If you’ve been watching movies for the last 20 or 30 years, or just like cinema from the 80s and 90s, then you might have picked up on one or two movie references in Stranger Things.

Stranger Things has garnered a cult following because it’s a near-perfect product of the nostalgia industry.

It takes us back to when the scariest thing in the world was It or Alien rather than the threat of nuclear war, Trump in the White House, and rising fascism worldwide.

The premise is simple. Take a group of kids with flexible curfews who are best friends, but not the kind that would shoot up a school, and add a supernatural threat.

Shake it up with an 80s soundtrack and the power of friendship to solve anything, and you get almost every kid-centred movie made in the 80s and 90s.

You also get Stranger Things. The one exception being that unlike 80s films, the parents aren’t all morons. In fact, Joyce Byers is without a doubt the true hero of the series.

If you’d like to take a closer look at that feeling of familiarity you get when watching the show, here are the creators and directors, the Duffer brothers, explaining all of the films they referenced in the series.

Enjoy:

Now back to the ‘upside-down’, or contemporary reality as we commonly call it.