‘Stranger Things’ Season 2: Monster In New Promo May Have A Disturbing Origin

The Stranger Things Season 2 monster made its long-awaited debut in the teaser trailer released during Super Bowl LI on Sunday. While some fans of Netflix’s summer smash hit may have already identified the monstrosity that will be wreaking havoc in the upcoming season, an interesting theory about the creature’s origin has been put forth by an avid fan — and may have been corroborated by one of the sci-fi horror’s stars.

The freshman season of Stranger Things ended with fan-favorite character Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) seemingly sacrificing herself to destroy the Demogorgon and save her friends. Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) returned from the Upside Down and everything seemed back to normal. But in the season’s final moment, the boy coughed up a slug-like creature and briefly phased into the Upside Down, leaving fans with loads of unanswered questions.

Sunday’s Stranger Things Season 2 trailer shed some light on the upcoming episodes (yes, Eleven is back — and so is the Upside Down) but also gave rise to new mysteries. What is the new monster and where did it come from? Is it Barb (Shannon Purser) reincarnated as some fans have suggested? Did Will open a portal to the Upside Down?

In the Stranger Things Season 1 finale, Will and his friends Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) ended up playing another round of Dungeons & Dragons, the same thing they were doing at the beginning of the season. When Season 1 opened, the boys were going up against the Demogorgon, a fictional creature that resembled the real-life monster they would later encounter. In the season ender, they went up against a new monster: the Thessalhydra.

In Dungeons & Dragons, the Thessalhydra is a hybrid creature with eight heads. In a post on the Stranger Things subreddit, user poptart92 theorized that Will, who may have been infected by the Upside Down, could be one of the creatures that make up the monster — or that the Thessalhydra arose from him.

“So after a bit [of] research [I] found that the Thessalhydra is one of the family of Thessalmonsters, which are basically hybrid monsters. This kinda made me think, cause obviously [W]ill has something inside him, as he coughs up a slug and had a long leech-like snake in his mouth, maybe the monster was using humans as hosts to grow it’s young, and Will will eventually grow into a human-monster hybrid, since he has radioactive monster DNA inside him now, and Will will start to go crazy and they might have to kill him or at least do something to [W]ill to get the monster out of him.”

Interestingly, Schnapp hinted at the possibility of Will transforming into a monster in an interview during a BAFTA event in January.

“You’ll be seeing more of me. I’ll be there. In the last episode, I threw up a slug, so Season 2 begins with what happens from there. There may have been some effect on him. I may or may not have turned into a monster.”

However, Polygon suggests that the Stranger Things Season 2 monster may not be an actual thing. According to the outlet, the scene in the trailer in which Will opens the front door and sees the silhouette of the creature outlined against the red sky may have just been a hallucination or a dream. In the trailer, there is a scene in which Will is being examined by a doctor, possibly hinting that the boy is suffering from some kind of psychosis.

The alternative, of course, is that the Stranger Things Season 2 monster in the trailer is the real deal and that Will has become a portal, allowing creatures in the Upside Down to enter his world.

Stranger Things Season 1 is currently streaming in its entirety on Netflix. Fans will have to wait until Oct. 31 for Stranger Things Season 2.

[Featured Image by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images]