Backlash To The Flashback

Stranger Things returns with all the mystery, but missing a bit of the magic.

- Matt Zoller Seitz

THE TITLE Stranger Things 2 looms against a black screen in Stephen King– sanctified ITC Benguiat font while Reagan- era synth music burbles. Right away, you know what you’re in for. This is a sci-fi/horror sequel in the tradition of sci-fi/horror sequels from the ’80s—a decade that churned out a regular supply of follow-ups to surprise hits whose stories didn’t necessarily require another chapter: Halloween II, Friday the 13th Part II, Fright Night Part 2, Critters 2, Return of the Living Dead II, etc., ad nauseam, amen. Filmmaking siblings Matt and Ross Duffer are too young to have experienced that Velveeta tsunami firsthand; they’re both in their early 30s. But they absorbed its splendors thoroughly enough to create the original Stranger Things, a Netflix drama set in Hawkins, Indiana, in the age of Swatch watches, Beta videotape decks, and Atari consoles. Its premise answered the previously unasked question “What if Stephen King and Steven Spielberg got drunk together, then dropped in on John Carpenter after midnight?” As the show’s intrepid, bike-riding kids and beleaguered grown-up guardians searched for a missing boy, grappled with their personal demons, and fought treacherous scientists and a beast released from an alternate world known as the Upside Down, the Duffers took viewers on a wide-eyed tour of their favorite ’80s films, pop songs, and dog-eared paperback novels—sources that some gate keeping geeks might rather have labeled “under appreciated” and sealed away in BCW silver- Mylar comic-storage bags until the end of time. Poltergeist, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Pumpkin head, Fire starter, The Hidden, The Fury, Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, Altered States, The Goonies, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Videodrome—whether a film was a smash that made the cover of Time or an oddity that snuck into the back pages of Fangoria or Starlog, the Duffers