Hawkins Is Back: What Stranger Things Fans Should Be Renting Right Now
Hawkins Is Back
What Stranger Things fans should be renting while the final season plays out
The final season of Stranger Things is here, and we feel it in the shop. In the past few weeks, people have been asking for things they have not asked for in years: the original Halloween, Christine, Poltergeist, Firestarter. Someone came in Tuesday asking if we had a VHS of The Evil Dead like the one in the first season. We did.
The Duffer Brothers have been upfront since the start: they grew up on VHS. The show is not just set in the 1980s, it is saturated with the texture of watching films on tape in a living room with the lights off. That feeling is the whole point, and it turns out millions of people under thirty have been chasing it.
What makes Stranger Things unusual is how precise its references are. This is not a show that gestures vaguely at the eighties. It knows what it is talking about. The scenes in the video store are not set dressing; they are the actual thing. That specificity is why the nostalgia lands.
For a shop like ours, it has been a gift. People watch the show, feel the pull, and come in looking for something real to hold. A tape is not a streaming thumbnail. It has weight, a spine, a studio logo that nobody uses anymore. That is what the show is pointing at, even when it cannot say so.
The Films That Built It
Start here, then go deeper: the shelf a Stranger Things fan deserves
The films to start with are the ones the show draws on most directly. Halloween (1978) is essential: the suburban dread, the way Carpenter uses darkness, the template it set for everything after. We have a worn but faithful copy with the original label. Put that in first, on a Friday night when you have nowhere to be.
Then go to the Spielberg section. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist (which Spielberg produced, though Tobe Hooper directed). The show's emotional template owes as much to the warmth of those films as to the horror that scared it. You need both sides to understand what Stranger Things is actually doing.
Stephen King is the third pillar. Firestarter, Christine, Cujo: not always the finest adaptations, but the tapes carry a period feel the remakes cannot match. The 1990 TV miniseries of It occupies its own category, technically limited and genuinely frightening, unmistakably of its moment. Kids lost sleep over Tim Curry in that format.
Do not skip The Goonies and Stand by Me. Both share the young-ensemble premise that Stranger Things inherited: children moving through dangers that adults cannot see or navigate. Stand by Me is the better film. The Goonies is the more fun rental. You could honestly do both in one evening.
If you want to go further out, Explorers (1985) and WarGames (1983) are worth tracking down. Neither is horror, but both carry that register of eighties adolescent anxiety, the sense that something enormous is happening just beyond the edge of town. That is Stranger Things' whole emotional frequency, distilled to tape.
The final season will end, and this cultural moment will settle into the record. What the show did, whether or not everyone realises it, is spend nearly a decade telling people that the video store era was worth mourning. We knew that already. Come in and we will put something in your hands.
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