Stranger Things

The Duffer Brothers have explicitly described D&D as one of the show's major inspirations.

• The kids' party structure → Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, etc. each fill different "party" roles.
• The Upside Down adventure structure → essentially treated like a gigantic D&D campaign.
• Monster naming → Demogorgon, Mind Flayer, Vecna.
• Vecna himself → directly borrowed from the D&D villain.
• How the kids understand supernatural events → they use D&D monsters as analogies for things they don't understand.
• Dungeon Master mentality → the Duffers have compared the writers to DMs, throwing increasingly difficult challenges at their characters.
• Character archetypes → the kids' D&D roles reflect their personalities in the real world.

The Duffers actually described Stranger Things as being like a massive D&D campaign where the role-playing takes over their lives.

The Duffer brothers have named Firestarter directly, and it supplies the half of Eleven that Carrie does not. From this book specifically:

• A secret government agency running experiments on university students, whose children are born with the results. The Shop is Hawkins Lab, down to the euphemistic name
• A child with a power the agency created and cannot control, kept as an asset rather than a subject
• The flight: an adult and a child moving between motels and strangers' houses while the agency closes in
• Power that costs the body to use, signalled by bleeding

Carrie is the other King debt inside the same character and it is recorded separately: that one gives the adolescence, the bullying and the catastrophic release. Eleven is built from both at once, which is why the map carries two edges rather than one.

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.

• Kids on bikes
• suburban America
• government experimentation,
• mysterious supernatural child
• friendship
• 1980s Spielberg tone

Eleven is assembled from King's telekinetic girls, and the Duffer brothers have named them: Carrie and Firestarter. From Carrie specifically: a girl whose power arrives with adolescence and is treated as an affliction, who is tormented by people who do not understand what she can do, and whose release of it is both triumph and catastrophe. The nose bleeding under strain is King's image. Filed MEDIUM. Firestarter supplies the other half of Eleven, the government laboratory and the numbered subject, so the character carries two King debts at once.

The Duffer brothers have named Akira, alongside Firestarter, for Eleven: a child taken young by a government programme, identified by a number, whose power arrives with nosebleeds. The lab, the earlier subjects who did not survive, and the pursuit through an ordinary town all come from the same place. The graph already holds E.T., The Goonies and D&D as sources for the show; this is the one that is not American.

The Duffer brothers have said Chief Hopper was modelled on Roy Scheider's Chief Brody: a small-town police chief who has come there to get away from something, is not taken seriously, and turns out to be the one who sees the threat for what it is. The show's early pitch was a Spielberg-style monster in an ordinary town, and Jaws is the purest version of that.

Season four's villain Vecna kills teenagers through visions only they can see, cursing them one by one while their friends try to keep them awake, which is Freddy Krueger's method. The Duffers have acknowledged the debt and cast Robert Englund, Freddy himself, as Victor Creel. Filed MEDIUM: one season of five.

The Duffer brothers built Stranger Things out of Spielberg's films of the late seventies and eighties. From Close Encounters it takes a parent's obsession with signals no one else believes, communication through lights, and the government men who arrive to control it.

The Duffer brothers have named John Carpenter among their models, and The Thing is on the wall: its poster hangs in Mike's basement in the first season. The Demogorgon's practical-effects body horror is in the tradition Carpenter's film established.

• Group of adventurous kids
• Adventure mentality
• Kids solving a mystery adults don't understand