Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and Will (Noah Schnapp) are best buddies who love Dungeons and Dragons. After a victorious game, Will is on his way home when he’s unexpectedly snatched into an alternate dimension called the Upside Down by a creature called the Demogorgon.
It doesn’t take long for his mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) and his older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) to realize he’s missing, so they ask Hawkins’ Chief of Police and lover of quiet mornings, Jim Hopper (David Harbour), to help find him. On the other side of town, a girl named Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is caught stealing food. She’s clearly a bit messed up. The man who finds her calls social services, but that turns out to be a big mistake.
The woman who arrives in response to his call is actually an agent working for the shady Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), the scientist who conducts experiments on Eleven’s supernatural abilities at the Hawkins Laboratory. She shoots the man, but fortunately, Eleven escapes and crosses paths with Mike, Dustin, and Lucas as they search for Will.
The gang hides her in Mike’s basement, feeds her Eggos, and discovers her levitating powers. Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Mike’s older sister, is dating local popular kid and well-meaning prat Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), who invites her to his house party. Not wanting to go alone, she brings her best friend Barbara (Shannon Purser), whom she promptly neglects for most of the night right up until Barbara cuts her finger.
Nancy goes with Steve to his room and they have sex, leaving her friend waiting by the pool. One moment, Barbara is there; the next, she’s gone. Jonathan, searching the forest where Will disappeared, captures the moment she vanishes with his camera as he’s secretly taking photos of Nancy and Steve. It’s unclear what happened to her, but Barbara is never seen again. She dies, and she’s not coming back.
Joyce figures out that she can communicate with Will using the lights and completely redecorates the house accordingly. Hopper looks at the tapes from the Hawkins Laboratory for any sign of Will but realizes that they’ve been faked. He gets pretty suspicious. After some good old-fashioned research, he finds out about the lab’s dodgy mind-control experiments, Project MKUltra, and Terry Ives, one of the test subjects.
Will’s body is discovered floating in the quarry, but he’s not dead, which we know because Eleven uses a walkie-talkie to tune into him freely singing in the Upside Down. The boys begin a makeover montage as they disguise her so they can get her to the powerful radio at school, which she can use to locate Will.
Although they have this critical information, they choose not to share it with Joyce, who refuses to accept that Will is dead. Her doubts are finally confirmed when she hears Will’s voice calling to her from within the walls of their house. In a desperate frenzy, she attacks the wall with an axe and, in doing so, uncovers a membrane separating Hawkins from the Upside Down, with her son trapped on the other side. Just as she processes this, the Demogorgon bursts through the wall, delivering a shock she never saw coming.
Steve and his crew find out Jonathan has been taking pictures of them and are understandably a little bit miffed, so they break his camera and rip up his photos. Nancy gathers up the scraps featuring Barbara and, upon seeing the Demogorgon in the photo, realizes that whatever took Barbara matches the description Joyce gave of the creature that came through her wall. Nancy lets the police know Barbara is missing.
Meanwhile, Hopper breaks into the morgue and finds that Will’s body is fake. Thanks to the wonderful powers of Dungeons & Dragons and Eleven, the boys figure out that Will is trapped in the Upside Down and that there should be a gate linking it to Hawkins.
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They follow their compasses to try to find it, but Eleven manipulates the needles because she’s scared of encountering the Demogorgon. Lucas finds out and isn’t happy. As he and Mike fight, Eleven accidentally uses her telekinesis to push Lucas away and knock him out. He eventually comes around, but by then Eleven has disappeared.
Hopper has a similarly eventful time back at the lab when he finds the spooky, creepily fleshy gate into the Upside Down, but he’s knocked out. He wakes up in his apartment and finds that it has been bugged. His deputies arrive and tell him they found Barbara’s car at the bus station, suggesting she ran away. But Hopper doesn’t believe it.
Nancy and Jonathan venture into the forest in search of the Demogorgon. Instead, they stumble upon another gate to the Upside Down. Nancy bravely crawls through, but her exploration turns harrowing as she is hunted by the monster. She manages to escape back to the real world, understandably shaken. Terrified of being alone, she asks Jonathan to stay at her place.
Meanwhile, Steve grows worried about Nancy and decides to check on her. When he finds her with Jonathan, he jumps to conclusions and assumes they are a couple. Oblivious to Steve’s suspicions, Nancy and Jonathan spend the next morning buying supplies to kill the Demogorgon.
They later discover Steve has vandalized Hawkins with graffiti insulting Nancy. This leads to a confrontation where Steve and Jonathan get into a fight. In the scuffle, Jonathan accidentally punches a police officer and ends up getting arrested.
Hopper and Joyce go on a brief road trip to meet Terry Ives, but she’s not mentally present. Her sister tells them that Terry believes the government abducted Jane, her unborn child, because she had special powers. Remembering the drawings he saw at the lab, Hopper believes Jane (or Eleven as we know her) is in Hawkins.
Mike and Dustin are searching for Eleven when they’re cornered by bullies. The bullies force Mike to jump off the edge of a cliff, but Eleven arrives just in time. She uses her powers to levitate Mike to safety and breaks the arm of one of the bullies. Meanwhile, Lucas spots agents leaving the lab and warns Mike that they’re heading to his house. Mike, Dustin, and Eleven manage to escape in the most epic way possible.
The friends reconcile, and Joyce and Hopper arrive at the police station, where they reunite with Jonathan and Nancy. Together, they team up to rescue Will. To amplify Eleven’s powers, they construct a makeshift sensory deprivation tank at the school, where Eleven locates Will hiding in the Upside Down and confirms that Barbara is dead.
Hopper and Joyce are discovered when they try to break into the lab to go through the gate to find Will. Nancy and Jonathan retrieve their hunting equipment from the police station. Hopper reluctantly trades information about Eleven’s location in exchange for permission for himself and Joyce to enter the Upside Down.
While his mother is away, Jonathan and Nancy booby-trap Joyce’s house in preparation for fighting the Demogorgon. Steve arrives just after Jonathan and Nancy cut their hands to summon the monster. The three stab, shoot, and set the monster on fire, but it escapes back to the Upside Down. Brenner and his men appear at the school, but before they can capture her, Eleven kills them all.
The massive amount of blood summons the Demogorgon, which attacks Brenner. Hopper and Joyce find and rescue Will from the Upside Down. Eleven destroys the Demogorgon and apparently sacrifices herself in the process. The boys and Will reunite in the hospital. Outside the hospital, Hopper is picked up by an ominous black car.
One month later, at the police Christmas party, Hopper sneaks out, takes some food, and places it in a hidden box in the woods. Within the cozy warmth of his home, Will excuses himself from Christmas dinner to wash his hands. He coughs up a slug and seems to step into the Upside Down for a moment. He tells no one. That won’t come back to haunt him at all.
