Citation: Julia Dauer, “Plant Monsters Turn Normal Upside Down,” Edge Effects, October 31, 2019.
Image citation: Illustration of the Venus flytrap from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1804, via Wikimedia Commons.
In the first season of the Netflix series Stranger Things, when Will Byers and other residents of Hawkins go missing, it’s not immediately obvious that the culprit is a plant.
Viewers learn early on that a government lab in the small Midwestern town of Hawkins, Indiana, has opened a rift to the Upside Down, an ecological nightmare of proportions. But it comes as a surprise when, in Episode 6, when viewers finally get a full-on depiction of the monster and learn that its face is a flower.
This essay contextualizes the Upside Down’s plant-creature within a long history of plant monsters in U.S. literature and culture (and British culture too). Monstrous plants often appear in Anglo-colonial and U.S. contexts, as plant life seems by turns productively fecund and terribly uncontrollable. Stranger Things reanimates longstanding ideas about the disruptive power of plant life.