‘Stranger Things 3’ is a zombie story that riffs on internet rage mobs

The kids might call their Upside Down monster the Mind Flayer, a D&D reference, but Stranger Things 3 leans in on zombie horror.

It’s a different kind of zombie than the ones we’re used to, more intelligent and free-thinking. It wears the face of people you know, but it’s not a scary face — not at first. It just wants to show you, bring you into the fold. The instinct for violent consumption is still there, roiling beneath the surface and ready to lash out, but it’s guided with hateful purpose by the Mind Flayer hivemind.

That ought to sound familiar. It’s 2019 and anyone who exists online lives with those monsters every day. Stranger Things 3 offers a breed of zombie that taps into the darkest impulses of an internet rage mob.

The actual creature from the Upside Down, the thing we’ve come to know as the Mind Flayer, is a puppet master. The oozing biomass that makes up its body is alive with activity, and capable of splitting off pieces of itself. Those pieces then take the shapes of people the Mind Flayer has already consumed.

The host “humans” still possess a measure of their old personality. They’re capable of deception, as we see when Billy and Heather drug and then knock out Tom and Janet Holloway — Heather’s unknowing parents — over dinner. What begins as a perfectly innocent scene of domestic life turns into a nightmarish betrayal of trust and familial bonds.

It’s not so far off from the recruitment tactics employed online by individuals and communities with toxic beliefs. They operate in places like video game chat rooms, YouTube channels, and Discord servers. They build trust with an audience, poisoning minds over time using deceptive viewpoints and half-truths. Bad actors online recognize that hiding in plain sight is a powerful strategy.

Both of these monsters, real and fictional, hate the world they live in and want to reshape it.

That’s the Mind Flayer’s whole deal, too. It always ends violently with every victim, when an oozing tendril grabs their face and feeds on their humanity. The victim then ceases to exist, and is replaced with a zombified avatar that’s been consumed by the hivemind’s simmering hatred. But open violence is a last resort; the Mind Flayer prefers to perform this work in the shadows.

Traditional zombies consume without any real purpose beyond a primal urge to feed. But for the Mind Flayer — just like the real life monsters of the internet — there’s intent, driven in Stranger Things‘ case by a hatred for El and the reality she calls home. Both of these monsters, real and fictional, hate the world they live in and want to reshape it.

The zombie connection isn’t necessarily clear in a purely surface read of Stranger Things 3 — the Mind Flayer consumes, but plenty of fictional entities do the same. This is Stranger Things though. Subtext is everything. 

In Season 1, the boys’ Dungeons & Dragons game didn’t just give the show’s Demogorgon its name; the campaign they’re playing is also a direct riff on the dangers that lie ahead. The following season kicks off in an arcade as the boys are obsessing over the hot, new release of the moment: Dragon’s Lair. Parents at the time worried about how this new technology could pull kids out of everyday life and “rot their brains.” This is a direct reflection of the dilemma Will faces in Season 2 as he’s caught between Hawkins and the Upside Down.

Now Stranger Things 3 has come along, peppered with references that paint the Mind Flayer’s avatars in a distinctly zombie-like light. There’s the mall, for starters. It’s where the story opens, with the gang sneaking into the newly built Starcourt Mall so they can sneak into a showing of Day of the Dead, the 1985 zombie epic from George R. Romero.

It was Romero who popularized the idea of zombies as a commentary on American consumerism in 1984’s Dawn of the Dead. That movie, along with its 2004 remake, is set almost entirely inside a U.S. shopping mall. And don’t overlook the fact that Season 3 concludes with “The Battle of Starcourt,” an episode that turns this monument to capitalism into the season’s final battleground.

There’s also a broader fixation on capitalism peppered throughout Season 3’s unfolding story. The business-owning adults of Hawkins are concerned about the arrival of Starcourt and what it means for their own enterprises. To put a period on that point, the Duffers even have Erica quite literally just define capitalism to Dustin and Robin.

Season 3 harbors a quiet obsession with America’s prevailing economic system and the consumerism it breeds, as well as the corruption. (Hi, El and Max’s second episode shopping spree montage and Mayor Kline’s season-capping imprisonment, respectively.) And separate from all of that, there’s also the secondary threat a secret Russian plot, a nod to the Cold War and the arms race fears of that era. 

The “why” and “how” explaining a particular zombie story’s origin tends to change, with different interpretations reflecting or thematically connecting to real world anxieties. Through the years, we’ve seen takes that riff on the atomic/nuclear threat, racial tensions, pandemic fears, capitalism, and even our own fellow humans. 

The common bond tying them all together is that enduring hunger, the need to consume. It’s the first building block of any zombie story. Some zombies are the product of a plague. Others are born out of radioactive fallout. The Mind Flayer’s minions have their seeds in a dark mirror world that’s like a corrupted version of the one we know.

Stranger Things 3 is a zombie story, but it’s a different kind than the one you’re used to. The monster is an evolution of the one we’ve known before. It’s forever hungry, sure. But it’s driven by a hateful, hive-minded mentality that simply wants to see the world burn. The people of Hawkins should be thankful there was no Twitter in 1985.

Stranger Things 3 is streaming now on Netflix.