If you liked Stranger Things

A group of kids filming a zombie movie in 1979 Ohio witness a train crash, and something escapes from the wreck.

Super 8, produced by Steven Spielberg, came out five years before Stranger Things and uses the same recipe: a kid gang, a small town, a military cover-up and a creature. It is warmer and more contained, with a lovely subplot about the movie the kids are making.

The creature reveal in the last act is less interesting than everything before it.

Kids about to lose their homes find a treasure map and follow it into caves full of traps, with a criminal family close behind.

The Goonies is the template for the kid gang in Stranger Things: the talker, the inventor, the big brother and the outsider who becomes family. It has no monster, but its sense of a summer adventure with real danger is exactly what the early seasons capture.

It is loud, chaotic and has some 1980s jokes that have not aged well.

03 / TV show · 2017

Dark

Matches: A small town hiding something

A boy disappears in a German town with a nuclear plant and a cave, and four families discover their histories are tangled across decades.

Dark starts like Stranger Things, with a missing child, a forest and a cave, then turns into a time-travel puzzle that spans generations. If the mystery was your favorite part, Dark goes further than any other show.

It is complicated enough that many viewers keep notes, and it is much darker in tone. Watch it in German with subtitles.

04 / Anime · 2016

Mob Psycho 100

Matches: A small town hiding something

An awkward middle schooler with enormous psychic powers tries to live a normal life while working for a con-artist psychic.

Mob is a kinder, funnier Eleven: a kid whose powers grow with his emotions and who would rather make friends than fight. It shares Stranger Things' interest in found family and its suspicion of organizations that want to use gifted children.

The animation style is rough on purpose, and the first episodes lean into comedy before the story deepens.

A group of teenagers on an overnight island party tune a radio into a ghostly signal and open something they cannot close.

Oxenfree feels like playing an episode of Stranger Things: teenagers bickering, a supernatural threat with a buried military history, and a radio that picks up voices from somewhere else. Its conversations flow naturally while you walk, so you steer the friendships as much as the plot.

It is short, about four to six hours, and mostly walking and talking, with little action.

Seven misfit kids in a Maine town face a shape-shifting creature that feeds on fear, then return as adults to face it again.

It is one of the most obvious influences on Stranger Things, from the Losers' Club to a town that has learned not to see what happens to its children. King spends real time on what friendship means to outcast kids, and that is what makes the horror hurt.

Over 1,100 pages, very violent, and it contains one scene near the end that many readers find gratuitous.

Four girls delivering newspapers on the morning after Halloween 1988 get pulled into a war between time travelers.

Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's comic takes the 1980s kid-gang story and gives it to girls on bikes, then sends them through time to meet their adult selves. Its bright, neon-heavy art is as much a period piece as Stranger Things' synth score.

The plot gets very strange very quickly, and the time travel gets complex in later volumes.

Kate Bush's most celebrated album: one side of soaring pop songs and one side of a dreamlike suite about a woman lost at sea.

"Running Up That Hill" opens this album, and its use in Max's story in the fourth season sent it back up the charts in 2022, almost four decades after release. The rest of the record is just as strange and emotional, especially the second side, The Ninth Wave.

The second side is one long concept piece with no obvious singles. Listen to it in one sitting.