5. Poltergeist

Stranger Things' plot concerns a mother who learns to communicate with her missing son in a very unconventional, paranormal fashion, and that is very similar to Poltergeist's ghosts communicating via television static with that film's character of the young daughter.


4. Jaws

This was another interesting homage I didn't place at first, although I thought something was there right under my radar. Stranger Things has a police chief named Hopper, who's a former big-city cop who has taken a job out in the sticks. The truck he drives around in even resembled the one Chief Brody drove in Jaws.


3. The Evil Dead

There are a couple of exterior shots of Joyce Byer's home that are obvious references to the super-creepy cabin in Sam Raimi's epic film about undead horrors, and her eldest son even has the movie poster prominently displayed on his wall.


2. The Thing (and a Whole Lot of John Carpenter Stuff)

Another movie poster featured on a wall is that of John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing. That film might be one of the best horror movies of the 1980s, and it's a clever tip of the hat to a master of the genre. There are other threads running through Stranger Things that seem to suggest Carpenter's work. The music and opening credits look and sound as if they came straight out of one of his films, and there's even a fistfight in an alley that echoes one in 1988's They Live.


1. A Nightmare on Elm Street

A large part of the plot revolves around El, and as the story develops, she is called to psychically enter a world occupied by a monster, and has to rely on people from the outside to bring her back to reality in time. This mirrors the plot of 1984's A Nightmare On Elm Street, in which Freddy Krueger kills teenagers in their dreams, and only waking them up in time will save them. It's another subtle detail that helps craft the world of Stranger Things.