MOVING PICTURES

‘STRANGER THINGS’ GOES FULL ‘NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET’ WITH A WELCOME RETURN TO FORM

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

Season 4 of Stranger Things debuted on Netflix on May 27, just in time for the long Memorial Day weekend. I’m a fan of the show, and, for me, fandom means I want a new season to be good and I worry a little bit that it won’t be. Zipping through the show’s first seven episodes my anxiety abated as I enjoyed this welcome return to Hawkins, Ind., and to the bedrock elements that established the series.

Fans of Stranger Things like the show for different reasons — 1980s music and movies have proven to be surprisingly enduring, and younger generations dig E.T. and synth pop, too. For older viewers, the nostalgia value is obvious. As a Gen-Xer growing up in the Midwest, Stranger Things pretty much looks like my middle school years after my family moved from Detroit to a small town within a large rural and suburban township in southeastern Michigan. There were two essential elements instrumental in Stranger Things’ initial breakthrough: it’s one of the most unique Sci-Fi titles since The Matrix, and it’s also, conversely, virtuosic in its cultural call-outs which are smart candy for anyone who appreciates the pop culture of the late Cold War.

Season 4 gets us back to the roots of the show’s unique premise: a psychic weapon tries to be a kid in Indiana. These new episodes find Eleven/Jane attempting to recover her telekinetic powers by revisiting the trauma of her training in the Rainbow Room at Hawkins National Laboratory. Meanwhile a series of teen murders whips Hawkins into a Satanic Panic, and Hopper plans to breakout of the secret prison we saw him in during the Easter Egg scene which played in the end credits of the Stranger Things Season 3 finale. Stranger Things is at its best as a blend of science fiction, horror and growing pains, and here the balance between the genuinely disturbing visual effects, the surreal storytelling, and the evolution of the characters feels just right. Season 4 returns to the roots of the show, but it’s not just a gimmick. The new episodes begin to get to the bottom of what’s really happening in Hawkins, and they feel like a great mash-up of The Scooby-Doo Show and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

I’m beginning to think the Belcourt Theatre has its own psychic powers, programming A Nightmare on Elm Street as a Midnight Movie just a few weeks before this new season premiered. One of Season 4’s masterstrokes is its broad and thoughtful borrowing from A Nightmare On Elm Street. The teen murders happening in Hawkins are as unsettling as the ones on Elm Street. Freddy Krueger’s victims are murdered in their dreams, and the kids in Hawkins are captured in a trance state experienced as a waking nightmare. These sequences also remind me of Stephen King’s It, but Stranger Things Season 4 is mostly a celebration of the Freddy-verse. Vecna, a new villain, gets his name from an undead wizard monster from the Dungeons & Dragons game — this is the Hawkins’ way. Vecna brings lots of taunting dialogue to his confrontations with the teens in the Stranger Things alternate universe, the Upside Down. Then he dispatches them with his over-sized claw the Dungeons & Dragons Lore Wiki describes as having “long, claw-like nails.” Sound familiar? Vecna’s self-important, sometimes silly orating owes a lot to Pinhead from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, but the psychic ambushing and claw slicing come straight outta Krueger.

The show is scheduled to end after a final fifth season, and the second half of the fourth season will be released by Netflix on July 1, just in time for the Fourth of July holiday weekend. The second part of season four

includes two episodes with the 9th and final show of this season coming in at a whopping two hours and 30 minutes runtime.

Stranger Things Season 4 is currently streaming on Netflix

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.