12) Star Wars (Original Trilogy)
Star Wars doesn’t really have a great bearing on the plot of Stranger Things – though you could argue there’s a strong Jedi/Sith vibe to Eleven’s powers, and she very much shares Luke Skywalker’s struggle with the light and dark. More pertinent, though, is how the original Star Wars trilogy has had an impact on the younger characters within the series.
By the early 80s, Star Wars had become a phenomenon. The Duffer brothers, perhaps remembering their own childhoods, acknowledge the impact it had on children of the era, inserting throwaway references to the force and Lando Calrissian (“Lando” is used by Dustin as code for a double cross) into Stranger Things whenever the three schoolboy characters are around. In one scene, Will even asks Eleven to make his model Millennium Falcon fly using her mind.
11) Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
Where ET appears to provide the basic framework for the setting and much of the plot of Stranger Things, the show is also infused with elements lifted from another Spielberg classic. Jaws is touched upon literally in the form of the Hawkins police department (the Hawkins police dept. uniform is identical to that of the police force on Amity Island), but Close Encounters comes up time and again, mostly in Joyce’s storyline.
As in Close Encounters, lights are used to communicate with the supernatural, as Joyce uses Christmas lights to talk to Will in the Upside Down. Joyce herself also appears to be an amalgamation of the Melinda Dillon and Richard Dreyfuss characters in the film. Like Jillian Guiler, Joyce’s son is abducted by forces out of this world, and like Roy Neary, Joyce’s house begins to reflect her growing anxiousness as she attempts to come to terms with the unknown.