It's a surprising and emotional moment and a testament to the show's smart storytelling that such a minor character could make fans feel so sad. Barb is incredibly innocent and dies because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and trying to be the best friend she could be.
In late 1983, Barb mysteriously vanishes, which leads Nancy and Jonathan Byers to investigate her disappearance. Eventually, it was revealed that she had been killed by the Demogorgon.
Eventually Will's body turned up, but Barb's never did. It's only when Eleven psychically traveled to the Upside Down via a sensory deprivation tank that she saw Barb's decayed body and knew she was dead.
Barb's death implied that whatever the slug does didn't take, so the Mind Flayer reached out to Will instead. It could be that the Mind Flayer needed a younger host, or Barb may have simply died while the Demogorgon was attempting to infect her.
She wound up injuring her hand while trying to shotgun a beer. While Barb was off tending to her wound, nobody seemed to care about her wellbeing. Even the usually loyal Nancy brushed her off by telling her to go home. Instead, the Demogorgon targeted Barb as she sat alone by the Harringtons' pool.
For starters, she's a girl, one of the few teen girl characters in the first season. And many LGBTQ+ viewers saw Barb as a closeted queer character with an unrequited crush on Nancy.
Barb Dies In Stranger Things Season 1 When She's Trapped By A Demogorgon In The Upside Down. Barb's Stranger Things death is one of the most emotionally affecting moments of season 1.
Vecna's first big credited kill was Chrissy Cunningham (Grace Van Dien). He followed that murder with canonically terrible driver Fred Benson (Logan Riley Bruner) and basketball star Patrick McKinney (Myles Truitt). But wait, there's more.
Re-watching the episode where Will Byers goes missing, there is a lot of evidence suggesting that it was Vecna who abducted Will and trapped him in the upside down. Many Stranger Things fans who re-watched the scene pointed out that they could hear the chimes of the grandfather clock.
In episode 7, Vecna is revealed to be Henry Creel (played as a youngster by Raphael Luce), the son of Victor Creel (Robert Englund) and his wife Virginia (Tyner Rushing) shown in the 1950s flashbacks.
Stranger Things season 4 introduced viewers to Vecna, a powerful psychic revealed to be the show's true villain all along.
Barb ultimately decides to return to her family and their own church. At the end of the series, as Bill lies dying on the street, he sees a halo around Barb and asks her to bless him as he dies.
The history of the Upside Down remains mysterious. Exactly how and why it came into existence is unclear. Dustin theorised the Upside Down had existed for thousands, if not millions of years.
The California crew of Mike, Will, Johnathan, and new character Argyle also made it back to Hawkins, though Hawkins isn't exactly the best place to be at the moment.
They tell Nancy they've hired a man named Murray Bauman, a former investigative journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times, to track down any leads on the case. Also, in a truly sad twist of the knife, the Holland's are planning on selling their home to pay for the pricey investigation.
The sisters, known as the "little Debbie murderers," do just that — murder their little sister, Debbie. Debbie is a competitive gymnast, so their family relocates all the time for her competitions.
After a certain period of time, Vecna will finally kill the victim by placing them into a comatose-like state, in which they will be unable to respond to outside stimuli.
Max has escaped Vecna, so she is safe from Vecna.
Vecna, who absorbs beings' consciousnesses and resultantly feeds off their power, knew he had stumbled upon exactly what he needed to exact his revenge on the world: I saw so many things, then one day I found the most extraordinary thing of all. Something that would change everything.
Brenner. The episode culminates in Eleven unknowingly freeing One from Brenner's control, allowing him to unleash his true power on the staff and children in the lab, killing everyone except for Eleven and Dr. Brenner, who is only knocked unconscious.
Vecna prays on those dealing with trauma, which is why Max, who recently lost her brother, Billy, was the perfect victim. While she initially got away from him with help from her friends and her favorite song, she wasn't as lucky at the end of the season when Vecna captured her again.
As Vecna, he uses these mental abilities as a way to psychologically weaken and lure in his victims – much in a way that Pennywise, Freddie Kruger, and Pinhead do. (All of which have been cited by show creators the Duffer brothers as inspirations for the villain.) But he does have a surprising weakness: music.
Instead of being stricken by the death of a loved one like Max was, Chrissy's trauma stems from her troubled home life. She endures constant body shaming and emotional abuse from her mother Laura, which eventually drives Chrissy to bulimia—a development revealed when Max crosses paths with her in the bathroom.
There are intense monster/slasher-type scares, with frequent death, peril, and gore. Children and teens are killed gruesomely, and people are attacked or taken by genuinely scary monsters, their bodies manipulated, possessed, and absorbed.
One of the theories could be that Will has some supernatural powers that caused the monster to be lured to him even though he wasn't injured. That could also be the reason he could communicate with his mother using the lights.