The air is toxic. Floating, ashy bits of debris swirl around like particles in a snow globe. They flicker through flashlight beams and gather on canvas bodysuits, yet never amass on the dark, uneven ground. Voices echo, stunted, through the murk: “Willllll!” The mix of sickly green and flat marine-blue hues lends an aquatic quality to the atmosphere, a quality made even more pronounced by the submerged, undead condition of the ubiquitous trees. It’s a place to look for and find the lost, dead or tucked away in an incubation chamber. A place to listen for the bipedal flower-headed beast that hunts, scenting blood across dimensions. Forever night, it’s a place on the other side of the routine, the normal, the safe. It’s the Upside Down. But what is the Upside Down? Where does it end? And what does it mean?

Like any invented world, the Upside Down follows rules. The rules make the world and provide the contrasts from the real world. Know the rules, know how to survive. In Season 1 of Stranger Things, the Upside Down remains largely unexplored, with our view of it restricted to what the various search parties can see with their naked eyes or with the aid of flashlights as they hurry through in search of lost loved ones or a way out. But the trailers for Season 2 suggest it’s certain we’re going to see a whole lot more (soon—yay!). Before we binge away the weekend, however, it seems fitting to savor the Upside Down’s temporary vagueness, so tantalizing, so ripe for speculation. It’s something we’ve wanted to write about for Wild Lot since we watched the first season last summer. So on the very precipice of the release of Season 2, we take a few minutes to get our thoughts down.

Here are “the facts”:

1. The Upside Down is probably a parallel dimension. From the comparisons to the D & D campaign “The Vale of Shadows” to the science teacher, Mr. Clarke’s, very Cosmos breakdown of the concept using two sides of a sheet of paper, the Upside Down will likely turn out to be exactly what it’s said to be: a dimension parallel to our own. Science gives it comfortable plausibility while Myth says we have a need for this type of place, this Hades or Vale of Shadows or Sprawl. It’s the nebulous junction where scientific possibility and spiritual necessity come together behind the realm of the knowable. The un-human realm. Which begs the question: what in the real world makes the Upside Down a necessity?
2. Something bad happened there. While the floaties look harmless, serene, almost beautiful, they tell a story, and no matter what story you read onto them it’s a dark one. Nuclear winter. Holocaust. Ice Age-begetting supervolcano eruption. The dark reverse of the poppyfield scene in Wizard of Oz where frolicking adventurers nestle in amongst the falling asbestos fibers. Aside from the ominous floaties, there’s also the presence of the Demagorgon(s) and the otherwise total absence of life . . .
3. . . . well, almost total absence. There are vines. The vines slither in and out of buildings, most noticeably on the outside of the Department of Energy building and on the inside of the Byers house and the school. The vines seem to be only beginning to overtake the civilized and the built environment, which seems to indicate . . .
4. . . . that the bad thing happened only recently. All the buildings are standing exactly as they are in the real world. Late model cars line the streets (why doesn’t anyone think to try the ignition of one?), streetlights still shine down on the empty world, like a Walmart parking lot in hell, and . . .
5. . . . footsteps are heard. Time happens concurrently in the Upside Down and the real world, implying the worlds are separated by the thinnest curtain of spacetime. In Chapter 8, “The Upside Down,” two parties, Joyce Byers and Sheriff Hopper in one and Jonathan Byers, Nancy Wheeler, and Steve Harrington in the other, run through the same space but in the two parallel dimensions. Joyce Byers, in the Upside Down, seems to hear and/or sense her son Jonathan, while Jonathan, Nancy, and Steve see the Christmas lights flicker on as the other party makes their way down the hall. But the only way they’ll actually see each other is if they take the . . .
6. . . . gates. Monsters? They need no gates. They (or it—is there only one?) can pop through walls or ceilings, no matter how thick. In fact this fluidity between worlds constitutes the monster’s power—it can strike anywhere, anytime, though the show’s creators haven’t dealt much with the scope of the Upside Down (surely more people bleed in range of the monster . . . ) But people? Certain warmly-glowing portals are needed. That or the psychic transcendence that Eleven demonstrates in the salt pool, or Will Byers in the Season 2 trailer. This rule is the trickiest: Who has access to the Upside Down and under what conditions? For instance, Hopper and Joyce take rather great pains to reach it, yet Nancy and Jonathan stumble luckily upon a portal glowing in the base of a tree in Mirkwood, the strip of woods at the outskirts of town. The question seems simple but the answer is elusive and, as Dr. Brenner’s Frankenstein experimenting in Season 1 suggests, the possibilities for exploiting the Upside Down appear to be worth a lot of resources to those in power . . .

While questions about the rules of accessing the Upside Down will have to remain unanswered for now, as a text that we can read now, the Upside Down looks like a world intentionally designed to arouse fear. It’s dark. In its aesthetics, it smacks of  #abandoned porn on Instagram: leafy organic debris scrawled over decaying surfaces, with flaking, clinging, drifting shapes. While there are lights (pale, harsh), there are no stars in the sky. The floaties are reminiscent of Silent Hill, a horror envisioning of an alternate dimension (interestingly, both Silent Hill and Stranger Things see this fearsome alternate dimension being opened up or created by extreme psychic trauma). The floaties also evoke the deadly asbestos-contaminated areas of Ground Zero on 9/11—the horror that the cameras couldn’t fully convey then but which sadly ruined lives in a painful, slow manner. Or ashes, in the air at Dachau. Or Chernobyl. Places where human beings took their industrialist hubris to such extremes that extermination followed as the only logical result, leaving a psychic stain on the landscape for generations to come . . .

And that’s what the Upside Down must be: a visual metaphor for collective psychic trauma and environmental devastation. What gives it its power is the formlessness of its source; it’s a serial quest-generator, capturer of bodies and imaginations, a place to penetrate and be abducted by, a realm of danger and uncontrolled natural forms.

Crawling vines complete a picture of an environment that spells doom not only to macro mammals but also to any effort at establishing a foothold or shelter in the Upside Down, as Castle Byers’ destruction at the end of Season 1 demonstrates. What can be started anew in the Upside Down? Can it be colonized, settled, exploited? How can anything be made to last in there?

The Upside Down, as frontier, must first be claimed from its present occupants. It has its own indigenous population—the Demagorgons with their venus flytrap heads—who, being monsters, have monstrous ends in mind for those unfortunate enough to end up in their grasp. For the Demagorgons, the Upside Down serves as larder for human meat (Barb, womp womp) and incubation chamber for propagating their parasitic race. A place to procreate and dine in peace. Scenes where bodies are found—Barb, when Eleven transcends the physical from her saltwater pool and Will, trapped, asleep with a monstrous feeding tube affixed to his guts through his mouth, when his mother and Hopper finally find him—look a lot like similar situations in the Aliens franchise and in the 2007 Frank Darabont movie The Mist. As in those worlds, any human stepping into the Upside Down plummets immediately a number of rungs down the food chain. And yet, to go in is necessary . . .

“In you must go,” Yoda tells Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back (1983), amid the swampy Dagobah atmosphere.

“What’s in there?” Luke asks.

Yoda plays with his stick. “Only what you take with you.”

Beneath a mat of forest floor and tree growth Luke discovers a cave strewn and hung with roots and reptiles. It’s underground. Vines everywhere and then, breathing robotically, Darth Vader himself, lightsaber brandished, emerges—a dream encounter. Like the scene in Stranger Things where Nancy Wheeler slips into the Upside Down, the Dagobah tree is a portal to another dimension—the myth world, a place of dreams—through the base of a root-gnarled trunk, a frenzy of wild root or vine forms.

In the same vein, Ichabod Crane must go into the forest and to the Tree of the Dead to face the truth of the headless horseman in Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton, 1999). The tree is contorted grotesquely and dominates its section of the endless woods. Blood flows through its roots and in its trunk a number of severed heads jostle aside to let through the horse’s black hooves. In this case, the tree trunk is a one-way gate from hell, as the portal leads allows no one in but allows the Headless Horseman out.

In The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya locates the Pit of Despair through the base of a tree, which is revealed to be a doorway.

“Please,” he says, vowing to avenge his father’s death at last, speaking to his spirit, “guide my sword.”

He moves about, eyes closed in trance, in a leaf-strewn clearing ringed by massive, misshapen tree trunks. The sword jabs against one tree trunk and, despairing, he leans against the tree, only to trigger the opening of a hidden door in the trunk.

Through the door is the Count Rugen’s Pit of Despair, the underground torture chamber where e the Man in Black (Westley) lies unconscious, waiting for Montoya and Fezzik to rescue him.

Finally, in the Fellowship of the Rings, one of the first mystical threats that Frodo and his fellow hobbits face comes from an enchanted willow tree deep in the forest:

“Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved.”

The tree puts the hobbits to sleep, pushes Frodo into the water, and encloses Merry and Pippin within itself, threatening to kill them. Only the singing of Tom Bombadil saves the hobbits.

In these examples, the tree in the woods stands as doorway from hell, as a place to safely encounter your own dark side, as doorway to a man-made hell, and as a monster in and of itself. It is the trope of the Dark Magic Tree in the dark woods. As a landscape the Upside Down feels empty, gloomy, shadowy, and of undefined size. But the nexus between Hawkins ‘83 and the UD comes at an equally gloomy, shadowy, and empty landscape in Mirkwood, the aptly named, it turns out, woods at the edge of town, home to the portal tree.

When the young characters refer to the woods that borders the subdivisions and hides the Department of Energy complex as Mirkwood, they suffuse the area with an instant mythos. These woods are the setting to our first sights of the Demagorgon, who initially lurks on the edges of civilization, snatching Will and Barb as they venture too close, alone, as well as the occasional deer. The woods as home of the terrifying unknown is a well established thematic path through our collective unconscious, from Grimm’s fairytales to “Young Goodman Brown.” But where such woods once dwarfed civilized areas, more recently they have been snipped to strips and pushed to the margins.

The periphery woods have become a recurring presence in depictions of American suburbia and the unease that accompanies it. Remnants of undeveloped land form hollowed-out shells around ever-growing pockets of civilization. Uninhabited, alienated from the adult world of paved streets, sidewalks, and manicured lawns, the periphery woods represents the simulacra of wild landscapes our species once had reason to dread. These are the places that bullies reign, bodies are abandoned, children are lost. One could name hundreds of references to woods just like these in movies, television shows, and books.

But alongside the unease these no-man’s-lands create, there is another association that is invariably intertwined with our understanding of them. For children who grew up in the suburbs, the near-wild strips of land that border their backyards, separating neighborhoods and marking flood zones and zoning boundaries, are sometimes the only places where they experienced nature, outside of planned excursions, under the watchful eye of adults. These are the places, rarely visited by adults, that held the treacherous and time-saving shortcuts from one part of town to the next, where kids retreated to build forts and dam creeks (later sneak beers and set off fireworks). There is a certain anxious freedom that can only be found in suburban woods. Anyone growing up in the suburbs through the 80s or 90s is familiar with this feeling.

But this once ubiquitous childhood experience is being lost, to overdevelopment, to childhoods spent indoors, wholly supervised, to childhoods that disappear into schedules of constant activity. Perhaps one of the most compelling things about the Upside Down is that it is built on the collective nostalgia of a real lost time and lost world, where mythical beasts might actually emerge from the shadows of the woods as you pedaled your bike at breakneck speeds down an isolated road, racing the vanishing daylight, vulnerable, but still free.