Chapter 9 Gothic Horror Films at the ‘Fin-de-Millennium’: From Nightmare Videos to Filtered Realities (1980–2000)

Fhlainn, Sorcha Ní

doi:10.1515/9781474490146-011

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“…As I have argued elsewhere, these sentiments recall similar 1980s anxieties about the future onscreen, as expressed through both time travel and apocalyptic-themed films during the decade. 4 According to Tom Shone, numerous 1980s films envisioned the future as a precarious landscape that must be chased down, lest we collectively regress into the falsehood of a glorious past that never was. 5 The Gothic ruptures in Stranger Things are made legible through the Duffer brothers' nostalgic science-fiction and fantasy series, at first seducing (Gen X and older) viewers with a sense of nostalgic and comforting return as an escape from our fractured and decentred postmodern present, only to then critique the encroachment and contemporary stranglehold of poisonous neoliberal economic policies that have dominated the 2010s; for younger viewers (particularly Millennials and Digital Natives, who have been disproportionately affected by neoliberal precarity, underemployment, and the privatization of social-safety nets), the series stages their precarious circumstances and imbues its representative youthful heroes with an urgent and necessary agency to respond to these calamitous outcomes accordingly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Rift between Worlds: The Retro-1980s and the Neoliberal Upside Down in Stranger Things

Fhlainn

2022

Gothic Studies

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The Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–) is one of a host of recent 1980s-set texts that returns to the decade through the lens of cultural nostalgia. Recalling and resituating its viewers in the Reagan era, the series presents a contemporary Gothic narrative by returning to the 1980s as a period of profound cultural importance, setting its secondary Gothic space, The Upside Down, as a Gothic neoliberal shadow world that conveys profound implications for a terrifying future. Examining the 1980s as a nexus point for socio-political anxieties and nostalgic recall, which has dominated the economic landscape and many Hollywood films and shows in the twenty-first century, this article argues that Stranger Things situates its characters at the precipice of a wrong turn in history, a period in which its youthful band of heroes, like their 1980s counterparts in its science fiction and fantasy cinema before them, must chase down their own futures to prevent a terrible fate. Through ‘reflective nostalgia’, this rift between the 1980s onscreen and the shadow future of the Upside Down is presented as a diachronic narrative, a return to the past to identify and critique the 1980s as a point of origin for numerous socio-economic anxieties and ills in our contemporary neoliberal Gothic world. Stranger Things, alongside other 1980s retro-texts, articulates our own Gothic terrors in the contemporary moment. Moreover, this article argues how and why the Gothic 1980s is a revisited site of return from which we need to learn, particularly following the post-2008 financial crisis, to overcome the necro-economic consequences of the ‘Upside Down’ neoliberal wasteland of the twenty-first century.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%