The episode titles are homages to old horror classics.Ĭhapter Two ( Stranger Things: Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street (2016)): The Weirdo on Maple Street, is a clear reference to Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (1959) classic, The Twilight Zone: The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street (1960) (Season 1, episode 22.) In the episode, a group of neighbors descend into paranoia and murder after they gradually become convinced that aliens/monsters are invading their neighborhood during a power outage. The actor Finn Wolfhard ( Finn Wolfhard) bears an uncanny resemblance to Alex Shepherd's little brother, Joshua. An "Eleanor Gillespie" is mentioned in Stranger Things the Gillespies are a crucially important family in the Silent Hill mythos (and Alessa Gillespie is a telekinetic little girl who spends most of her life in a hospital).
Elle (El) ( Millie Bobby Brown) is a prominent character in Silent Hill: Homecoming. Mike's ( Finn Wolfhard) family share the same last name with Deputy Wheeler from the same game. In addition to the similarities of the dark "Otherworld" of Silent Hill and the "Upside-Down" (both mirroring the real world, but decrepit and filled with a haze and falling flakes like ash), there are also living portals in inanimate walls, one of which an agent "Shepherd" tears into so he may pass through, just as the character Alex Shepherd does in Homecoming.
There are many possible homages to the Silent Hill (1999) series of games on the show, particularly the game Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008).
Just before the trial was due to start in May 2019, Kessler withdrew his lawsuit after hearing the depositions and seeing documents from as early as 2010 which showed him that the Duffers had independently come up with the concept of Stranger Things. The judge denied summary judgment for the Duffer brothers in April 2019, allowing Kessler's suit to proceed to trial. The Duffer brothers' lawyer stated that they never saw Kessler's film nor spoke to him regarding it, and that Kessler had no input into their concepts for Stranger Things. Kessler contended that the Duffer brothers used his ideas to devise the premise for Stranger Things and sought a third of the income that they had made from the series. he pitched his film to the Duffer brothers and later gave them "the script, ideas, story and film" for a larger film idea which he called The Montauk Project. In April 2018, filmmaker Charlie Kessler filed a lawsuit against the Duffer brothers, claiming that they stole his idea behind his short film Montauk, which featured a similar premise of a missing boy, a nearby military base doing otherworldy experiments, and a monster from another dimension.