It

The Duffer brothers have named It repeatedly, and the show is built on its skeleton:

• A group of bullied children who are the only people who understand the threat
• A small town whose adults are useless, complicit or absent
• A monster that lives beneath the town and feeds on what the children are afraid of
• A bond formed in one summer that the story keeps returning to

The casting closed the loop: Finn Wolfhard was cast as Mike here and then as Richie Tozier in the 2017 film of It. The graph already holds E.T., The Goonies and D&D pointing at this show; It is the one that supplies the horror rather than the bicycles.

King has named Bradbury among the writers who formed him, and It is the book where it shows most. Both are about boys in a small American town where something ancient arrives wearing an attraction: a carnival in Bradbury, a circus balloon and a clown in King. Both make the town's adults unable to see it. Both turn on the idea that the thing feeds on fear and can be starved by refusing to supply it, and both treat the end of childhood as the real horror. Filed MEDIUM: an acknowledged formative influence rather than a specific borrowing.