The Stranger Things cast explains the movies that helped shape season 4

polygon.com:

Nostalgia is baked into every level of Stranger Things. In the first season, it was impossible to not notice how each group — the kids, the teens, and the adults — were all trapped in a different 1980s horror plot only for all three strands to merge into one climactic battle.

Since then, creators Matt and Ross Duffer have worn their influences on their sleeves. But the cast of Stranger Things says the twin creators have also started to write to their own strengths.

“We never really got assigned any homework, because I think at this point the Duffers know us super well,” Finn Wolfhard said in a roundtable with the Stranger Things cast. “I think they’d have to throw us a gigantic curveball in order for us to do some different stuff.”

That said, the cast cited some influences on season 4. Speaking with Polygon at a press junket ahead of Stranger Things 4, they laid out the movies the Duffer brothers discussed with the cast as they were crafting the fourth season.

Perhaps the most obvious of the horror films referenced, Wes Craven’s 1984 classic was “definitely discussed,” per Natalia Dyer, who plays Nancy on Stranger Things.

“They love the genre and all these stories that they draw from,” Dyer said. “I think the brothers are pretty open with their references and their ideas.”

The exact nature of the reference is best left to be seen; suffice it to say the show indulges its horror roots by the end of the first episode. But the clearest connection isn’t a secret: Robert Englund, the original Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street, plays Victor Creel, “a disturbed and intimidating man who is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s.”

But Stranger Things isn’t just pulling from the