Ready to join The Hellfire Club?
That’s the title of the first episode of Stranger Things season four, as revealed by the Stranger Things writers Twitter account late in the day on Stranger Things day.
Stranger Things Day is, obviously, the anniversary of the day Will Byers disappeared into the Upside Down on November 6, 1983. The show has been all over social media all day, sharing bloopers and messages from the cast to celebrate the day it all began.
They ended the day with a shot of the cover page for the script for episode 401, titled “Chapter One: the Hellfire Club.”
The theories about what “The Hellfire Club” is began immediately, and the title was trending on Twitter pretty quickly.
Hellfire Clubs are not an invention by Stranger Things, but actually date back to the 18th century when they were known as exclusive clubs for members of high society in Britain and Ireland.
“Such clubs were rumored to be the meeting places of persons of quality who wished to take part in socially persceived immoral acts,” reads the Wikipedia page. “The members were often involved in politics.”
That doesn’t sound particularly relevant to Stranger Things, but there definitely are some uses of the term that do. In the X-Men Comics, the Hellfire Club “is an ancient club for the rich and hedonistic with Regency Era trappings that has branches all over the world, concealing the ‘Inner Circle,’ a powerful and influential criminal organization” that “seeks to influence world events, in accordance with their own agenda.”
Who on earth knows what that means for the characters of Stranger Things, but those comics came out in 1980, meaning the kids could easily be familiar, and it would be no surprise to discover some group of evildoers with an agenda trying to influence world events in the world of this show.
We’ll just have to wait four season four to arrive to find out what exactly is going on.
Stranger Things season four will debut on Netflix at some point.