Publications and Research
Document Type
Book Chapter or Section
Publication Date
7-2021
Abstract
Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things is an homage to 1970s and 1980s sci-fi and horror, including Alien and Aliens, Carrie, the Star Wars trilogy, and Poltergeist, as well as buddy adventure films like Goonies and Stand by Me. But it is also, in its obsessive presentation of monsters as mothers and mothers as monsters, a show that takes its 1980s mothering cues straight out of Bram Stoker’s 1890s. Despite its 2016 production date, the Duffer Brother’s Stranger Things presents viewers with very old fashioned ideas of mothering, with Joyce Byers (Wynona Ryder) as the single, but exceedingly pro-active mom from the other side of the tracks, to Karen Wheeler, who seemingly has the ideal family, but never knows where her children are. These mothers find their prototypes in the dangerously smart but infected mother-to-all-men Mina (a role Ryder played in Coppola’s Dracula) and Lucy’s mother Mrs. Westerna, who causes her daughter’s demise through inattention. In their transgressions of cultural norms, both sets of mothers are depicted as monstrous. But if mothers can be monstrous, monsters can also be maternal.
Included in
Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons
Comments
Originally published as a book chapter in Monstrous Mothers: Troubling Tropes. 2021, pages 223-242. @ Demeter Press.