Stranger Things clearly owes some of its inspiration to the fiction of horror icon Stephen King, but could an idea from King’s son Joe Hill’s novel NOS4A2 provide a connection between the Netflix series and King’s work? Created by Hidden directors the Duffer Brothers, Stranger Things became an outstanding runaway hit for streaming service Netflix shortly after it debuted back in mid-2016. It’s not hard to see why the series succeeded, too, as Stranger Things offers an appealing fusion of two ‘80s pop culture heavyweights, Stephen King and Stephen Spielberg, in its tale of a small town plagued by spooky goings-on and the plucky kids out to get to the bottom of proceedings.
A mixture of coming-of-age drama, horror, teenage comedy, and sci-fi tropes, Stranger Things is clearly indebted to the fiction of Carrie creator Stephen King as well as the movies of John Carpenter and Wes Craven. However, when asked about a fan theory that linked King’s best-selling doorstopper IT to the action of Stranger Things season 2, the creators were quick to deny a direct canonical link between the series and its famous inspiration.
When the love interest of Winona Ryder’s perpetually harried Joyce Byers assured her young son that he used to fear a creepy clown until he finally defeated his paralyzing terror around the imaginary monster by standing up for himself, fans immediately began to wonder whether the clown in question was Pennywise, the villain of Stephen King’s iconic bestseller IT. The Duffer brothers themselves debunked the theory that season 2 character Bob Newby encountered Pennywise, saying they based the anecdote on their own fear of Tim Currys’ performance as the character in the classic '90s Stephen King miniseries IT. However, the invention of “inscapes” in the fiction of King’s real-life son and occasional collaborator Joe Hill proves that there may be another connection between the world of Stephen King’s fiction and Stranger Things’ mysterious small-town setting of Hawkins, Indiana.
NOS4A2's Inscapes Explained
First explained by Charlie Manx, the villain of Joe Hill’s novel NOS4A2 and the subsequent AMC series of the same name, inscapes are inner landscapes, the psychic realms created by people attempting to create a reprieve from reality. Charlie Manx is the primary villain of NOS4A2, terrifyingly immortalized onscreen by Zachary Quinto, and according to the television adaptation of NOS4A2, he’s not the only villain to own his own personal inscape. The Lovecraft Keyhole (the main setting of later Hill adaptation Locke and Key) and Pennywise’s Maine circus are also inscapes, a detail confirmed by the NOS4A2 TV show. This easter egg proves that Hill and King’s works share a fictional canon in common. But could the Upside Down of Stranger Things secretly be an Inscape too — and if so, what connection does it have King’s and Hill’s inscapes?
Is The Upside-Down An Inscape?
The trippy dream logic of the Upside-Down, its so far unexplained monster population of Demogorgons, and its way of mirroring but distorting an existing location all check out in terms of Inscape characteristics. Manx’s Christmasland and Pennywise’s Maine circus are similarly otherworldly locations that operate on their own paranormal terms and contain murderous monsters that generally can’t escape into the outside world but can occasionally wreak havoc when they do. Both the Upside-Down and other (potential) Inscapes clearly occupy real physical space and can be entered and (on rare, lucky occasions) exited by characters other than their creators, but don’t appear on maps and can’t be arrived at via conventional travel, with the likes of Eleven and Will Byers instead relying on various forms of telekinesis and mind-warping inter-dimensional travel.
The dark, grimy Upside-Down also looks a lot like both Manx’s grim Christmasland and Pennywise’s ruined, corpse-strewn circus in the sewers, with all three being locations that once looked normal and have now been warped beyond recognition by evil forces. All three feature the ability to spread out and consume more of the land around them, with Pennywise’s influence extending throughout the town of Derry despite his inscape being contained by the sewers and Stranger Things’ Hawkins being plagued by supernatural phenomena outside of the Gate as well as inside the Upside-Down. Meanwhile, the resident Mind Flayer’s ability to draw in victims via mind control and eventually consume their bodies for sustenance operates a lot like Pennywise’s circus and Manx’s Christmasland, both of which also see their shape-shifting monsters control the minds of victims to pilot them to their doom.
Why The Theory Might Not Be True
However, for all their superficial similarities, there are also significant differences between the inscapes of IT and NOS4A2 and the Upside-Down of Stranger Things. For one thing, neither Hill’s or King’s inscapes have been successfully reached by government agencies (although Manx’s Christmasland made short, gruesome work of an FBI raid in a tie-in graphic novel), and the fact that Stranger Things shows the scientists of Hawkins Lab being the ones responsible for opening the Gate doesn’t fit with the “individual victims are lured into Pennywise and Manx’s traps” modus operandi of Hill and King’s inscapes. Moreover, the fact that both the Russian and American authorities are interested in the Upside-Down in the first place flies in the face of how both Christmasland and Pennywise’s circus operates, since both of those settings boast an ability to commit acts of ambitiously awful atrocity precisely because nearby human populations have no interest in investigating the mysterious disappearances that feed these eldritch living locations.
How This Affects Stranger Things 4
The revelation that the Upside-Down is actually an Inscape would open up Stranger Things for all manner of cross-collaboration with the fictional worlds of both King and Hill, meaning the Netflix show could incorporate everything from Stephen King characters from Carrie or IT or more in its storytelling going forward. However, this would also bring a nightmarish tangle of legal rights, so it’s unlikely that Stranger Things will ever make the Upside-Down’s potential status as an inscape canon even if it does add up. That said, Netflix does have a hand in producing Locke and Key, so there’s at least one Joe Hill crossover they could conceivably connect to Stranger Things via an inscape — although any confirmation of this theory will need to explain how two entirely unrelated '80s teens played by Finn Wolfhard exist simultaneously in the same reality.