In the fourth season of The Duffer Brothers’ Netflix horror/sci-fi show Stranger Things, we see Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) being bullied at her new high school in California — she has moved there with Joyce (Winona Ryder), Will (Noah Schnapp) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton). But every new town in Stranger Things comes with its own Mean Girls-style clique and here, Eleven is being bullied by her classmate Angela. In a poignant scene, we see her close to breaking point, even as laughing and jeering kids surround her in a circle, led by Angela. The backdrop to this scene is that at the end of the last season, Eleven had lost her telekinetic abilities. So when she finally tries to strike Angela with her powers, nothing happens and everybody bursts out laughing.
This scene is an affectionate tribute to the classic 19070s Stephen King novel Carrie, where a telekinetic young girl is bullied by her classmates in a particularly ruthless way — and she responds by killing nearly every one of them with her powers. Across its four seasons, Stranger Things has carefully placed references to the works of its two biggest influences — Stephen King in the writing department, and the iconic director Steven Spielberg when it comes to visuals. King and Spielberg are, of course, two of America’s most loved storytellers and their works are now considered pop culture staples. Let’s take a closer look at how Stranger Things weaves in these references, one by one.
King-sized thrills
According to the Duffer Brothers, the creators of Stranger Things, the inspiration began with the title card itself. The font that Netflix uses to spell out the name of the show is actually inspired by the “big, chunky, ominous-looking” title fonts of Stephen King paperbacks from the 1980s — the show itself is like an elaborate love letter to that decade. I personally remember owning a copy of the Stephen King novel Needful Things where the title font was indeed very similar to the one used by Stranger Things (see picture below).
Take a good long look at the basic premise of the first season of Stranger Things — a group of nerdy pre-teens in the town of Hawkins grow up and find their true selves fighting an other-worldly monster, discovering a fresh corpse at one point. This is reminiscent of two different Stephen King stories — IT, which featured the killer clown Pennyworth haunting a group of children. The other, of course, is ‘The Body’, which was later adapted into the 80s classic movie Stand By Me, starring River Phoenix and Will Wheaton. In that story, a group of children discover an abandoned cadaver by the train tracks and that sets into motion their classic bildungsroman (coming-of-age) narrative. IT finds another mention in the second season of Stranger Things, when Bob (Sean Astin) gives Will (Noah Schnapp) advice about battling one’s personal demons and mentions that for Bob, this demon was a terrifying clown called Mr Baldo. Similarly, Stand By Me is referenced in the Season 2 scene where Dustin and Steve are out dropping pieces of meat along the railway tracks (the monsters in Stranger Things are typically lured this way, remember the Demogorgon hunt towards the end of Season 1)
And what about Eleven herself, the super-powered teenager at the heart of Stranger Things. We already established her Carrie connection at the beginning of this article. But there’s another Stephen King novel that bears close resemblance to the plot trajectory followed by Eleven — Firestarter, which also involves a young girl, super-powers (in this case, pyro-kinesis) and top-secret government projects that use children for experimentation.
In Season 3, we meet an unhinged new character called Billy Hargrove (Darcy Montgomery), who’s brash and impulsive and at one point, tries to run our heroes off the road with his sports car. Billy’s car is actually the biggest Stephen King reference to found across Season 3 (which is less of a horror story and more of an action-adventure, a la 80s classic Indiana Jones, who also finds a couple of mentions). You see, the way the car is introduced to us, the camera angles used in that sequence, are a throwback to a Stephen King novel called Christine, a book about a homicidal car (yup, you read that right).
Billy Hargrove is one of the season’s bad guys and his big maniacal moment in Season 3 finally happens when he thrusts his whole head through a sauna door, ripping it apart to catch his terrified sister Maxine. This moment was reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s iconic scene from The Shining where he does something very similar and then says “Here’s Johnny!” The Shining, of course, is one of the most famous and acclaimed Stephen King adaptations of all time, directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Spielberg, the all-American hero
For an average American kid growing up in the 1980s — Stranger Things’ chosen decade — Steven Spielberg was, in all likelihood, the Lord of the Movies. Spielberg directed some of the most critically and commercially successful films around that time — E.T., Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and so on. He also produced and wrote classics like Poltergeist (1982). His narrative style (blending the coming-of-age story with horror and/or sci-fi elements), camera angles (his long-take opening scene of Columbo is still taught in film schools) and emphasis on Americana really made him the country’s most beloved filmmaker.
Stranger Things’ visual style is heavily inspired by an all-star lineup of Spielberg classics. Look at the very first scene of the first season, for instance. We see young Will Byers getting separated from the rest of his group. He approaches a bright light off-screen, attracted by something or someone—before being whisked off to the Upside Down (the alternate dimension that’s home to Stranger Things’ monsters) by an unknown creature. This is a clear reference to when we first see the titular alien in E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial.
Then there’s the matter of Eleven’s disguise—she was experimented upon since her early childhood and so her hair has been sheared down to a buzz-cut. To help her fit in at a Hawkins high school, Mike and the gang give her a blonde wig and a frilly dress. This is almost identical to how Gertie dressed up E.T. in a much-loved scene from the Spielberg movie.
Chris Columbus’ beloved Goonies (1985) was based on a story by Spielberg and like Stranger Things, it featured a gang of nerdy kids. In fact, if you look at the way the respective nerd-groups are characterized, you’ll find lots of overlap. Dustin in Stranger Things is a foodie and something of a lovable oaf, as is Chunk in Goonies, who also enjoys his food a lot. Poltergeist (1985), written and produced by Spielberg has even more direct connections with Stranger Things. In that movie, the haunted child Carol Anne ‘talks’ to the static emanating from her parents’ television set. In Stranger Things, Will, who’s trapped in an alternate dimension called the Upside Down, communicates with his mother Joyce through the latter’s Christmas lights and radio sets.
And while we are on the topic of Joyce, it’s worth noting some of her major character traits—she is chronically anxious, she suspects a large-scale supernatural conspiracy in her hometown and she feels that covert government agents and hidden-away experiments are to blame for all the mayhem in Hawkins. All of these same character traits, one way or another, are also found in the character Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) from Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Like Joyce, Roy had to struggle with the fact that just about nobody believes him. Roy builds a shrine-like mountain inside of his house, raising eyebrows within his family and his neighbours. This is pretty similar to when Joyce’s lining of her house with Christmas lights (in order to communicate with her son Will) is seen as a symptom of her deteriorating mental health.
In Season 4, when we first catch a glimpse of Home Video, Hawkins’ local video rental establishment, there’s an advertisement for Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is also in line with the show becoming gradually more of an adventure-caper like the Indiana Jones movies.
There’s no doubt that both Stephen King and Steven Spielberg are two of America’s definitive storytellers of the last 50-odd years. They have both created enduring classics and crowd-pleasing stories and record-breaking blockbusters. And they’re both still going strong—King in particular is going through an unusually productive four to five years or so, even by his prolific standards. Spielberg just finished making West Side Story, perhaps his finest work since Minority Report. The success of Stranger Things (by any metric one of Netflix’s most successful products worldwide) shines a light on these two legends’ back catalogs and fans are encouraged to go and check out these films and books, to see where the magic originally came from.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.
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by Aditya Mani Jha
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