Very Familiar Things: Captivity and Female Fierceness in Stranger Things

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.