It was only a matter of time before the Satanic Panic reared its ugly head in Hawkins, and in season four of Stranger Things, it comes in a form we are used to: panicked suburban mob justice.
SPOILERS FOR STRANGER THINGS SEASON 4 PART 1
Content warning: mention of suicide.
Following the events of the previous season of Stranger Things, Hawkins is a lot more aware about the stranger dangers in town that have taken the lives of multiple characters in unexplained circumstances. Jason Carver is the captain of the basketball team, who embodies everything we thought Steve would be. He is introduced saying that the victories they’ve had are dedicated to the people that the town has lost. It is an instant a red flag.
The flags begin to glow after his girlfriend Chrissy dies in the trailer of Eddie Munson. He takes the supernatural death of Chrissy as an indication of the work of Satan. He leads the jocks, and later the town, in a witch-hunt against Eddie, accusing him of being an agent of the devil. Now, as absurd as this all sounds, this is based on the real Satanic Panic that took place in the ’80s and ’90s, and Dungeons & Dragons was very much a part of that.
When we hop in the time machine, the root of this panic, as it is connected to D&D, started with the death of James Dallas Egbert. Egbert was a young child prodigy who attended Michigan State University with a degree in computer science at the age of sixteen. On August 15, 1979, Egbert wrote a suicide note and attempted to end his own life. He woke up the next day and went into hiding, sparking an investigation into his disappearance.
The investigation lasted for several weeks, and Egbert’s parents decided to hire a private investigator, William Dear, to find their son. Once Dear found out that Egbert liked to play Dungeons & Dragons, he theorized that the disappearance was linked to the game—especially after reports were shared that students were playing the game in the tunnels below the school. In true moral outrage pile-on fashion, the new media took this nugget and decided that Dungeons & Dragons had a negative psychological impact on children.
Eventually, James turned himself in to Dear. Sadly, almost exactly a year after he first left, Egbert died of suicide on August 16, 1980. In 1984, Dear wrote The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, which discussed that James was struggling with his sexuality and mental health issues. Still, the public fever had hit, which made it so that anytime a teenager died by suicide, it was connected to the game if they were reported to have played it.
When Irving Lee Pulling died in 1982, his mother blamed the game. According to the BBC, Patricia Pulling, “attempted to sue her son’s high school principal, claiming the curse placed upon her son’s character during a game run by the principal was real.” Pulling would go on to sue the publishers of D&D (the suit was thrown out of court) and formed Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD) in 1983.
She described the game as “a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings.” Christian organizations labeled it as an “occult tool” that would open up children to demonic possession (girl, I wish).
With the benefit of hindsight, it might seem silly, but considering we have seen the rise of QAnon in recent years, this seems to be something that’s almost cyclical. From rock music to comic books to video games, we have seen a fever pitch of people believing something is evil without evidence, if it can be connected, even tangentially, to something that could negatively impact young suburban kids and teens. Stranger Things might be bringing this to light in a speculative fiction show, but as is often the case, the truth is stranger.
(featured image: Netflix)
