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17 Key Cinematic Influences On Stranger Things

Credit where credit's due for Matt and Ross Duffer: together, they've created one of the most purely entertaining shows of the year so far, despite having no major credits to their name before now (save for some shorts and a few episodes of Wayward Pines). Now, with Stranger Things, the brothers are set to become Hollywood big shots - already, their supernatural Netflix original is proving a runaway success with both critics and audiences.

2) Under The Skin

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Another of the more modern reference points in Stranger Things is Jonathan Glazer’s cult 2014 sci-fi Under the Skin. Eleven doesn’t reflect that film’s predatorial ‘The Female’ in any way, though they are both ‘alien’ figures discovering the world for the first time. That aside, their stories are very different.

It’s when El goes into the sensory deprivation tank and we reach the dark psychic space between our world and the other that the Under the Skin influence becomes obvious. This nether region is depicted as an entirely black space, with the floor vacillating between a solid and a black pool of liquid. Only Eleven and her target are visible in the space, and these sequences are visually virtually identical to the scenes in Under the Skin wherein Scarlett Johansson’s alien captures her human victims.