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.
Published: Jul 21, 2016 01:20 pm