“A lot of it feels very like Indiana Jones to me,” Gelman told Polygon during a virtual set visit last year, describing his character’s upcoming arc. That plot line produces some adventure-movie action that departs from Stranger Things’ horror influences. Indiana Jones Image: Paramount Home EntertainmentĮlsewhere in the world of Stranger Things 4, Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Murray (Brett Gelman) are trekking behind the Iron Curtain to rescue Chief of Police Jim Hopper.
Rather than a bullied girl who discovers her powers, Eleven starts the season as a bullied girl who’s just lost the powers that used to protect her. This season, however, the Duffers play with this idea a little more than usual, almost giving us a reverse Carrie story. This idea that she has these amazing abilities, but is she ultimately dangerous?” In a video for Wired from 2019, the pair said, “Of course, you have a high school girl who has these amazing powers and these amazing abilities, and we always looked at how King dealt with that when we’ve talked about Eleven. The Duffer brothers have often talked about how much of an inspiration Carrie was for them when it came to Eleven. Vecna has his own version of Freddy’s Nightmare Church in the Dream World, and Eleven and her superpowers have quite a few similarities to Alice, one of the protagonists of The Dream Master. There are also quite a few references to Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. But the clearest connection isn’t a secret: Robert Englund, the original Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street, plays Victor Creel, “a disturbed and intimidating man who is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s.”īut Stranger Things isn’t just pulling from the first Elm Street movie.
The exact nature of the reference is best left to be seen suffice it to say the show indulges its horror roots by the end of the first episode. “I think the brothers are pretty open with their references and their ideas.” “They love the genre and all these stories that they draw from,” Dyer said. Perhaps the most obvious of the horror films referenced, Wes Craven’s 1984 classic was “definitely discussed,” per Natalia Dyer, who plays Nancy on Stranger Things. Speaking with Polygon at a press junket ahead of Stranger Things 4, they laid out the movies the Duffer brothers discussed with the cast as they were crafting the fourth season.Ī Nightmare on Elm Street Image: New Line Home Video That said, the cast cited some influences on season 4. “I think they’d have to throw us a gigantic curveball in order for us to do some different stuff.” “We never really got assigned any homework, because I think at this point the Duffers know us super well,” Finn Wolfhard said in a roundtable with the Stranger Things cast. But the cast of Stranger Things says the twin creators have also started to write to their own strengths. Since then, creators Matt and Ross Duffer have worn their influences on their sleeves. In the first season, it was impossible to not notice how each group - the kids, the teens, and the adults - were all trapped in a different 1980s horror plot only for all three strands to merge into one climactic battle. Nostalgia is baked into every level of Stranger Things.