Don’t call Netflix’s spooky, Spielbergian Stranger Things an avatar of ’80s nostalgia. Rather, it’s a loving homage to the moment early in that decade when newly empowered Baby Boomer directors turned the supernatural and sci-fi from a genre into the mainstream with a series of films in which kids battled forces—space aliens, vengeful ghosts, runaway technology, malevolent government agencies—beyond the dim comprehension of their clueless parents and teachers.
The Goonies, War Games, Stand by Me and Firestarter are all touchstones for Stranger Things. And any doubt about the identity of the show’s intellectual godfather is resolved when one character, trying to explain what they’re up against, asks a cop, “You read any Stephen King?”
An occasional wink like that one aside, Stranger Things is not a campy send-up but a hugely engrossing and enjoyably paranoid suspense thriller. Television critic Glenn Garvin has more.
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