Monster Menstrual: Women, Girls, and Queer Horror in Stranger Things.

This analysis focuses on the 2016 Netflix series *Stranger Things* as a nostalgic homage to 1980s pop culture and horror, particularly drawing on Stephen King's works and classical feminine body horror tropes. While the series incorporates progressive elements such as more inclusive portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality compared to its 1980s inspirations, it remains constrained by the regressive paradigms of its source material, especially in its reinforcement of traditional gender roles and the marginalization of female characters. The show's supernatural elements, including the Upside Down and its monsters, evoke the "monstrous feminine" and "monstrous queer," linking fears of female sexuality and queerness to horror imagery that is ultimately contained within heteronormative resolutions. Thus, *Stranger Things* simultaneously revisits and reinscribes 1980s cultural anxieties, offering a complex but limited feminist and queer reading within its nostalgic framework.