Texas shooting: Netflix issues content warning on ‘Stranger things’

With striking similarities in the opening scenes of Stranger Things season 4 and the recent mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Netflix has issued a content warning.

Following a recap of previous chapters, ‘Stranger things’ new season begins with a short message explaining that while production on Stranger Things 4 wrapped in 2021, viewers may be disturbed by the parallels between scenes from the first episode and the real world Texas school shooting that left two teachers and 19 school children dead.

Netflix had earlier uploaded the scenes in question to YouTube as a teaser in anticipation of the coming premiere, but the video was pulled down.

The content warning comes up when you play the season 4 premiere, and it seems that the message only appears the very first time to press play.

Though Stranger Things 4 is mostly set in 1986, the season’s premiere — “Chapter One: The Hellfire Club” — opens a few years earlier, back when Hawkins National Laboratories were still up and running experiments on Eleven and other children with enhanced abilities. “The Hellfire Club” frames the Hawkins lab as both a prison and a schooling environment for Eleven and her peers, and the episode details how their time there culminated in a horrific attack that left most of the children and staff dead. Both in and out of the larger context that’s revealed as the rest of Stranger Things’ latest season unfolds, the Hawkins lab massacre plays very much like the show’s take on a school shooting due to its focus on helpless children losing their lives in classrooms.

Texas mass shooting

The shooting occured on May 24, 2022. 18-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers, and wounded seventeen others at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Salvador who had earlier that day shot his grandmother in the face, severely wounding her later fired shots outside the school for approximately five minutes. He entered Robb Elementary School armed with an AR-15 style rifle and handgun without encountering any armed resistance.

Salvador Ramos locked himself inside a classroom, where he killed his victims over the course of an hour, before being killed by a United States Border Patrol tactical team.

It was the third-deadliest American school shooting, after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, and the deadliest ever in Texas.

Today/ Stephanie .S.