sacred remains” is then presented to the reader as the main narrative of The Last Man (5, 6). The Romantic present of this frame narrative thus reaches back into the Classical past represented by the Sibyl to relate a narrative of the far future that takes place at the end of the twenty-first century. Through the prophetic power of the Sibylline leaves, translated, transcribed and reassembled by the narrator and their companion, this found manuscript draws together past, present and future into a single, if disrupted, chain of literary transmission.

Almost 200 years later, in the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things (2016–present), Eleven, a young girl with telekinetic powers, appropriates and rearranges the remnants of a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game to represent a parallel dimension and the monsters within it. Eleven picks up Will the Wise, the D&D character token of missing boy, Will, sweeps the other character tokens aside, and flips the D&D map board upside-down, placing Will the Wise and the figurine of the Demogorgon side by side on the black backing of the board (“Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street”). As Eleven places the Demogorgon, one of the first demon lords in D&D lore and a figure whose name can be traced as far back in literary history as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (1472), on the upside-down game board, these pieces of the D&D game drawn out of Gothic and Classical pasts are brought together to represent the otherwise incomprehensible Gothic horror faced by the characters and audience of Stranger Things. From this moment, the parallel dimension in the series is known as “the Upside Down” and the monster which breaches its borders as “the Demogorgon.” As the series continues, more monsters from D&D will lend their names and histories to the monsters of Stranger Things’ Upside Down. The discarded ephemera of the D&D game and the lore they represent are here, like Shelley’s discovered manuscript of the Sibylline leaves, reconstructed, and, in their reconstruction, bring the literary pasts of this game and its monsters to bear on the 1980s Gothic present of Stranger Things.

In setting out to sell their story of a 1980s suburban town beset by supernatural horrors, the creators of Stranger Things, Matt and Ross Duffer, compiled a pitchbook to highlight the main plot, characters, and tone of the series. They used science-fiction and horror texts of the 1970s and ’80s as the pitchbook’s key organizing principle. The front cover mimics the style of Stephen King’s book covers and each of the pitchbook’s sections is interspersed with stills from 1980s science-fiction and horror films including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) (Miyamoto). The effect is to place Stranger Things in relation to these late twentieth-century Gothic texts and to tie the appeal of the show to nostalgia for them. This nostalgia continues in the show itself in which shots, set dressing, and narrative elements recall popular science-fiction and horror films and novels of the 1970s and ’80s.

It is no surprise then that much of the scholarly response to Stranger Things focuses on its engagement with nostalgia for the 1980s. Whether as reaffirming an idealized past or, more commonly, as a critical tool for interrogating cultural anxieties prevalent in Reagan’s America which have become once again relevant in America under and after Trump’s presidency, nostalgia of various kinds has been the key lens through which Stranger Things’ engagement with the past has been examined. Joseph M. Sirianni, for example, explores references to the 1980s in Stranger Things’ narrative structure, cinematography, sets, props and costuming, and places Stranger Things in the context of a rise in nostalgic television designed “to capitalize off of audiences’ nostalgia” (196). Kayla McCarthy uses “consumed nostalgia” to link Stranger Things’ nostalgia for the 1980s more specifically to geek culture and its consumer products, including D&D (665, 670–71). Rose Butler also examines references to 1980s science fiction and horror films in Stranger Things to demonstrate its engagement with Reagan-era Cold War anxieties, such as the fear of an American “suburbia under invasion” (190). Zachary Griffith rounds up all these differing interpretations of Stranger Things’ nostalgic aesthetic to argue that the show enacts “a hyper-recombinatorial approach to the past, in which the past is configured merely as a particular confluence of genres, tropes, and styles,” producing a nostalgia that is “primarily oriented toward cultural ephemera rather than grounded in past experiences” (4). For Griffith, Stranger Things’ engagement with the 1980s “suggests a lot but says very little”; it is nostalgic style over substance (5).

Scholarly engagement with the narrative function of D&D or the Gothic in Stranger Things is similarly often contextualized through the series’ nostalgia for the 1980s. Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.’s “Monsters and Moral Panics: Dungeons & Dragons as Force of Good in Stranger Things” positions the use of D&D as a positive conceptual tool in Stranger Things combining its “nostalgic glory” with a “perspective of today” in contrast to the moral panic in the 1980s that linked the game to Satanism and deaths by suicide (68, 62). Similarly, Jason Landrum’s “Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss: Stranger Things and the Digital Gothic” discusses the digital Gothic of Stranger Things in relation to nostalgia for the analog world of the 1980s (137–38). More recently, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn has argued that Stranger Things employs “reflective nostalgia” to present “a return to the past to identify and critique the 1980s as a point of origin for numerous socio-economic anxieties and ills in our contemporary neoliberal Gothic world” (201). A notable exception to nostalgia-focused criticism is Clem Bastow’s analysis, which maps the narrative structure of D&D onto recent debates in television criticism on the “eight-hour-movie” structure of shows like Stranger Things (89–90). Nonetheless, Bastow’s focus remains largely contemporary. As a result, much Stranger Things scholarship engages with the Gothic past of the show only so far as the late-twentieth century.

This article seeks to extend the critical understanding of the Gothic pasts and inheritances of Stranger Things beyond the science-fiction and horror cinema of the 1980s via the Gothic novels of the Romantic period. By examining the use of D&D in Stranger Things alongside Shelley’s use of found manuscripts, specifically, the Sibylline leaves in The Last Man (1826) and Paradise Lost (1674) in Frankenstein (1818), I argue that in Stranger Things, Dungeons & Dragons functions as a Gothic found manuscript drawing the past into the present through acts of transcription, translation and recreation. In doing so, it calls forth the Demogorgon from its Romantic Gothic inheritance.

“What do ‘raves’ have to do with eighteenth-century Romanticism?” asks the description to J. David Black’s 2002 book The Politics of Enchantment: Romanticism, Media, and Cultural Studies. In the two decades since Black’s argument for the “creative anachronism” of “conjoining a two-hundred-year-old intellectual tradition [Romanticism] with one as contemporary as cultural studies,” Romanticism has proven a productive lens through which to analyze twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural products, both literary and otherwise (4–5). Bringing Romanticism into dialogue with the cultural artifacts, music, and technologies of the present is a flourishing multidisciplinary practice, from Peter Otto’s examination of Romantic-era virtual reality technologies in Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (2011) to James Rovira’s two edited collections titled Rock and Romanticism (both 2018). Such methods help us to deepen our understanding of the longer histories of our cultural products and of the forms of Romanticism as it persists in the present.

The sense of profound historical change experienced during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides a productive vantage point from which to view such literary inheritances and continuities. Early in her book Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal, Elizabeth Fay argues that “‘Romanticism’ is a Janus-faced movement, always looking back even as it looks forward, anachronistically replaying and revising history even as it proleptically installs a modernity we now recognize” (1). By positioning Romanticism on the cusp of the “modernity we now recognize,” Fay points to it as a key moment in which the past is reimagined and brought to bear on the political considerations of the present. Similarly, Gillian Russell, in working through the position of Romantic scholarship in the modern university, argues that it is

[E]mbedded in questions of historiography, particularly relating to periodization. Romanticism invents and reifies the concepts of “period” and “movement” as a way of objectifying the historical moment, particularly the sense of the immanence of change, as well as simultaneously putting these very concepts into question. (73)

As a result, the “period” of Romanticism is perpetually in debate, leading some to question whether it has in fact finished. In this way, Romanticism is critically entwined with notions of history and change. Indeed, the key Romantic genre of the Gothic, with which this article engages, defines itself by the “conjoining,” to borrow Black’s term, of the past and the present. Markman Ellis in his account of the history of Gothic fiction argues that “‘the gothic’ is itself a theory of history: a mode for the apprehension and consumption of history” (11). For Ellis, the conjoining of past and present allows Gothic fiction “in its formal structures, mode of discourse and its narrative patterns, [to] host a contest between different versions of history” (14). By reading Stranger Things’ use of D&D as one of these formal structures and narrative patterns of the Gothic, the found manuscript, this article contributes to this ongoing exploration of the legacies of Romanticism and the Gothic in the present and reframes the critical conversation of Stranger Things’ and, indeed, Dungeons & Dragons’ relationship to the past.

When Shelley introduced her narrative of The Last Man, with the discovery of the Sibylline leaves, she was drawing upon a firmly established Gothic tradition. The narrative device of using a “found manuscript” that supposedly contains the story that becomes the Gothic novel is perhaps one of the most recognizable tropes of the genre as it rose to prominence in the late eighteenth century. Made famous by Horace Walpole in the preface to his seminal Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), the found manuscript brings the past into dialogue with the present by framing the ensuing Gothic novel as the translation or transcription of an older discovered manuscript. In his preface to the second edition of Castle of Otranto, Walpole famously excused the device by articulating his aim as “an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern,” balancing the fantastical components of the “ancient” with the more “natural” characterization of the “modern” (65); that is, bringing together the past and the present, fiction and the “real” world.

For the Gothic novels that came after Walpole, the found manuscript continued to function as a narrative frame that transported the reader from their Romantic present into a Gothic past. Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), for example, opens with a prologue set in 1764 in which English tourists are exploring an Italian church. Upon noticing a shadowy figure, they are informed that he is an assassin who has been provided sanctuary by the convent adjacent to the church. To give further context to the practice of sanctuary, the tourists are given a manuscript transcription of the confession of a different criminal. Dated 1758, this manuscript contains the narrative that becomes The Italian (The Italian 3–4). This opening brings together the long history of the traditions of the Catholic Church, in particular those of confession and sanctuary, with two moments in Radcliffe’s near past (1758 and 1764) and the reader’s present of the 1790s, by presenting the confession as part of a history of possibly real events.

Discussing what he sees as the traditional view of narrative frames such as the Gothic discovered manuscript, Gregory O’Dea argues that they are usually understood to function as “both distinctive and transitional” (par. 1). In other words, they both separate the main narrative of the text from the world of the reader (for example, by placing the disturbing action or Gothic threats of the novel in the past) and assist in ushering the reader from the “real” world to the fictional world of the main text. More recently, Clayton Carlyle Tarr has pointed to a key distinction between the use of framing narratives more generally and their function in Gothic novels where, he argues, they are more porous and transgressive than in other types of fiction. In their “function as thresholds between the central narrative and the reader’s reality” (3), Tarr adds, the formal properties of Gothic frame narratives make permeable the boundaries between the world of the reader and the horrors of the Gothic text: “Gothic frames exploit the more devious formal possibilities of the device, making readers victims as much as voyeurs … Gothic novelists subtly work to taint the everyday, extradiegetic narrative with the horror that lurks within” (13). In this way, the trope of the found manuscript, by presenting the frame narrative as part of the history of the real world, makes the world of the reader continuous with the world of the main narrative with its Gothic monsters. On the one hand, this allows the reader to be transported into the Gothic past represented by the found manuscript. On the other hand, it enables the Gothic horrors described in the manuscript to enter the world of the reader. Significantly, Tarr figures these incursions of the Gothic monsters on the “everyday” as “horrifying ‘found manuscripts,’ buried entities that resurface in the extradiegetic frame to challenge the borders between fiction and reality” (14). Found manuscripts can be understood to represent both extradiegetic framing devices like Shelley’s Sibylline leaves and Radcliffe’s manuscript confession, as well as the monsters which transgress the permeable boundaries of the frame, drawing Gothic pasts into the reader’s present.

In the case of Stranger Things, then, D&D as a found manuscript allows the Gothic horrors of the fictional Upside Down to enter into the real world of the audience. Tarr argues that Gothic frames, like Jacques Derrida’s parergon, “occupy a space that is part of both the central, fictional narrative and of the outside, real world” (6). In the same way, D&D functions as a parergon as an example of a game that exists both within the fictional world of Stranger Things and the real world. D&D also draws upon mythic and literary histories of the real world to facilitate the creation of fictional imagined worlds that the boys inhabit in their games. D&D draws together many orders of real and fictional worlds and histories blending the world of Stranger Things and the world of the audience. The real-world game of D&D helps to mediate between the audience’s world and the horrors of Hawkins.

Found manuscripts and the Gothic pasts they summon can also be found within the main narrative of a Gothic novel. In Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), an aged, almost illegible manuscript written by an imprisoned, dying man ultimately reveals forgotten lineages and the traumas of the past. The heroine, Adeline, discovers the manuscript in the seemingly endless secret rooms of a ruined abbey. Unbeknownst to her, the manuscript relays the final days of her father’s life, communicating to her pieces of a family history that she never knew (346). In a twist on this trope, in Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Creature discovers a selection of books—“Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter”—all of which are French translations of the original texts that the Creature reads as “true histor[ies]” (86, 87). These found texts help to facilitate the Creature’s education and crucially shape his world view.

In Frankenstein, Paradise Lost, in particular, functions as what O’Dea has called an “inner frame-work … the shaping core upon which outer forms are hung or built—not an external, bordering picture frame, but an internal, shaping skeletal frame” (par. 3). This “frame-work” text sits at the center of the novel, embedded in the Creature’s narrative of his life, which is in turn embedded in Frankenstein’s narrative, which is transcribed by the explorer Robert Walton in letters sent to his sister. O’Dea argues that Paradise Lost, as an internal framework, shapes the narrative of Frankenstein from within. In doing so, it provides the Creature and Frankenstein with a shared history and a unified language with which to debate their relationship. The Creature refers to himself as Frankenstein’s “Adam,” and compares his life to the fall of Milton’s Satan, famously exclaiming: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed” (66). Such language and the conceptual context of Paradise Lost allow the Creature to make demands of Frankenstein by positioning him as his father and creator. In his own narrative, Frankenstein also takes up the language of Paradise Lost, regularly referring to the Creature as “devil,” “devilish,” or “fiend,” names that associate the Creature with Satan and thus enable Frankenstein to reject the Creature’s demands that he assume responsibility for his creation (65, 115, 67). O’Dea argues that, through this language, Paradise Lost shapes the Creature’s tale and Frankenstein’s narrative, “suppl[ying] the Creature with a discourse, a source of descriptive metaphor that shapes his view of the world and allows him to express that view according to the supplied discourse” (par. 13). In this way, the found text of Paradise Lost functions as a rhetorical and categorizing framework that enables Frankenstein and the Creature to take up Milton’s language to conceptualize, contextualize and debate their experience. As such, this found text operates from within the main narrative, drawing the literary pasts of the western canon into the center of Shelley’s Gothic novel.

The way in which Dungeons & Dragons permeates the narrative of Stranger Things is reminiscent of the way in which the language and concerns of Paradise Lost pervade Frankenstein. From the opening scenes of Stranger Things, the lore and monsters of D&D become essential tools by which the Gothic horrors that beset the small town of Hawkins, Indiana are understood by the characters and the viewers. Throughout the four seasons of Stranger Things that have so far aired, supernatural horrors and alternate dimensions encountered by characters in the show are named and understood through the language of D&D. The monstrous creatures from the Upside Down are variously “the Demogorgon,” “the Mind Flayer” and “Vecna,” all drawn from the D&D Monster Manual (“Chapter Three: Holly, Jolly”; “Chapter Eight: The Mind Flayer”; “Chapter Two: Vecna’s Curse”). By utilizing O’Dea’s notion of rhetorical frameworks, this use of the language of D&D in Stranger Things can be seen to position D&D as an internal framework akin to Shelley’s use of Paradise Lost in Frankenstein.

As both external and internal narrative frames, Gothic found manuscripts can be usefully understood through Derrida’s concept of the parergon, which “comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done [fait], the fact [le fait], the work, but does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside. Neither simply outside nor simply inside” (54). The parergon sits outside of and within, against and alongside the text or work in a state of “quasi-detachment” (59). It is both integral to the work, essential in its composition, and separate from it just as the Sibylline leaves both preface and comprise the narrative of The Last Man and just as Paradise Lost exists both within the narrative of Frankenstein and outside of it, bringing literary pasts and “true histor[ies]” to bear on the presents represented by the main narratives.

Michel Foucault, in the opening lines to his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” describes genealogy, that study of inheritance and lineage, as “grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary … operat[ing] on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times” (139). Foucault’s genealogy then, like Frankenstein, The Last Man, and Stranger Things, derives its narrative and conceptual understandings from the discovery, transcription, translation, and reorganization of found manuscripts, perhaps imperfectly passed through the ages. In this light, the found manuscript as a parergon is “neither simply outside nor simply inside,” and might be understood to represent a mode of non-linear Gothic inheritance and transmission in which pieces of the past are unearthed, transcribed, rewritten, and recreated to appear in new forms in the present.

Dungeons & Dragons is not a found manuscript in the sense that the characters of Stranger Things stumble across it in an ancient cave or labyrinthine medieval castle (though such adventures make up the heart of many D&D campaigns). Rather, D&D might be understood to function as a Gothic found manuscript in Stranger Things in its position as a parergon, both internal and external to the narrative of Stranger Things, and bringing the knowledge of the past to bear on interpretations of the present. Like the seminal found manuscripts of Walpole, Radcliffe, and, most importantly, Shelley, D&D draws on the past and its own literary genealogies to make the present legible; in doing so, it calls forth Gothic monsters. Reading D&D as a found manuscript provides a productive method for understanding the transmission of Gothic inheritances and lineages and for tracing the “confused parchments” of a Gothic past in Stranger Things.

In both The Last Man and Stranger Things, the process by which the found manuscript brings the past to bear on the present involves creative and collaborative acts of discovery, translation, and recreation. In The Last Man, while the narrator assures the reader that “the main substance” of the narrative “rests on the truths contained in these poetic rhapsodies, and the divine intuition which the Cumaean damsel obtained from heaven,” they admit that they have nonetheless “been obliged to add links, and model the work into a consistent form” (6). The coherence of narrative formed from the Sibylline leaves is then ambiguously positioned between the divinity of the Sibyl and the narrator’s own art in shaping them into a narrative:

Sometimes I have thought, that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me, their decipherer, as if we should give to another artist, the painted fragments which form the mosaic copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration in St Peter’s; he would put them together in a form, whose mode would be fashioned by his own particular mind and talent. (6)

The acts of translation and transcription performed by the narrator are here reframed as acts of recreation crucially vulnerable to the impulses of the narrator’s own “mind and talent.” The implication therefore is that the narrative formed by the “adaptation” of the narrator is not their only possible arrangement. Indeed, the narrator’s introduction ends with a claim that they have “giv[en] form and substance to the frail and attenuated Leaves of the Sibyl” (7). Like the imagined reformation of Raphael’s Transfiguration, the narrator suggests that there might be many ways in which the Sibylline leaves could be reconstituted.

Importantly, the process by which the prophecy of the Sibylline leaves is translated and “transform[ed]” into the narrative of The Last Man is, or at least begins as, collaborative (7). The narrator notes that they and their companion “made a hasty selection of such of the leaves, whose writing one at least of us could understand,” noting that the different skills of both narrator and companion are needed to translate the Sibylline leaves into a narrative (6). Similarly, we can read the collaborative labor of translating and refashioning the Sibylline leaves as representative of the Shelleys’ collaborative literary relationship. Anna Mercer has argued compellingly that Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley “engaged in a reciprocal process of creative idea-sharing, drafting, reading, and copying, which had a hugely important effect on the works that they produced” (30). This collaborative relationship between the Shelleys is echoed in the translation of the Sibylline leaves from multiple languages achieved through the combined knowledge and labor of the companions. The imaginative and collaborative play of D&D similarly creates and recreates worlds in differing configurations by translating rules and reordering pieces into new forms.

D&D is a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) in which players use pencil, paper, dice, and sometimes a board to adventure through fantasy worlds. It has moved through many editions and added countless supplementary materials since its original publication in 1974.¹ The edition of D&D used by the boys in Stranger Things is the Expert Set, first published in 1981, which provided an advanced set of rules for experienced players. The D&D rulebooks (Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, and Players’ Handbook) provide instruction for players to build their own characters and, indeed, the option to create their own worlds if they wish. The rulebooks provide guidance for play in a swords and sorcery fantasy world loosely inspired by the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien. Indeed, critics such as Michael J. Tresca and Jon Peterson have demonstrated that D&D was the result of experiments in bringing the magical medieval setting of fantasy worlds, particularly Tolkien’s, to wargame roleplaying communities in the 1960s and 1970s (Tresca 23–24; Peterson 59). While it emerged from wargames that at times positioned players as potential strategic enemies (for example, playing as representatives of different countries during war), D&D is nonetheless an inherently collaborative game (Peterson 56). Tresca argues that the adventuring party of D&D is modeled on Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring and is “a construct uniquely suited to group play. Characters of diverse backgrounds come together to achieve a common goal, just as a variety of players gather together to play the game” (5). Like the collaborative translation of the Sibylline leaves, each character contributes different skills to the party. While play in D&D is organized and facilitated by a Dungeon Master (DM) who referees the players and takes on the roles of all non-player characters (those not created and controlled by the players), gameplay is directed by the decisions of the players and the DM must be flexible and responsive to these decisions.

A growing body of research on role-playing games such as D&D connects the sociable worlds of such games to emergent forms of play and communal imaginative worlds in the nineteenth century (Jara and Torner 266–68; Saler 101). Crucially, the collaborative nature of D&D creates shared game worlds for the players. Michael Saler argues that, in the late twentieth century,

D&D players inhabited imaginary worlds communally through practices similar to those used by fantasy fans earlier in the century … Fantasy was accompanied by strict rationality: players followed complex rules laid out in dauntingly thick rulebooks … This combination of logic and fancy was pursued in the name of modern enchantment. (101)

Such a description of D&D’s construction of communally inhabitable imagined worlds is distinctly Gothic, echoing Walpole’s claim that his Gothic novel “blend[s]” the “rules of probability” of the modern romance with the “powers of fancy” of the ancient romance (65). In this sense, D&D can be understood as a Gothic encounter in which players draw the fantastic myths and literature of the past into the present to be mixed into a new form by the rules of play. Like the Gothic found manuscript of the Sibylline leaves, this encounter is produced through a process of translation and recreation in which players reinterpret and reorganize monsters, rules, and character traits from the rulebooks into new, original imaginary worlds.

The Expert Set of D&D used by the children in the first season of Stranger Things is comprised of a binder of printed material collated to form a rulebook. The “piles of leaves, fragments of bark,” and “white filmy substance” of Shelley’s Sibylline leaves are here the loose-leaf pages of the binder (The Last Man 5). D&D requires few materials but those that are used by the boys in Stranger Things are, like the Sibylline leaves, largely unbound and unordered: character sheets and drawings, journal notes, the binder, a simple grid map board that can be altered to suit a range of encounters. Nicholas J. Mizer characterizes this reconfiguration of pieces in D&D as a form of creative reassembly of imagined worlds: “As players define and re-define a game world, they must take apart some of its pieces, make new sense of them, and then communicate the new state to one another by reassembling the words and images used to conjure the world” (3). Like the Sibylline leaves, the “new sense” of the D&D world is predicated on the creativity of the players. The pieces that constitute the D&D game can be taken apart and put together in differing configurations to form each game just as Shelley’s narrator brings together and reorders the Sibylline leaves to form a coherent narrative.

In Stranger Things, the adventuring party of Mike, Dustin, Lucas and Will spends hours crafting and playing through a fantasy world with rules and lore informed by the D&D rulebooks but brought to life by their collaborative play. Roleplaying games are often both made from and produce ephemera. Peterson argues that through letters and zine culture, roleplay strategy games “generated [their] own literary output” and “generate their own history” (57, 59). As Mike, Will, Dustin and Lucas translate the character sheets, rulebooks and drawings that create the D&D campaigns into a shared narrative and fantasy world they also, unknowingly, reform the literary histories embedded in the game itself, crafting them into the supernatural horrors of Stranger Things.

The Gothic horrors of Stranger Things are drawn into the town of Hawkins through the Upside Down. Like Derrida’s parergon and Tarr’s characterization of Gothic frame narratives, this cold, dark world is “an echo” of Hawkins (“Chapter Five: The Flea and the Acrobat”), “quasi-detached” from the town, neither outside nor inside but “against, beside” it (Derrida 59, 54). In this way, the name “the Upside Down” utilizes the pieces of D&D (in this instance the game board) to describe this relationship between the found text as parergon and the world of Hawkins. The Upside Down materializes the effects of the D&D game as found manuscript, disrupting the boundaries between real and fictional by drawing real Gothic histories and monsters from real games into Hawkins where they take on new forms.

While the title of “the Upside Down” is drawn from Eleven’s physical manipulation of the D&D gameboard, the Upside Down is also conceptually explained in season one, episode five (“Chapter Five: The Flea and the Acrobat”) using the D&D dimension the “Plane of Shadow” to explain the Upside Down’s relation to the world of Hawkins. At the end of the previous episode, the boys and Eleven use a radio to hear Will describing the Upside Down as “like home but it’s so dark … It’s so dark and empty. And it’s cold!” (“Chapter Four: The Body”). In episode five, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas connect Eleven’s muttering that Will is “upside down” to the “Vale of Shadows,” Stranger Things’ name for the D&D Plane of Shadow (“Chapter Five: The Flea and the Acrobat”). This plane is a dark mirror image of the world; as Dustin reads from the D&D binder, it is “a place of decay and death. A plane out of phase. A place of monsters. It is right next to you and you don’t even see it.” This description offered by the D&D rulebook affirms both Will’s characterization of the alternate dimension in which he is trapped and Eleven’s use of the D&D board by articulating the alternate dimension’s relationship to Hawkins as “right next to you” (“Chapter Five: The Flea and the Acrobat”). Like Derrida’s parergon the Upside Down is “an accessory that one is obliged to welcome on the border, on board [au bord, à bord]. It is first of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er)” (54), both represented by the gameboard and representative of a bordering dimension.

This scene of Dustin reading the Vale of Shadows entry in the D&D rulebook is cross-cut with Police Chief Hopper’s discovery of the tear in the fabric of the universe through which the Upside Down is bleeding. This tear will later be called the “gate,” a D&D term for portals between planes and one of the spells to create them. This cross-cutting allows Dustin’s voice to continue in voiceover as Hopper explores Hawkins Lab where the tear has occurred, applying the language of D&D to the science-fiction “reality” of the government conspiracy uncovered by Hopper. In this moment, the use of the D&D rulebook draws the narratives of these two sets of characters together to provide the audience with a clear picture of the Gothic threat faced by Hawkins. While the boys are able to understand or guess at the nature of the Upside Down without having seen it, and Hopper confronts it without understanding it, the audience is provided with both explanation and visual. The combination serves to cement the boys’ characterization of the other dimension as like the Vale of Shadows.

This characterization is reinforced later in the episode as the boys attempt to work out how to reach Will. Their science teacher, Mr. Clarke, holds some of the answers; however, they must first frame their discussion in terms that Mr. Clarke understands. Mr. Clarke at first assumes that the boys are seeking solace in a dimension in which “none of this tragic stuff ever happened,” but they correct him: “we were thinking of more of an evil dimension, like the Vale of Shadows. You know the Vale of Shadows?” Mr. Clarke confirms his knowledge by reeling off a definition which demonstrates more than a passing understanding of D&D: “An echo of the Material Plane where necrotic and shadow magic.” He is interrupted mid-sentence, but this understanding of an alternate dimension that is an “echo” rather than an alternate history mobilizes his analogy for dimensional travel from which the episode gets its name: “The Flea and the Acrobat.” This conversation is enabled by the shared understanding between the boys and Mr. Clarke of the D&D Vale of Shadows as a parergon that is as beside or bordering on, rather than in place of, the “real” world. As a result, when Mr. Clarke explains that the flea in his analogy can travel across dimensional space in a fundamentally different way from the acrobat by moving “underneath” the tightrope, this explanation immediately resonates with the boys because it places the flea “upside down” (“Chapter Five: The Flea and the Acrobat”). The boys and Mr. Clarke have combined their understandings of the world to collaboratively translate the D&D Vale of Shadows into the Upside Down.

A similar translation occurs in the first episode of Stranger Things in which the supernatural horror of the Demogorgon is framed through a D&D game played by Mike and his friends. The episode opens at Hawkins National Lab. A scientist runs through empty hallways, lights flicker and an alarm blares. The scientist enters an elevator and anxiously waits for the doors to close; we hear a chittering growl and he is pulled headfirst through the roof of the elevator by an unseen monster as the doors finally close. His screams are almost immediately replaced by the sound of a sprinkler and Mike’s voice in voiceover echoing the anxious anticipation of the opening scene: “Something is coming,” he says, “Something hungry for blood … It is almost here” (“Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers”). As the camera begins to pan across the faces of Mike and his friends, Mike is interrupted by Will’s impatient anxiety followed by the boys’ bickering:

Will:

What is it?

Dustin:

What if it’s the Demogorgon? Oh, Jesus, we’re so screwed if it’s the Demogorgon.

Lucas:

It’s not the Demogorgon. (“Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers”)

In answer Mike takes a miniature from behind a screen and slams it onto the table—they are playing D&D. It is the final battle of a ten hour campaign and as the game is interrupted by Mike’s mother, an errant dice reveals that Will’s wizard character, Will the Wise, has failed to land his fireball attack against the dreaded Demogorgon. As the boys head home, Will admits as much to Mike: “The roll, it was a seven. The Demogorgon, it got me.” This association between the Hawkins Lab monster and the Demogorgon is reinforced almost immediately when Will is abducted by the monster on his way home after the Demogorgon “g[e]t[s] him” in the D&D game. Stranger Things thus establishes the relationship between the D&D Demogorgon and the Gothic threat from its opening scenes, framing the supernatural occurrences in Hawkins through the boys’ D&D game.

From this opening moment, the name Demogorgon takes on a significant conceptual reference in Stranger Things and is used throughout the series to refer to the monster faced in season one. Wetmore argues that the Demogorgon is, for Mike and his friends, a “meaning-making tool” and represents the concept of threat rather than the specifics of the D&D Demogorgon, which, he argues

[B]ears no resemblance to the Demogorgon of the show, and that is because it is not literally meant to be a Demogorgon. Since Demogorgon is the greatest, most dangerous and terrifying adversary the party has faced, the boys interpret the creature from the Upside Down conceptually as Demogorgon. (64)

In this way, the Demogorgon of the D&D campaign lends its name to and conceptually represents the threat of the Upside Down and its monsters. However, the Demogorgon, and this sense of an unknown threat that it carries, relies in part on the conceptual weight of a long literary history of the name.

An historically formless entity associated with the underworld and creation, the name Demogorgon has been adapted to suit many ends, most notably, for the purposes of this essay, by both Milton and Percy Bysshe Shelley. According to Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, in their notes on the Oxford World’s Classic edition of Paradise Lost, the name Demogorgon first appeared in a late-classical commentary on Statius, likely as a misspelling of the “Platonic Demiurgos, the creator” (58n965). From here, “Demogorgon” is named the father of the pagan gods in Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. Jon Solomon, in his 2011 English translation of Boccaccio, agrees with Orgel and Goldberg, noting that “ironically, [Demogorgon’s] original nonmythological essence provided the parentless status that Boccaccio found to be unique” and convinced him to position Demogorgon as the first pagan god (xxiv). From these origins, Demogorgon appears in two key texts for the Shelleys: Paradise Lost and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820) before finally making its way into some of the earliest D&D materials and manuals. In 1976 he appears as a demon lord and in the 1977 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as Prince of Demons, before eventually becoming the ruler of parts of the Abyss: a plane of chaos and evil (Wizards of the Coast). As such, Stranger Things’ use of Demogorgon via D&D calls forth a monster from the literary pasts of the western canon, Gothically reforming it to meet the needs of Stranger Things’ present.

Demogorgon is a particularly apt figure for Gothic transmission because his formless body allows his name to become a signifier for an unknown, or unknowable, threat. Boccaccio begins his description of Demogorgon by stating that “the name alone is horrible” (33). In Paradise Lost, “Demogorgon” is almost solely a name. Milton locates Demogorgon among those that stand near the throne of Chaos:

    and by them stood

Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name

Of Demogorgon; Rumour next and Chance,

And Tumult and Confusion all embroiled,

And Discord with a thousand various mouths. (2.963–67)

Here, unlike many of the other characters that appear in Milton’s Abyss of Chaos, such as Rumour, Chance, Tumult, and Confusion, Demogorgon is defined not by his name but as a name. Orgel and Goldberg gloss “the dreaded name of Demogorgon” by noting that Demogorgon is “the mysterious primal god of pagan mythology, dreadful and unknowable” (58n965). In Prometheus Unbound, Percy Bysshe Shelley departs from this tradition somewhat by figuring Demogorgon as the son of Jupiter destined to end his tyrannical rule. Nonetheless, Demogorgon remains formless:

      I see a mighty darkness

Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom

Dart round, as light from the meridian sun,

Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb,

Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is

A living Spirit. (2.4.3–8)

This formless, unknowable creature is perfectly suited to adaptation into the demon lord of D&D and the monster of Stranger Things. Demogorgon is thus a rhetorical tool with historical weight—a name that can be applied to signify the dread of the unknown, or unrecognizable.

In reforming and repurposing this name, the characters of Stranger Things are also able to make knowable the unknown threat that the monster poses. Across the series Demogorgon develops from a name for a specific monster into a category. In season two, when smaller, four-legged monsters slip through the tear between dimensions, they are dubbed “demo-dogs” and understood as animalistic evolutionary precursors of the more humanoid Demogorgon of the first season (“Chapter Eight: The Mind Flayer”). Demogorgon thus expresses a relationship to threat that becomes a category of supernatural monster in Stranger Things. As such, D&D acts as a found manuscript, drawing the name of Demogorgon from its deep literary history and translating and recreating it into new forms in the present of Stranger Things.

When Eleven flips the Dungeons & Dragons game board and places Will the Wise and the Demogorgon tokens side by side on its black backing, she picks up and rearranges figures and histories of the past to represent new Gothic horrors in the present. In doing so, she echoes the actions of Shelley’s unnamed narrator in The Last Man, and Frankenstein’s creature in Frankenstein and their respective use of the Sibylline leaves and Paradise Lost. By reading the Gothic found manuscripts as parergon, we can recognize these acts of translation and recreation as a mode of Gothic transmission shared by Shelley’s novels and Stranger Things. In this light, D&D functions as a Gothic found manuscript in Stranger Things by drawing the literary and Gothic pasts of the show into the present where they are recreated into new forms as the Upside Down and the Demogorgon. Understanding the use of D&D in Stranger Things in this way allows us to more fully understand the shows’ embeddedness in a much longer history of the Gothic than is demonstrated by readings of its nostalgic engagement with the 1980s. Such a reading reframes our understanding of the series’ relationship to the past and of the significance of the found manuscript to the Gothic throughout the generations.

Notes

1 In a striking yet coincidental link to Shelley’s works, the co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons met and worked towards the creation of the game in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, echoing Shelley’s conception of Frankenstein while visiting Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland.