What ‘Stranger Things’ can teach Hollywood about making movies By Sara Stewart

August 27, 2016 | 11:55am

Modal Trigger What’s scarier than a kid-devouring, plant-faced monster from a parallel universe called the Upside Down? If you’re a Hollywood executive, it’s the runaway success of Netflix’s “Stranger Things.”

The 1980s-obsessed series is the pop-cultural hit of the summer, despite the film industry’s nonstop parade of throwback reboots, remakes and sequels. The result? Netflix continues its march to entertainment domination, while the movie industry is on track to have the worst box- office year in decades. This little supernatural thriller is teaching what must be a stinging lesson to film bigwigs.

“Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer understand what movie moguls have been too dense or craven to realize: Audiences want entertainment that makes them feel like they did watching the movies of their childhoods. It takes more than slapping a familiar title on a remake to win them over, though this clearly didn’t occur to the people who brought you, over the past several years, “The Karate Kid,” “Clash of the Titans,” “Annie,” “Poltergeist,” “Arthur,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “Footloose,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Red Dawn,” “Vacation,” “Point Break,” “The Thing” and, yes, the all-female “Ghostbusters.”

Audiences want entertainment that makes them feel like they did watching the movies of their childhoods.

Most of these films were carelessly made and deeply lame, and even the ones that weren’t — “Footloose” and “Ghostbusters,” in my opinion — succeed not because they evoke an earlier time but because they made something new out of the old.

“Stranger Things,” on the other hand, gives no signpost character names and titles but traffics heavily, scrupulously, in ambiance. Its opening credits are a visual and auditory “Welcome, friend” to viewers of a certain age — the glowing red lettering in a font inspired by a Stephen King paperback, the pulsing synth music a nod to John Carpenter and early techno-centric films like “Tron.”

The references don’t stop there. The show is a pointed homage to a sprawling range of late ’70s and ’80s thrillers, with emphasis on the triumvirate of Steven Spielberg, King and Carpenter — and, of course, star Winona Ryder, who began her career in ’80s classics “Lucas,” “Beetlejuice” and “Heathers.” Visual cues to Spielberg’s “E.T.” and “Close Encounters” are everywhere, particularly via Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), the oddball psychic girl found in the woods by three boys (Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin) searching for their abducted friend Will (Noah Schnapp).

But for all the cinematic shout-outs you can catch (there’s an exhaustive supercut of them online), “Stranger Things” never feels shamelessly derivative. Like the ’90s show “Freaks and Geeks,” it channels a sincere understanding of what that era felt like. All of the leads here look like real people, with real imperfections.

“So many kids nowadays, it’s almost like they go through this Disney training where they’re taught to be cute and play it up for the camera, and they’re trying to get laughs. What we were looking for were kids that, you just felt like you knew them,” Ross Duffer told Vulture. Ryder’s hair is a statement in itself, terrifically flat and unkempt (the Duffers have said the actress asked to be styled after Meryl Streep’s character in “Silkwood”). Her loner son Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) evokes River Phoenix in his early parts. Also significant are its bygone-era details — kids riding bikes alone in the dark; wall-mounted phones and phone booths — that make you long for a simpler time.

“Stranger Things” averaged 14 million viewers in its first 35 days.Netflix

What Hollywood wouldn’t give for this kind of visceral authenticity, right? The problem is nobody’s willing to take a risk on relatively unknown directors and an original script. Big, dumb remakes do well overseas, making a financial investment more of a sure thing regardless of how bad the reviews ultimately are. And so the cycle continues.

Meanwhile, “Stranger Things” is now the third-most-watched series on Netflix in the past year, averaging 14 million adult viewers aged 18-49 in its first 35 days, reports Variety. It was surpassed only by “Orange Is the New Black” and the reboot “Fuller House,” which survived scathing reviews thanks to a tide of millennial curiosity.

The series is now the third most-watched on Netflix.Netflix

Netflix hasn’t been immune from the urge to revisit and recycle: They’ve also rolled out updated seasons of “The X-Files,” “Arrested Development,” “Wet Hot American Summer,” and, soon, “Gilmore Girls.” But while these have been met with generally more favorable reviews than film reboots, I’m betting the success of “Stranger Things” may have the network doubling down on the search for the next great original series — preferably one that collars the 18-49 demographic as effectively as this one did.

Because movies sure aren’t doing it. As Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount, has understated, “This has definitely been a rough summer for remakes and sequels.”

In a wonderfully ironic twist, one of the reasons “Stranger Things” exists is because Hollywood denied the Duffers their shot at a big-screen reboot. The remake of Stephen King’s “It” currently under way but with the loss of original director Cary Fukanaga (“True Detective”),was a dream for the duo. “We’d asked Warner Brothers. I was like, ‘Please,’ and they were like, ‘No,’ ” Matt Duffer said this month. I wonder how Warners is feeling about that decision these days.