17 Key Cinematic Influences On Stranger Things

Credit where credit's due for Matt and Ross Duffer: together, they've created one of the most purely entertaining shows of the year so far, despite having no major credits to their name before now (save for some shorts and a few episodes of Wayward Pines). Now, with Stranger Things, the brothers are set to become Hollywood big shots - already, their supernatural Netflix original is proving a runaway success with both critics and audiences. It can't be denied, however, that the brothers had help. It'll be obvious to anyone who's been tuned in to pop culture from the past 40 years that Stranger Things is the sum of its influences. This series certainly doesn't exist in a bubble: rather, it's a show propped up by ideas from other hit movies and stories drawn from the works of popular filmmakers. Again, credit where credit's due: the Duffer brothers have borrowed only from the best, pinching liberally from Steven Spielberg, Stephen King and John Carpenter, to name just three of the artists they use as inspirations. Altogether, numerous sources provided inspiration for Stranger Things, and here are 17 of the most prominent. Warning for anyone yet to catch the show: there are spoilers from here on out 17) ET If you were to single out just one key touchstone for Stranger Things, Steven Spielberg's ET the Extra-Terrestrial would be it. This is a show set in a small all-American suburb, wherein bike-peddling kids are hounded by FBI agents after they discover a supernatural being, hide it among their own and begin teaching it the ways of the world. It's not just the central plot: the bittersweet comic fantasy tone of ET would also appear to inform Stranger Things on the whole. The show, like ET, is largely taken from the perspective of children and finds said kids - behind the backs of suspicious parents and other assorted adults - keeping their newfound super-friend a secret. This friend isn't quite as benevolent as Spielberg's long-fingered space traveler, though... 16) Carrie Almost all of the main inspirations for Stranger Things come from the 1980s (representing a high watermark for family-oriented blockbusters), but there are exceptions hailing from the 70s - hits from the decade that continued to have a cultural impact into the 80s and beyond (the era when the Duffer brothers grew up and apparently spent their time watching the same movies over and over). An immediately obvious precursor to Millie Bobby Brown's Eleven is Carrie White. Like the Stephen King (anti-)heroine, Eleven is quiet, unsure of herself and surrounded by bullies. Fortunately for her, though definitely not for them, she also has powers that allow her to take humiliating and eventually rather bloody revenge. Like Carrie's, Eleven's is a story about an outcast coming of age in an often altogether violent way. 15) Firestarter There are many shades of Carrie White in the shy yet occasionally barbarous (if pushed to the edge) Eleven, but a much closer comparison can be found in another Stephen King adaptation. Firestarter is the story of a young girl (aged nine, so closer to the age of Eleven than Carrie's lead is) with telekinetic powers. Like Eleven, Firestarter's Charlie McGee is borne of parents given hallucinogens in a government experiment. Unfortunately for mom and dad, Charlie is eventually abducted by government scientists in their effort to make a psychic weapon out of her. Almost beat for beat, that reflects El's own journey in Stranger Things (in Firestarter, as in Stranger Things, telekineses also causes the user's nose to bleed). Firestarter also features a score by Tangerine Dream, an influence on Stranger Things' synth-y soundtrack. 14) The Mist More Stephen King (this isn't the last one on the list, either). The Mist, written in 1980 and adapted into a film by Frank Darabont in 2007, is along with ET another key touchstone for Stranger Things. In the King story, shady government figures accidentally open up a portal to another dimension, unleashing terror from the other side - the exact same thing happens in Stranger Things. It's the icy Dr. Brenner (played by Matthew Modine) opening up an inter-dimensional can of worms that kicks off the whole story in Stranger Things. One difference is that, in King's tale, all manner of beasts come crawling through the cracked space/time portal, whereas in Stranger Things we only get one murderous monster. The Duffer brothers are already talking about exploring what else is lurking in the other dimension in season two, though... 13) 80s Cop Movies There doesn't appear to be one single source of inspiration for Chief Jim Hopper, police chief of sleepy suburban Hawkins, but you can see him in a number of good/bad policemen from a slew of 80s cop movies. He's cynical, a womanizer, an alcoholic. Things have gotten so terrible in Hopper's life that he doesn't even bother to shave or comb his hair anymore. Of course, we slowly come to learn how Hop got to be this way. He was once a great cop, a golden boy working in the city, but took to the bottle when hit by tragedy. Now he's a loner, a maverick demoted to walking a shitty beat in Nowheresville. His redemption story will sound just as familiar as his character set-up: it takes learning to trust people and believing in something again for Hopper to get back to being a good cop. Aww. 12) Star Wars (Original Trilogy) Star Wars doesn't really have a great bearing on the plot of Stranger Things - though you could argue there's a strong Jedi/Sith vibe to Eleven's powers, and she very much shares Luke Skywalker's struggle with the light and dark. More pertinent, though, is how the original Star Wars trilogy has had an impact on the younger characters within the series. By the early 80s, Star Wars had become a phenomenon. The Duffer brothers, perhaps remembering their own childhoods, acknowledge the impact it had on children of the era, inserting throwaway references to the force and Lando Calrissian ("Lando" is used by Dustin as code for a double cross) into Stranger Things whenever the three schoolboy characters are around. In one scene, Will even asks Eleven to make his model Millennium Falcon fly using her mind. 11) Close Encounters Of The Third Kind Where ET appears to provide the basic framework for the setting and much of the plot of Stranger Things, the show is also infused with elements lifted from another Spielberg classic. Jaws is touched upon literally in the form of the Hawkins police department (the Hawkins police dept. uniform is identical to that of the police force on Amity Island), but Close Encounters comes up time and again, mostly in Joyce's storyline. As in Close Encounters, lights are used to communicate with the supernatural, as Joyce uses Christmas lights to talk to Will in the Upside Down. Joyce herself also appears to be an amalgamation of the Melinda Dillon and Richard Dreyfuss characters in the film. Like Jillian Guiler, Joyce's son is abducted by forces out of this world, and like Roy Neary, Joyce's house begins to reflect her growing anxiousness as she attempts to come to terms with the unknown. 10) Stand By Me Stranger Things, like Stephen King tale Stand By Me, focuses largely on a group of four savvy school-age kids on a quest to locate a school chum. Rob Reiner's film was such an inspiration that the Duffer brothers had the actors read lines from it in their Stranger Things auditions. Clearly, that paid off: there's a real Stand By Me-style shooting-the-shit vibe to the scenes between Mike, Dustin and Lucas (and Will, very much the Wil Wheaton figure before he disappears to leave his group rudderless). It's not just the camaraderie among the four characters along with their initial quest that recalls Stand By Me, however. There are visual callbacks too: a shot of the gang walking down railway tracks snaking through a forest; the sight of the characters shooting the shit in a junkyard; and, of course, finding the 'body' of their schoolmate out in the wilderness. 9) The Goonies While the carefree vibe and basic group dynamics of Stand By Me have been transferred over to Stranger Things, The Goonies probably had more of an impact on the creation of the schoolboy characters in the show than Reiner's film did. The kids in Stranger Things are more like archetypes, closer to the main child characters in Richard Donner's family adventure movie (story by Spielberg, funded by Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment). The Stranger Things gang is also more resourceful than the Stand By Me crew, like The Goonies evading dangerous weapon-toting adults and embarking on their mission without any outside help (though the mission of the kids in Stranger Things is very different to that of those in The Goonies). 8) Poltergeist A lot of 80s pop culture and many hit 80s movies are explicitly referenced in Stranger Things. Poltergeist - directed by Tobe Hooper and written and produced by Steven Spielberg (though some insist Spielberg, rather than Hooper, actually directed the thing as well) - is one of them. In fact, in the very first episode, Joyce gives Will tickets to see the horror classic. The show then becomes a kind of poltergeist story itself for a few episodes, as the Byers residence turns into a 'haunted house' affected by the Upside Down and its monster. As in Poltergeist, the 'house' appears to abduct one of the child residents, and begins to bend and 'behave' unnaturally, with electronic appliances switching on and off at random (though this is more specifically related to the definitely-Spielberg-directed Close Encounters). 7) John Carpenter John Carpenter's movies don't have as strong a bearing on Stranger Things as those of Spielberg and King, but his films are unquestionably in the show's make up. There's a protracted alleyway fight a la They Live, radio acts as a communication tool for the other side as in The Fog, while the faceless monster from the Upside Down appears influenced by those from The Thing (at one point we even see two characters watching and discussing a scene from the movie). Perhaps the director's greatest 'contribution' to the series, however, is the Carpenter-aping score by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein. Heavy on the synth, the Stranger Things soundtrack is apparently influenced not by any one Carpenter score in particular; it's more like a summation of all the movie scores from his 70s/80s collection, and it plays throughout Stranger Things. It means Carpenter DNA can be detected in season one from beginning to end. 6) Alien/Aliens A more obvious reference point for the Upside Down creature/demagorgon than The Thing's monsters is clearly the xenomorph. Specifically, the Duffers appear to be drawing from James Cameron's Aliens and Ridley Scott's original Alien. There's only one creature, as in Alien, but as in Aliens we go behind the scenes to see how the creature sets up camp, making itself a slimy nest and 'storing' people in cocoons for later use (namely eating them and, as is hinted at the end of Stranger Things season one, implanting in them some living thing). There are visual callbacks to Aliens, too: the creature is shown to be almost impervious to bullets, but screams in agony when touched by fire. The two creatures even look similar: The demagorgon is, like the xenomorph, a nightmarish humanoid that stalks its prey from the shadows, clambering along ceilings and walls and often appearing out of nowhere. 5) John Hughes Like John Carpenter, John Hughes is all over Stranger Things, even if no specific movies of his can be said to influence the plot in any deep way. Generally Hughes-like characters dominate Jonathan and Nancy's storylines: there's the outcast (Jonathan) pining for the good girl in the bad crowd (Nancy), and a group of cartoonish jocks, the charismatic leader of whom (Steve) is gradually revealed to have secret hidden layers. Hughes' presence is felt elsewhere, too. There's a cheesy makeover scene for Eleven, where she's turned from feral child to apple in Will's eye, and a few heartfelt confessionals that seem to draw from the likes of The Breakfast Club. Meanwhile, the Hughes-penned Home Alone plays a key part in one episode - Chapter Eight - as Jonathan, Nancy and Steve set home made traps in the Byers residence to neutralize the Demagorgon. 4) David Cronenberg Stranger Things brings to mind several David Cronenberg movies from the 1980s. 1981's Scanners, first of all, gets a nod as Eleven's powers extend to blowing up the minds of her adversaries (no outright head explosions here, though - Stranger Things is at heart (dark) family entertainment, after all). There's also 1983's mind-bending satire Videodrome, which unquestionably is what inspired the warping walls inside Joyce's home. More generally, 1986's The Fly and assorted other Cronenberg body-horror classics would appear to have had an influence on the show (the appearance of the demagorgon's victims after they've been cocooned, the fake body that Chief Hopper cuts into to find only wool). 1983's The Dead Zone may also have had an impact: that's another Stephen King tale of someone with a psychic 'gift' thrust upon them. 3) Only God Forgives Getting into more recent times, could it be that Nicolas Winding Refn's divisive revenge shocker Only God Forgives had some influence on the Duffers when they were making Stranger Things? The opening credits, consisting of actor credits and the title appearing in a blaring neon red, is spare and glowing in the light of a suspiciously Nic Refn-style primary color. The Duffers have said the titles were inspired by Richard Greenberg, but the title design is almost an exact repeat of the Only God Forgives title work. There's also the matter of the Stranger Things theme tune, which sounds remarkably like the ominous synth stylings of composer Cliff Martinez on Only God Forgives. John Carpenter has a heavy influence on the sound and look of Stranger Things as a whole, but this credit sequence uncannily follows Danish provocateur Refn's lead. 2) Under The Skin Another of the more modern reference points in Stranger Things is Jonathan Glazer's cult 2014 sci-fi Under the Skin. Eleven doesn't reflect that film's predatorial 'The Female' in any way, though they are both 'alien' figures discovering the world for the first time. That aside, their stories are very different. It's when El goes into the sensory deprivation tank and we reach the dark psychic space between our world and the other that the Under the Skin influence becomes obvious. This nether region is depicted as an entirely black space, with the floor vacillating between a solid and a black pool of liquid. Only Eleven and her target are visible in the space, and these sequences are visually virtually identical to the scenes in Under the Skin wherein Scarlett Johansson's alien captures her human victims. 1) Quentin Tarantino Quentin Tarantino, as a director of ultra-violent (none of his movies have ever rated lower than R) crime movies and westerns, probably doesn't seem like an obvious influence on the Duffers on the surface. But his influence can be felt on the show nonetheless. For one, Tarantino is the filmmaker that made it not only acceptable but cool to lift from the work of others and plunder pop culture to make something new and 'original.' This, as evidenced by all the many heavy influences on this list, is the very MO of Matt and Ross Duffer on Stranger Things. Whether they realize it or not, they're heavily indebted to Quentin Tarantino. It would appear they're at least partly conscious of the debt they owe to Tarantino: at one point they even pay tribute to the director, with a POV shot from the trunk of a car - a QT trademark.