Could a Classic Stephen King Character Hold a Clue About Billy's Fate in Stranger Things?

• The final Stranger Things 3 trailer focuses considerably on the character of Billy Hargrove.
• Billy is looking more and more similar to a character from a hyper-popular Stephen King novel.
• Stranger Things 3 debuts on July 4.

The final trailer for Netflix's Stranger Things 3 dropped on Thursday, and the Stephen King vibes are as strong as ever.

The final trailer for the show—which releases July 4th—heavily hints that the Mind Flayer has returned to Hawkins, and this time with a new host. Daunting images of Billy, a minor villain in Season 2, flash across the screen, and the insinuation is that the monster has possessed him—that he and the Mind Flayer have become one. You have to consider the fact that this might be deliberate misdirection on the part of the filmmakers, because that doesn't seem like a twist they would want to give away in the trailer. But for now, we'll play along.

So let's assume that Billy has become the human host for the Mind Flayer. This makes a certain number of similarities with another character pretty undeniable: Henry Bowers, the horrific bully from Stephen King's IT. The character is pretty similar in both King's 1986 novel, and the 2017 film edition, so we'll run with both.

Stranger Things often pays homage to King's work. In the first season, one character even prefaces her idea of Eleven by asking Chief Hopper and Joyce a simple question: "Ever read any Stephen King?" King himself has also publicly expressed how much he enjoyed both the first and the second seasons of the show.

Both Henry Bowers and Billy are introduced as grounded villains in stories that reach much higher supernatural heights. In IT, Henry is a sadistic child, at one point slicing up an innocent classmate's stomach with a switchblade. Billy isn't quite as bad as that, but he's abusive nonetheless: his violent nature comes out toward his step-sister, Max, and toward his own classmate, Steve, whom he fights. He threatens the boys, specifically Lucas, with violence, and is only stopped from attacking when Max sticks him with a syringe, knocking him out.

Both characters are also revealed to come from difficult backgrounds. In Stranger Things, we see Billy's father get physical with him, much in the same way we see Billy threaten Max. Henry's father in IT isn't as outwardly violent, but he senses the way his son behaves and treats others, and treats him strictly as a result.

And then there's the shared supernatural element. A sadistic human bully in IT is made into a true horror villain when he's put into something of a trance by Pennywise, the demon/clown at the center of King's story. He kills his father, and looks to take out his aggression further by killing the group of boys (and one girl) at the center of the story. Billy, meanwhile... We'll see. But we know that a group of boys and one girl (with one of the boys played by Finn Wolfhard, who appears in both Stranger Things and the 2017 IT adaptation) is a familiar concept.

The final Stranger Things 3 trailer seems to confirm the popular fan theories that Billy might die this season, or at least that he will wind up playing a larger role in the supernatural mythology at the heart of the show. If Billy continues to follow the path of Henry Bowers, he would seemingly embrace his villainy, and join forces, in a way, with the monster, much like Henry does in King's IT novel and the 2017 film.

Most of those fan theories are plenty convincing—Billy's arm certainly looks infected by something in a screenshot, and he definitely appears to be hiding it in his character poster. The most convincing of these, to me, is Billy's placement on the official Stranger Things 3 poster. While every other named character on the poster is pictured above the monster, Billy is pictured beneath one of it's giant legs, turned away in the darkness. It is certainly a menacing pose, and his isolation from everyone else is certainly worth noting.

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