Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’ is a worthy successor to the teen vs. monster sci-fi genre of shows

The template first struck gold in the 90s with ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’

Netflix released the concluding episodes of Stranger Things’ fourth season last week and the memes haven’t stopped since. The Duffer Brothers’ science fiction horror series is among the streaming giant’s most popular shows globally and the narrative follows a group of youngsters in Hawkins, Indiana, in the 1980s as they fight the monstrous denizens of the Upside Down, an alternate reality whose connection with Earth has been unlocked by a covert U.S. child experimentation facility.

Fan of ‘Stranger Things’? This quiz is for you

As the storyline suggests, the show has generous smatterings of Stephen King and Steven Spielberg throughout its four seasons, the latest of which delivered its biggest large-scale battle sequences till date.

Big, spectacle-heavy and yet smart enough to deliver believable, intimate coming-of-age stories,  Stranger Things is a fitting successor to the classic sci-fi movies it is so enamoured of.

It is also worth noting that  Stranger Things follows a very familiar one-line template: teenagers fighting monsters. It’s a formula that first struck gold in the 90s, with Joss Whedon’s immensely popular TV show  Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Every decade since has had its own mega-franchise that follows this genre outline; the  Harry Potter movies in the 2000s, for instance. In last year’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, Marvel’sbiggest commercial success in years, we saw the same formula being replicated with Peter, MJ and Ned teaming up against a line-up of classic Spidey villains down the years, led by Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin. Horror series  Chucky (2021), which has received widespread acclaim from fans and critics, follows a group of teenagers as they try to fight back a murderous, possessed doll who has committed a string of killings in their small town.

Netflix itself has invested in this formula in a big way of late. In 2020, the streaming giant released the movie  Love and Monsters, starring Dylan O’Brien and Jessica Henwick as youngsters fighting supernatural evil together. In 2021, the Netflix fantasy series Shadow and Bone, based on the Grishaverse series of novels by Leigh Bardugo, featured a very similar lead pair, Alina and Mal, star-crossed childhood best friends who discover love amidst war with monsters from a dark realm.