Stranger Things — the Upside Down and biblical "the deep"

What the work does

The Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things premiered on Netflix in July 2016 and has continued through subsequent seasons. The series is set in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, beginning in 1983. Its central premise: that a government laboratory experiment opened a passage between the visible world and a parallel dimension that the show’s young protagonists name the Upside Down — a world of decay, darkness, and predatory creatures that intrudes into Hawkins through several portals across the series.

The show draws openly on multiple 1980s genre influences — Spielberg, Stephen King, Dungeons & Dragons, John Carpenter — as part of its texture. The Dungeons & Dragons influence in particular shapes the show’s monster naming: the lead creature of season 1, named by the protagonists after the D&D monster, is called the Demogorgon. This name is medieval and Renaissance in origin, not biblical.

This entry documents the Demogorgon name’s actual source and the loose biblical parallels to the Upside Down’s parallel-world structure.

The “Demogorgon” name

The name Demogorgon is not biblical. It does not appear in any version of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the New Testament, the apocrypha, or the patristic literature.

The earliest documented appearances:

• Late antique scholia on Statius’s Thebaid (early 5th c. CE). A grammarian commenting on Statius’s poem (1st c. CE) refers to a Greek daimon Gorgon or similar formula; the text is corrupt and disputed in transmission.
• Lactantius Placidus’s commentary on Statius (uncertain date, possibly 6th c.) further develops the reference.
• Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, c. 1360) introduces Demogorgon as a major mythological figure, drawing on the late-antique scholia and substantially expanding the figure’s role.

After Boccaccio, Demogorgon enters Renaissance and early modern literature: Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Tasso, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, where Milton refers to “the dreaded name of Demogorgon” in Book II). Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) makes Demogorgon a major character.

The 1974 first edition of Dungeons & Dragons drew the name Demogorgon into its monster manual, where it has remained as a major demon-prince figure across the game’s subsequent editions. The Stranger Things protagonists are playing D&D in the first episodes of season 1; they reach for the Demogorgon name as the closest thing in their available vocabulary for what they have encountered.

The name’s lineage is, therefore: late antique scholia → Boccaccio → Renaissance epic → D&D → Stranger Things. Nowhere in this lineage is the Bible.

The biblical “the deep” — tehom

The Upside Down as a parallel-world image has only loose biblical parallels, and the parallels should be held loosely.

Genesis 1:2. The opening of creation establishes a primordial state of darkness:

“Now the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2, BSB)

The Hebrew word for the deep is tehom (תְּהוֹם). HALOT s.v. tehom: “primeval ocean, the deep, primal waters.” The word is etymologically related to the Akkadian Tiamat — the primal salt-water goddess of Babylonian creation mythology (in the Enuma Elish) — though Genesis 1 is using the word in a demythologised way: tehom in Genesis is not a personified being; it is the primordial water-state.

The image is of darkness over water before order is imposed. The Spirit of God (ruach elohim) hovers; light is then commanded; the work of separation and order proceeds across the six days.

The Upside Down’s visual register — dark water, particulate ash, decayed vegetation, predatory beings underneath the surface of the visible world — has some tonal resonance with the tehom-over-darkness image. But the show’s Upside Down is not pre-creation; it is an alternative present, a parallel dimension co-existing with the ordered world. Genesis 1:2’s tehom is what precedes creation, not what runs alongside it.

The Hebrew Bible has separate imagery for currently-operating chaos and adversarial powers; that imagery sits in the apocalyptic literature.

Apocalyptic two-realm imagery

The biblical apocalyptic literature operates with a different parallel-realm imagination: not a primordial tehom, but a hidden adversarial realm operating alongside the visible world.

The clearest example is Daniel 10. The angelic figure addressing Daniel explains a three-week delay in arriving:

“The prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me for twenty-one days. Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I had been left there with the kings of Persia.” (Daniel 10:13, BSB)

“Soon I will return to fight against the prince of Persia, and when I have gone forth, behold, the prince of Greece will come.” (Daniel 10:20, BSB)

The image is of unseen princes operating alongside the visible empires of Persia and Greece — adversarial powers in an unseen realm whose actions affect the visible world. The book of Daniel does not develop the picture systematically; the New Testament Pauline literature does so further:

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this world’s darkness, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Ephesians 6:12, BSB)

The Greek list — archē, exousia, kosmokratōr — describes unseen powers operating in the heavenly places. The vocabulary is parallel-realm, not primordial-chaos.

The Upside Down has some structural resonance with this picture: a hidden realm whose inhabitants intrude into the visible world; the visible characters partially aware of the intrusion; the realms not separated by time (before-creation vs. after) but by dimensional arrangement. The resonance is loose; the show is not citing the biblical apocalyptic material.

Holding the parallels loosely

Two things to keep distinct:

• The “Demogorgon” name is medieval. It has no biblical pedigree at all. Treating it as biblical (as some viewer commentary occasionally does) is a category error.
• The Upside Down’s parallel-realm structure has loose resonances with two distinct biblical imagery clusters: the tehom of Genesis 1:2 (primordial chaos) and the unseen adversarial realm of Daniel 10 / Ephesians 6 (apocalyptic two-realm imagination). These are different biblical materials with different structures. Neither maps onto the Upside Down cleanly; both are worth knowing about as parallel imaginings of what is underneath the visible.

The show does not invite or require either reading. Naming the parallels is what the entry does; pressing them harder would over-read the show.

For the underlying Greek of apocalypse (relevant to the apocalyptic-genre material referenced above), see Apocalypse — unveiling, revelation, not catastrophe. For the Hebrew ruach (Spirit, breath, wind — the word in Genesis 1:2), see Ruach — Hebrew for spirit.

To read the relevant biblical passages in other translations:

• Genesis 1 — NIV →
• Daniel 10 — NIV →
• Ephesians 6 — NIV →