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This article examines the ways in which the TV series Stranger Things adopts selected tropes of the Indian captivity narrative and of the Puritan Weltanschauung to build a horror narrative that many found to be relevant, relatable, and enthralling. Studying Stranger Things’ system of selective citation of the captivity narrative is useful to identify a lineage that leads from Puritan to Hollywood horror, and to show the resilience of a genre across the centuries. The paper examines narrative situations in Stranger Things that are strongly reminiscent of the captivity narrative, such as the two intersecting captivities of William Byers and Eleven, the wilderness, concentric circles of evil, the dismissal of the Other, and typology as a means of sense-making. Due to its centrality for both the Indian captivity narrative and Stranger Things, the last part concentrates on the theme of female fierceness.

This paper contributes to the theorization of how Orientalism has evolved after 9/11 and in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. I specifically address the multimediality of films and propose that post-9/11 Orientalism has fragmented into more digestible, more complex micronarratives dispersed throughout the interplay of different media which constitute the film experience. I recur to Foucault’s concept of dispositif to illustrate how any of these media—such as music, screenplay, editing, acting, etc.—may “[enter] into resonance or contradiction with the others” (Foucault 195), ambiguating the film’s politics. When the film’s different media pursue diverging politics, I speak of multimedia dissensus. In order to test this hypothesis, I focus on two films which explicitly champion diversity and aim to reverse the logics of Islamophobia by presenting tributes to Muslim culture or denunciations of Eurocentric discriminatory practices: Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (2009) and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005). A more detailed analysis of the films’ multimedial complexity, however, shows that they do participate in the Islamophobic discourses that have dominated Hollywood cinema after 9/11.