Stranger Things season 4 episode 1: "The Hellfire Club," recap and analysis

The episode fact sheet

The first chapter of the fourth season is titled, in the French version, « Chapitre Un : Le Club Hellfire », and in the original version Chapter One: The Hellfire Club. Matt and Ross Duffer, the show's creators, wrote and directed it themselves, as they did for chapters 2, 7, 8, and 9. Directing of the other four was given to Shawn Levy (chapters 3 and 4) and Nimród Antal (chapters 5 and 6); their scripts are credited to Caitlin Schneiderhan, Paul Dichter, Kate Trefry, and Curtis Gwinn.

The runtime sits around 76 minutes. That is a long format for an opening, but the season will do much worse: the ninth chapter runs 2 h 19, longer than a feature film. None of the nine drops under an hour.

The release took place on May 27, 2022, at the head of the first of two volumes. Seven chapters that day, the last two on the following July 1. Between the season being ordered, in September 2019, and this date, nearly three years passed, including six months when filming stopped.

The action takes place on March 21, 1986, eight months after the battle at the Starcourt mall that closed the third season. A prologue goes back even further, to September 8, 1979, in the white corridors of a Department of Energy lab.

The critical reception was broad: the chapter shows 100% favorable reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, on a small sample of eight reviews counted, and Joseph Quinn, who plays Eddie Munson, was named "performer of the week" by TVLine from his first appearance.

Recap of Stranger Things season 4 episode 1, in order

The chapter moves across four places in parallel and closes none of its threads. It opens on a massacre nobody explains, continues into an almost ordinary high school day, and ends with a death filmed like a possession scene.

Nothing supernatural appears on screen before the last sequence. That is a deliberate construction: the fear comes from the most ordinary place in the story, a trailer, after an hour of corridors, gym, and cafeteria.

1. Prologue A white corridor, seven years earlier

   Dr. Brenner works with numbered children in a Department of Energy lab. An alarm sounds, the bodies pile up, and Eleven stands in the middle. The chapter lets you believe she is responsible.

2. Morning Max Mayfield walks through the high school alone

   Max is Billy's stepsister, dead the previous summer, and she has kept her distance from the group since. She walks the corridors, Walkman on her ears, a Kate Bush song on a loop.

3. Cafeteria Eddie Munson provokes the basketball team

   The president of the role-playing club climbs onto a table and mocks the conformity the high school imposes. He is also looking for players for the evening's game.

4. Restroom Chrissy hears a grandfather clock

   The cheerleading captain sees her mother appear and hears a chime nobody else hears. Max passes her without knowing what is happening to her.

5. California Eleven's presentation on her hero

   In Lenora Hills, Eleven gives her class a presentation devoted to Hopper, whom she believes is dead. Angela and her group turn the tribute into a farce, and nobody steps in.

6. The evening The game against the match

   Eddie launches the campaign « Vecna's Curse » with Dustin and Mike; Erica replaces Lucas under the name Lady Applejack. In the gym, Lucas sinks the title-winning basket; at the table, a natural 20 takes down the sorcerer.

7. Lenora Hills The doll from Russia

   A package arrives at the Byers. As a precaution, Joyce sets it off from a distance, and finds a phone number and a note signed « Enzo »: Hopper is alive.

8. The night Eddie Munson's trailer

   Chrissy came looking for something to help her sleep. She goes into a trance, rises to the ceiling, her limbs break and her eyes sink in. Eddie runs.

Three storylines: Hawkins. California and Russia

In Hawkins, everything fits into one high school day. Lucas Sinclair has joined the basketball team to finally be accepted; Dustin Henderson and Mike Wheeler stay loyal to the game table; Max isolates herself and sees a guidance counselor; Robin Buckley plays in the marching band; Nancy Wheeler runs the school paper. The town is filmed like a teenage chronicle, and that is precisely the trap.

In Lenora Hills, California, the Byers family and Eleven have lived there since the previous fall. Eleven has not had her powers since the mall battle, and she writes Mike letters in which everything is fine. Jonathan has found in Argyle, a pizza delivery guy, the friend he was missing; Will secretly paints a picture he shows to nobody.

The contrast between the two blocks is worked in the image: white, saturated light for California, gray corridors and rain for Indiana. The show separates its characters as it never had before, and refuses to reunite them for several chapters.

The third thread, in this chapter, hangs on a single object. The doll shipped from Russia contains a note that settles what the end of the third season had left hanging: Hopper survived the mall explosion, and he is held in a camp in Kamchatka. The name that signs the message, « Enzo », is that of a restaurant where he had invited Joyce and where she never came. Nobody else could have known it.

The key moment: the trailer, and what it changes

Chrissy Cunningham is the most visible girl in the high school: cheerleading captain, girlfriend of the basketball captain, Jason Carver. She hides an eating disorder and a mother who watches every bite. Her migraines and her visions are what push her toward Eddie Munson, who is said at school to sell something to help you sleep.

Their conversation, in the woods behind the high school, is the softest scene in the chapter. Eddie remembers her at a middle school talent show; she laughs. Then comes the trailer, the trance, the ceiling, the broken bones. Eddie runs, and the creature that has just killed is not named once on screen.

A clarification is needed here, because the confusion is common. This monster is not the Demogorgon of 1983, and it is not the Mind Flayer of 1984 either: it is a third entity, distinct from the other two, which the group will end up calling Vecna, after the lich the club was facing that same evening at its table.

What this death changes comes down to three points. The first is genre: the story moves from the creature to the killer, and the camera stays on the victim's face instead of showing the monster. The second is legal: Eddie becomes a suspect, and the town will soon take his club for a cult. The third is structural: a gate to the Upside Down opens at the exact spot where Chrissy falls. It will take four of them to split the town.

What the chapter sets up for what follows

The grammar of the curse is set with a single victim: headaches, nosebleeds, visions of a guilty past, a clock chime, then a trance. The next eight chapters will only repeat it. Because it is readable from the first death, the audience can fear for the characters who follow.

Max's song is planted here as a simple taste. Running Up That Hill, by Kate Bush, plays in the high school corridors well before it serves as a shield in the fourth chapter. The writing never presents it as a magic object: it is first what Max listens to so she does not have to talk to anyone.

The monster's name comes from the game table. The evening's campaign is called « Vecna's Curse », and it is Erica, a last-minute substitute, who takes down the sorcerer with a natural 20. A few chapters later, the group will give that name to the killer, exactly as the generation of 1983 had named the Demogorgon after its game manual. Two creatures named by the same teenagers, and which the seventh chapter will reveal are subject to the same will.

Two engines also start in this chapter. The note signed « Enzo » will send Joyce and Murray Bauman on the road to Alaska, then to Siberia. And Eleven's powerlessness, without powers and without a defense against Angela, will lead to the Nina Project, in the Nevada desert.

The prologue remains, and it lies. The lab scene is cut to make Eleven carry the massacre; the seventh chapter will show who really killed those children, and that reversal is the peak of the season. Watching the opening again afterward is discovering another film.

The details and references to notice

The club's name was not invented for the show. Hellfire Clubs existed in the eighteenth century: secret societies of the British and Irish upper class, known for their parodies of rituals. The X-Men comics reused the phrase for a circle of wealthy enemies. For a high school club, the choice is a teenage provocation, and nothing else.

Vecna, for his part, is a tabletop role-playing creature: a lich, that is, a wizard who has become undead. The killer in the story therefore inherits a name his future victims chose themselves, one evening, around a table.

The soundtrack works by contrast. California Dreamin', in the Beach Boys' 1986 cover, accompanies Eleven's letter and the California light; Running Up That Hill accompanies the corridors of Hawkins High. Two climates, two worlds, the same loneliness.

The witch hunt this chapter starts has a real model: the moral panic of the 80s, when American parents, journalists, and pastors accused role-playing games of pushing teenagers toward the occult. Jason Carver will become its mouthpiece in the following chapters.

The most twisted detail is still the cross-cutting at the end. The basketball game and the tabletop game are cut together: Lucas scores, Erica rolls her die, and the two victories fall in the same minute. Meanwhile, a few miles away, the real curse begins its work.

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