Stranger things: From adolescence to horror (and back again)

This paper explores different approaches to the study of audiovisual metaphor: the semiotic and linguistic perspectives and the transition from the semantic to the pragmatic one, which has seen the convergence between film studies and Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT). Starting from this scenario, a specific case study will be proposed: the serial fiction Stranger things (Netflix, 2016). The series works on the encyclopedic stratification of one of the most consolidated metaphorical relationships in the repertoire of the genre, especially since the 1980s: the (reciprocal) substitution between the semantic plane of adolescence and that of otherness and the supernatural verging on horror.