Season 5 opens with a flashback involving young Will Byers and the supervillain Vecna that is unmistakably charged with a heavy, uncomfortable sexual symbolism. It echoes the same dark, invasive, body-horror tone that defined Alien, and anyone familiar with that film’s history knows why that matters. The creators of Alien openly stated that the “face-hugger” design represented themes of oral rape and forced impregnation — a deliberate use of violent sexual metaphor.
So what does Netflix do?
It borrows that Alien imagery — that symbolism — and applies it to a child hero.
Do you really think that’s an accident?
This isn’t “just dark sci-fi.”
This is deliberate.
If you showed this scene to someone from the 1950s, they’d lose their minds. They’d wonder how a supposedly family-friendly, nostalgia-based show spiraled into fetish-coded horror symbolism aimed at a boy who’s been a child character since Episode 1. And their outrage would be justified.
Hollywood’s defense will be the same as always:
“It’s just metaphor.”
“It’s just horror language.”
“It’s all in your imagination.”
Give me a break.
Netflix has been playing footsie with grooming and predator aesthetics for years. They never do it openly — they’re too corporate for that — but they drip it into the culture through implication, tone, symbolism, and repetition. They rely on plausible deniability, and they rely on viewers being too dulled and exhausted to push back.
Look at how the show uses Will Byers. From the very beginning, his character has been written as a vulnerable, isolated, emotionally targeted boy — and every time, Hollywood leans into predatory symbolism around him. They frame Vecna not just as a monster, but as the classic psychological profile of a predator: isolating, manipulating, whispering, grooming. His father has left, he has trouble connecting with his family and friends, it's all the classic signs.
And now they’re ratcheting it up in Season 5 with imagery lifted straight from a movie about sexual violation — and people barely blink when it's done to a child.
This is the real scandal:
Not that Netflix crossed a line, but that Netflix knew the audience wouldn’t care.
They think America is so morally deadened that you can smuggle in sexually-charged horror metaphor aimed at kids — and most people won’t even notice the smell.
They think you’re desensitized.
They think you’re conditioned.
They think you’re beat.
And honestly? The lack of outrage proves them right.
Will’s character arc is now one long meditation on trauma — trauma he can’t name, trauma he can’t shake, trauma the show keeps linking to his identity and isolation. And it is the trauma of a child who was raped. And Hollywood has a long, ugly history of connecting marginalized identities to narratives of exploitation and victimization.
It’s a cynical, manipulative trope.
And Stranger Things just doubled down on it.
Let’s be crystal clear:
No responsible storyteller takes the symbolic language of sexual violation — historically acknowledged, artistically intentional — and attaches it to a child character “accidentally.”
Netflix did this on purpose.
They want you to see it.
They want you to internalize it.
They want your kids to grow up thinking this imagery is normal.
This is how cultural boundaries erode.
Not all at once — but through a steady drip of “just metaphors,” “just symbolism,” “just horror,” “just art.”
Here's what is interesting. What were the creators of Stranger Things really saying when they depicted the openly gay main character as being the victim of child sexual abuse?
A Vanderbilt study in 2022 reported that LGBT adults were 3–4 times more likely to report child sexual abuse than heterosexual adults.
What did the creators of Stranger Things mean by this?
