Stranger Things: Tales From '85 trailer shows mutating Demogorgon, Netflix April 23

Netflix released the first teaser for the animated midquel Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85, which premieres on April 23 and depicts a Demogorgon-like organism that mutates into multiple forms. Set between seasons 2 and 3, Tales From ‘85 adopts a Saturday-morning cartoon style while promising the same mix of nostalgic fun and horror as the core series, and the trailer aims to further develop the nature of the Upside Down’s monsters.

The teaser opens with Hopper (Brett Gipson) threatening a nervous Mike (Luca Diaz) as he picks up Eleven (Brooklyn Davey Norstedt) for a day of winter fun, but their plans for snowball fights and a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign are interrupted by a new threat. The trailer shows a lizard-like creature with a Demogorgon-style mouth being pursued by someone in a hazmat suit armed with a flamethrower, suggesting it may have escaped containment.

As the kids track it, the organism mutates into permutations including a pumpkin-headed, toothy jack-o-lantern, long-clawed stalkers in Hawkins High, toothy vines and a giant viney maw in the woods, and a hulking bear- or wolf-like form. The teaser and series lore point to two possibilities: Hawkins could be attacked by an Abyss creature altered by experiments, or the extradimensional monsters may rapidly evolve to suit their environment — Demogorgons are already shown to undergo multiple metamorphoses in the franchise.

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