Talk about stranger things! Brit Marling's Netflix series The OA might be the weirdest show on the streaming service, but it shares a few common threads with the Duffer Brothers' hit. And though it was contemporary at the time, watching it now invokes nostalgia for the late '90s/early '00s in the way that Stranger Things is nostalgic for the '80s.
Sarah Michelle Gellar stars as the titular chosen one, who, like Eleven ( Millie Bobby Brown), just wants to live a normal life, but she has to fight vampires as well as ghouls, demons, and other assorted creatures with her friends because their town has an interdimensional portal. The Scooby Gang may be a little older than the Stranger Things kids (most of the actors were obviously around 30 years old while playing high schoolers), but they have a similarly unbreakable bond of friendship thanks to their shared experiences and secrets, even when they're not getting along. Like Stranger Things, Joss Whedon's classic supernatural teen series is appealing to everyone ages 12 and up, as it follows young people coming of age while battling monsters. Nicholas Brendon, Anthony Head, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter and Alyson Hannigan, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fotos International/Courtesy of Getty Images Suspenseful and atmospheric, Black Spot deftly mixes elements of the mythological with the tension of a great crime drama to create an eerie but highly bingeable series.
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The show follows a prosecutor who's arrived to investigate why the town has such a high murder rate, but what he - and we - quickly find out is that the forest surrounding the town is full of dark secrets, and it's all somehow related to the head of the local police, who is still trying to figure out what happened to her the night she was kidnapped and chained up in said forest. The isolated small town at the center of the French-Belgian thriller Black Spot (known in France as Zone Blanche) is equally important to its series' narrative, but in much creepier ways. The city of Hawkins is central to Stranger Things' narrative because it's the location of the gate to the Upside Down, the alternate dimension that is home to all the monsters who've kept our heroes in prime fighting shape for three seasons. They must watch a lot of movies together, because they have similar taste in influences. There's also a family connection behind the camera: Leigh Janiak, the writer-director of the Fear Street trilogy, is married to Stranger Things co-creator Ross Duffer. As a bonus, Stranger Things' own Max Mayfield, Sadie Sink, appears in 19. The Fear Street movies are somehow both darker and campier than Stranger Things (in a great way!), but they're also influenced by horror of the past: The first two films - 1994 and 1978 - evoke classic slasher films like Scream and Friday the 13th, something film nerds should enjoy pointing out to whoever they're watching these movies with. All three take place during a different year but weave their timelines in with each other, and the common thread is that it's always, always up to the teens to hunt down the killer and put an end to the reign of terror. Stine's book series, and are all set in Shadyside, Ohio, a town that has been plagued by a notoriously evil force for centuries. Proving once and for all that nostalgia always wins, the Fear Street trilogy has been insanely popular on Netflix since the first film, 1994, premiered.