Someone Found All The Sci-Fi And Horror Movie References In ‘Stranger Things’ For You

The video below is stacked full of spoilers for Stranger Things.

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It’s no secret that much of the success of Stranger Things lays in its familiarity — the new Netflix series is dripping in ’80s nostalgia. As Junkee critic Clem Bastow put it, it reminds us of a childhood “spent in brown-toned interiors hazy with smoke, where yellow and red plastic lampshades cast an eerie glow over bowls of spaghetti thick with grated Coon cheese and butter”. But, it’s also reminiscent of a childhood spent at the movies.

Characters are pulled wholesale from John Hughes’ flicks, familiar tropes are lovingly inverted, and the world of popular science fiction is deliberately woven into the fabric of the story itself. As the first episode opens on a group of young boys invested in a 10-hour game of D&D, it’s clear this is a world that relishes the blurring of fact and fiction.

This has been well-noted. The internet is awash with lists of all the loving references the series makes to popular films and you would have absolutely picked up on some yourself, but it’s a whole other thing to see how uncanny the similarities really are side-by-side.

Thankfully, French director Ulysse Thevenon now has you sorted. He’s uploaded a huge supercut to Vimeo with a scene-by-scene breakdown of all the ’70s and ’80s direct references he could find including The Goonies, Alien, ET, Firestarter, Poltergeist, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Carrie, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Shining and more.

The comments on the clip are also packed with extra references he’s missed.