Swarms of otherworldly bats that tear our favorite characters to shreds.
Hallucinations of dead friends.
Mutilated children.
Needless to say, the producers of "Stranger Things" have really stepped up their horror
game with season four.
Let's take a look at the new season's scariest moments.
The season premiere episode, "The Hellfire Club," ends with a brutal, stakes-raising
cliffhanger that takes the show to gnarlier territory than it's ever explored before.
In it, cheerleader Chrissy hopes to score some ketamine from metalhead Eddie in hopes
of achieving some relief from the visions she's been having of her verbally abusive
mother.
While Eddie scrambles to find the drugs, Chrissy falls into yet another vision, but this one
has dire consequences.
First Chrissy sees her mother at a sewing machine, but her face is distorted with a
bit of Vecna's visage.
When she runs to escape, an equally distorted voice starts yelling at her to open the door,
and she seeks out her dad.
But when he turns around, his eyes and mouth are jaggedly sewn shut, leaking with blood
and fluid as he tries to scream.
This is when Chrissy finally comes face to face with this season's big bad.
"It's time… for your suffering… to end."
Chrissy's death looks both disturbing and excruciating.
In her mind, Vecna is placing his long-fingered hands on her face.
In reality, she's pinned to the ceiling, levitating.
Then her arms and legs begin to break.
She crumples in, backwards and broken.
When the sight of her crumpled form is finally too much to look at, her eyes bleed and implode
inward, crushed by Vecna.
In the season's fourth episode, "Stranger Things" goes full "Conjuring"-verse to tell
a freaky story of what seems to be a classic case of demonic haunting.
The story comes courtesy of mental hospital patient and apparent murderer Victor Creel,
who is a pretty intimidating guy himself.
Nancy and Robin interview Creel from behind bars Hannibal Lecter-style, as the man with
the gouged-out eyes weaves a tale that's gruesome and surprising.
“I am still very much in Hell.”
The story starts decades earlier, when Victor moves his new family into what they believe
will be their dream home.
Almost immediately, though, strange things start to happen.
The family starts to find tortured and mutilated animals outside their home.
Spiders crawl out of the bathtub drain.
Their daughter wakes up screaming in the night.
Victor is convinced everything is the work of a demon.
He even sees a baby in a cradle rocking in the fireplace, which is pretty messed up.
All of this culminates during dinner one night when the radio turns on of its own volition.
It starts playing "Dream A Little Dream of Me," and then Victor's wife flies up in the
air just like Chrissy did.
She dies in nearly the same way, but the situation grows even more horrifying when Victor becomes
trapped in a memory of his time in the military.
We learn that Victor accidentally ordered the shelling of a civilian residence in France,
and that the baby in the fireplace has roots in his own traumatic past.
The super-dark story ends with Victor, behind bars after being wrongfully accused of killing
his wife, slicing his eyes open with a razor blade.
If you're a horror fan, the introduction of the Upside Down's Demo-bats might be more
awesome than scary.
Still, it's a pretty intense set-up.
The scene starts with Steve exploring a door to the Upside Down in the middle of a cold,
dark lake.
"You guys realize there's a gate down there that's technically a water gate?
Watergate!"
Suddenly, he's yanked through the portal by a tendril that aggressively pulls at his foot.
Once inside, Steve takes a look around.
This seems to be a different part of the Upside Down than any we've seen before: it's vast
and unnervingly empty, but it also pulses with glowing lights.
Soon, Steve hears a cawing screech, and just as we glimpse some figures in the sky, he's
knocked down by a slippery vine.
No, wait, that's a tail!
Steve's being accosted on every side by some type of supernatural bats, with three tails
apiece and long, sharp fangs.
They strangle and bite him while he wriggles helplessly in a scene that's one of the most
visually interesting of the season.
Of course, Steve gets the upper hand in the next episode, but for a moment we're left
with a slow zoom out as he fights for his life.
This one is a brief sequence, but it packs a lot of punch.
Just before Number One explains how he became the monster Vecna, Nancy witnesses his manipulations
firsthand.
Unlike the other victims, who start to see hallucinations days before their final showdown
with the creature, Nancy seems to slip out of time and space and into his lair while
trying to get back from the Upside Down.
When Nancy dusts herself off, she realizes she's in a vine-covered pool that looks awfully
familiar.
It's where dear, departed Barb was taken way back in season one.
There's a nasty-looking mass in the corner, and it doesn't take long to realize it's the
rotten remains of Barb herself.
Barb's whole bottom half seems to have turned into this pile of goop, while an up-close
shot reveals a terrifying face.
This is "Stranger Things"' body horror at its best and grossest.
"The Massacre at Hawkins Lab" answers the questions "Stranger Things" viewers have had
for years now, but the lead-up to the big reveal features a disturbing inversion of
the season's opening sequence.
In an immersion tank at the site of Project NINA, Eleven finally unlocks her true memory
about the creation of Vecna.
It turns out, Number One, who was pretending to be a kind orderly, actually slaughtered
all the other kids in the experiment.
El walks down the hallway, lit by ominous flickering lights, and sees the aftermath
of the carnage.
These are little kids with their bodies bent and broken, splayed across their beds and
in puddles of blood.
Quite disturbing, to say the least.
Eleven finally finds One, and he's holding a boy up against a wall with the force of
his power.
The teen is shaking, his arms pinned to the wall and his eyes rolled back in his head.
One is working hard on his violence, his claw-like hand curled in concentration.
“I asked you to wait.”
As he tries to explain himself, telling her that he knows how alone she feels, he wipes
away at one of her tears, only the gesture looks more like he's trying to grab it for
himself.
After Dr. Brenner tranquilizes Eleven as a means to use her like a human bioweapon, the
government arrives to shut down Project NINA — despite the impending battle with Vecna
coming up fast.
The government is convinced that Eleven is responsible for all of the tragedy to befall
Hawkins, and wants to take her out by any means necessary.
"Eleven, we have to go!"
"What's happening?"
"They're coming to kill you."
The government in "Stranger Things" operates a lot like the government in "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial"
in that they are willing to destroy anything in their path and refuse to listen to the
truth of what's happening.
The government soldiers terrorize the scientists working at the lab, and even deploy a helicopter
to come after Dr. Brenner and Eleven.
When Lt. Colonel Jack Sullivan makes the call for the helicopters to "take the shot" and
snipe Eleven from the air, it's a shocking moment that feels genuinely scary.
Eleven has her powers back, but Dr. Brenner has subdued her with an injection — we aren't
sure if she'll be able to defend herself when she needs her powers the most.
It's pretty telling that even in a world with demogorgons, mind control, telekinesis, and
dream monsters, one of the greatest threats to all of our favorite characters is a military
grade weapon in the hands of a foolish member of law enforcement.
"Are you ready for the most metal concert in the history of the world?"
The final battle in episode 9 is filled with moments of heroism, and the visual of Eddie
Munson shredding Metallica on top of a trailer in the Upside Down while red thunder booms
and demo-bats swirl is quite possibly the most metal moment in television history.
However, as undeniably cool as this final face-off appears from an aesthetic standpoint,
it also serves as one of the scariest.
Eddie, knowing that the demo-bats will attack Robin, Nancy, and Steve if he doesn't keep
them at bay, makes the decision to draw the monsters away on his own.
Armed with his trash can lid shield and a homemade spear, Eddie sacrifices himself to
save the rest of the crew.
It's when he's screaming at the top of his lungs as demo-bats crash into his shield that
the audience knows what's about to happen, and we can only watch in agony as our beloved
dungeon master is slowly chewed to death by a swarm of demo-bats.
Dustin holds Eddie during his final moments, where he expresses how proud he is of himself
for not running away.
It's a horrifying moment not in the sense of a jump scare or high tension, but because
the audience knows that this is one battle that Eddie isn't going to walk away from unscathed.
After Eleven utilizes a sensory deprivation tank made out of a Surfer Boy Pizza freezer,
a lot of salt, and pizza box sunglasses, she is able to meet Max in the Void and help her
face off with Vecna as part of the master plan to shut him down for good.
While Eleven and Vecna's inevitable showdown is the most serious part of the fight, it's
their initial confrontation with Max that is truly the scariest.
She willingly turns off her Kate Bush safety net to draw Vecna out, and he appears to her
in the setting of the Snow Ball dance from season 2.
"You can't hide from me, Max."
The stakes are obviously high between Vecna and Eleven, but knowing Max is nothing but
vulnerable feels so much more intense than the fate of the world.
Vecna throws Max around like a rag doll, and unfortunately, she dies from her injuries,
lying in Lucas' arms.
Fortunately, Eleven is able to revive her, and Max instead slips into a coma.
Fans have grown greatly attached to Max since her arrival, and there was no way we were
ready to see her go.
The thought of a final season without Max?
Now that's scary.
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