5/15/2023 0 Comments Stranger things crack in lab![]() As he constructs Devil’s Tower out of mashed potatoes and shovels piles of dirt into his living room, his wife and children can’t get out of the house fast enough. What’s often forgotten about Close Encounters is how much Richard Dreyfuss’s character terrorizes his family to follow an alien premonition. Stranger Things and Close Encounters both feature parents whose obsession with the supernatural looks to everyone else like madness. (When they’re flashing trance-like stares, look out.) Stranger Things also includes a nice homage to the famous stinger that closes Carrie: Just as Carrie’s hand reaches through the soil at her gravesite - Nancy’s hand punctures through the goo when she climbs out of the Upside Down in episode six.Ĭlose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) ![]() And while Elle and Carrie are fundamentally sweet-natured, they’re capable of startling violence when provoked. Though Carrie’s age feeds into a more meaningful and excruciating story of her coming-of-age as a woman, the two characters are products of needy, controlling parents - Piper Laurie’s religious zealot in Carrie Matthew Modine’s experimental scientist in Stranger Things - who don’t allow socialization with other kids. ![]() Of the two, Stranger Things owes a little more to Carrie, if only because Elle and Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) have a broader range of skills and a similarly sheltered upbringing. It’s a thin reference, but any movie about an ambiguous images - or sound, in the case of descendants like The Conversation and Blow Out - owes something to Blowup.Įlle is a hybrid of two Stephen King stories about girls with telekinetic power, Carrie and Firestarter. After she brings it to Jonathan, their investigation recalls Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, which is about a photographer who may or may not have captured a murder in the park. When Nancy gets her hands on a torn-up positive of the shot, she pieces it together and notices a mysterious, blurry figure on the extreme right end of the frame. When shutterbug Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) surreptitiously snaps pictures of Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and her friends, he happens to take a photograph of Nancy’s friend, Barb (Shannon Purser), moments before the creature yanks her away. In episode eight, we learn it uses humans as live incubators, pinning them down and impregnating them with a snake-like analogue to Alien’s “face-huggers.” (The final scenes, which suggest a sequel of sorts, hint at a possible dinner scene like John Hurt’s in the original film.) And speaking of the face-huggers, they spring out of an egg that peels back into four corners when it opens in Stranger Things, the creature’s face does likewise.Įlle (Millie Bobby Brown) can only reach her full psychic potential when she’s placed in a sensory-deprivation chamber, which allows her mind to travel to another plane of reality known as “the Upside Down.” A sensory-deprivation tank also figures strongly in Ken Russell’s trippy Altered States, which puts William Hunt’s character under the influence of various psychotropic drugs. Whenever characters enter into the creature’s netherworld, they first have to claw their way through the goo. For one, there’s the sticky residue that the creature both leaves in its wake and uses to trap its victims. The faceless creature in Stranger Things combines design elements and traits from Predator and the first two Alien movies.
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