The Duffer Brothers spend 30 damn minutes naming every movie reference in Stranger Things
By Dan Selcke
Remember Alien? Remember Carrie? Remember Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Remember E.T.? Remember Ghostbusters? Remember Gremlins? Remember Indiana Jones? Remember A Nightmare on Elm Street? Remember IT? Remember Jaws? Remember John Hughes movies? Remember Jurassic Park? Remember Risky Business? Remember The Empire Strikes Back? Remember The Evil Dead? Remember The Exorcist? Remember The Goonies? Remember Terminator? Remember The Thing?
The Duffer Brothers remember.
Matt and Ross Duffer are, of course, the guys behind Netflix’s monster hit Stranger Things, about ooky-spooky goings-on in the small town of Hawkins, Indiana in the 1980s. It is chock-a-bloc with ’80s nostalgia, and that includes a whole lotta movie references. The guys sat down with Wired to go through all most of them. The fact that the video is 30 minutes long should tell you how many there are. Enjoy:
Obviously, the bulk of these movies are from the ’80s, give or take a few years in either direction, with 1931’s Frankenstein being the only major outlier. Watching this, you wonder if the guys are more interesting with making Stranger Things a good show or packing it full of references to stuff they liked as kids, which has been going cropping up a lot lately — we’re going through a bit of an ’80s nostalgia craze right now, if you haven’t noticed — but I think we can give them the benefit of the doubt. Stranger Things was pretty entertainment whether you noticed the Witness references or not.
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And Stranger Things isn’t all metatextual. More immediate is this behind-the-scenes shot of Mille Bobby Brown (Eleven) being spun round on a rig, for the scene where she was telepathically communicating with Billy in season 3. “Threw up after this,” she writes.
Well, yeah, you wouldn’t? I get a little nauseous just watching her.
Still haven’t gotten enough Stranger Things? Consider this new song from Joe Keery (Steve Harington). Yes, in addition to being an actor and having great hair, he’s also a musician:
Congratulations. You’ve found the soundtrack to your week.
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