The opening of season 4 sees the Duffer brothers go out of their way to establish a hetero max landscape where any form of hetero-normative courtship is the rule but suggestion of other representation is aggressively banished. There's being faithful to the 80s but then there's just being outright prejudice. In actual fact gay culture exploded in the 80s and there were plenty of out gay people of the age range depicted in the series.

Sadly, to add insult to injury, the Duffers then devise a classic negative gay sterotype in Henry, a queer, delicate and effate loner subject to lots of parental abuse who it is noted, develops into the primary antagonist and performs his worst believable crimes (familial murder) as a weak bookish boy. This tragic turned evil negative (implied sissy) gay sterotype is well documented and it's troubling to see the Duffers resurrecting it without any sense of self awareness or historical sensitivity.

Over-all Stranger Things is plagued by the adult Duffer's perpetual adolecence. This is made stark in the fantastical visual choices which are in fact typical of male pubecsent fantasy centred as they are around an anxiety, fear and fasination with bodily function, most notably here, the rear-end, faeces and any 'whiff' of the banished yet associated homosexuality. Tubes of brown colon filled creepers emerge as multiple penis substitute phallus, spreading across a convincing Dali / Elm Street franchise inspired alt world, while flower headed carniverous pansies feed like wild animals. The symbolism is really quite stark.

The Duffers have used the homophobia of the 80s as an excuse to exercise their own latent fears unchecked and once again prove that if you put cart blanche film making power in the hands of hetero males they just take it as a right to unleash their prejudices. The gay movement has spent 40 years critiquing and attempting to lay to rest LGBTQ cinematic prejudice, a task initiated by emerging queer theorists of the 1980s. In this light, Stranger Things is a shocking mark of cinemtaic immaturity for which the Duffers should be held to account.

In the immortal words of the hit gay 80s band 'Frankie Goes to Hollywood' , "Relax, don't do it, when you want to go to it, relax don't do it when you want to cum..." and we hope series 5 will address and put right much this review raises. Feel free to campaign on the Stranger Things twitter account.