Believe it or not, the suit and helmet behind that scene may be outdone by a prop fitting season 3's summer theme. While Stranger Things stars Heaton and Dyer worked with a stunt actor, other cast members were facing off with a shiny beach ball. In a tweet captioned "We had a ball on set," the Stranger Things writers room shared a video of the summer essential as a stand-in for the monster. That's a far cry from the towering and toothy blob viewers saw on screen, which Graff said was inspired by another entity with origins in 1980s horror.
If the Mind Flayer looked like a creature you'd already seen, and that creature was the alien from The Thing, you have a good eye. Graff said that Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer came to him early on with the idea that this year's big antagonist would "honor or play with" John Carpenter's creation. "We wanted to do something fleshy this year and something with teeth and wet and heavy," Graff told befores & afters. "It was a whole different ball game from the more reticulated tornado-type Mind Flayer monster from [season 2]."
With that monstrous inspiration in mind, the trio settled on several design elements that would give the Mind Flayer its gory look. That included tentacles, which they made retractable to avoid "everything flying around." There was also the being's actual composition, which they ultimately settled on being "chunks of goo" and "blobs of meat" that are floating and connected through a sticky tissue.
These moving parts helped the Duffers translate their concept of a wet, dripping, heavy creature into the Mind Flayer we all know and love.
