person with short brown hair wearing a white vest

Why is Netflix's 'Stranger Things' and then pop? It starts with Sigmund Freud.

William Precipitous, a professor of psychology at Northeastern, says there's more beneath the surface of "Stranger Things" than cornball thrills. Photo by Netflix

Eleven, the Upside Downward, Vecna, the Listen Flayer. If those words read similar gibberish to you, and then you're backside on 1 of the largest pop culture sensations of the decade: "Stranger Things."

Even before its supersized fourth flavor wrapped up this by weekend, Netflix'southward 1980s prepare sci-fi epic was one of the streamer's biggest hits, one of the terminal remaining watercooler shows that could create chat in an increasingly fractured Telly landscape. The show is setting Netflix viewership records and is so popular that the flood of fans, hoping to rampage the last two episodes upon release last calendar week, crashed Netflix entirely.

Why accept people fallen head-over-heels for "Stranger Things"? William Sharp, an associate didactics professor of psychology at Northeastern, has an thought–and it starts with Sigmund Freud.

Freud, the Austrian psychologist and founder of psychoanalysis, is well-known for his theory of the unconscious, which includes the concepts of the id, ego and super-ego. Abrupt, who also operates a individual do in Brookline Village a few miles from Northeastern's Boston campus, recently co-authored an article with Kevin Lu, of the University of Essex, and Greta Kaluzeviciute, of Derby University. It examines the themes, setting and characters of "Stranger Things" from a psychoanalytical perspective. Sharp says the Freudian concept of the unconscious–that there are repressed or fallow ideas and memories that can reappear in our witting minds–is central to "Stranger Things."

Look no farther than the Upside Down, an alternating dimension that exists aslope, or underneath, the evidence's sleepy Indiana town, Hawkins.

The Upside Downwards is a earth of shadow, smoke and monsters, with fleshy vine-like tendrils gripping every corner of this twisted mirror version of the world inhabited past the residents of Hawkins. It'southward the chief source of the evidence'due south increasingly intense horror, only it's also "a great metaphor for the idea of the unconscious," Sharp says.

"We're mostly aware of our reality, only we're existence influenced by this matter that looks similar but is merely unlike plenty that it freaks us out," Sharp says. "The idea of the Upside Down is information technology's nearly like this mirror image of our world. Information technology's our internal representation of what'due south in the outside, but it'southward not quite correct. It's off plenty that we know it's off, and that's what scares us because it'south and so close."

One of the reasons the show has continued with audiences, Sharp says, is how it uses nostalgia for a foretime era to basis the horror in something familiar. The Duffer Brothers, the artistic force behind "Stranger Things," apply the sights, sounds and feelings of the 1980s to draw viewers, while a steadily encroaching darkness keeps audiences off balance however intrigued.

"Then much of what happens in the [evidence] speaks to this wistfulness for something nosotros don't have anymore," says Precipitous, who grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons and working in his local mall like the characters in the show. "We want to go back in that location, but at the same time we would be afraid if nosotros went back there and it wasn't exactly similar nosotros remembered it."

That experience is mirrored in the journey of the characters. In its first season, "Stranger Things" was a relatively simple story about a child lost in an alternate dimension and his friends banding together to save him. Now, the characters are in high schoolhouse, and they have been repeatedly traumatized by inter-dimensional incursions. The globe isn't as black and white as it used to exist.

"At that place really are shades of greyness, which now add a whole new level to the Upside Down of existence this place of the shadows that nosotros wish were not part of us and which nosotros like to come across in other people," Precipitous says.

Despite all the psychic powers and creepy monsters, "Stranger Things" maintains a psychological and thematic core that is focused on the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of its characters, Sharp says. Whether it'south the maternal urge to protect a kid or the loss of innocence that comes with adolescence, Abrupt argues these universal ideas give stories similar "Stranger Things" their mass entreatment.

"Fighting against this large bad is something that anybody of every generation resonates with," Abrupt says. "Whether you're talking most climate change, whether yous're talking about political unrest, civil rights or a monster in a film, it's the same kind of universal matter that we can get backside."

Psychologists will never find an ego, id or super-ego–they are "just metaphors," Sharp says––but as concepts they can help people to view and eventually empathize themselves and the earth around them. Some modern psychologists have started to question Freud's ideas and the psychoanalytical framework. But, as Sharp, Lu and Kaluzeviciute write, information technology's a useful tool for analyzing popular culture–and ourselves.

"Hearing the music nosotros loved, seeing the toys nosotros once owned, and revisiting the games nosotros once played claw united states in, but we stay with the serial because a deeper stratum of the human psyche has been touched and activated," they write. "We are both fascinated and terrified by what might exist lurking around the side by side corner—what we volition find out about our protagonists and what, in the procedure, nosotros ultimately discover most ourselves."

For media inquiries , delight contact media@northeastern.edu .