Urgh, Stranger Things! It's over. So now what?
We just have to go back to remembering the 1980s as they actually were, shit bits and all whose memory no amount of Kate Bush can smooth over? Where else can we find plucky kids in K-Swiss Heaven S's saving their small town on BMXs, leaping through neon-lit fire portals to alternate dimensions or obliquely referencing Alien 3?
Well, nowhere because Stranger Things is over. But does that mean we can't get our teenage nostalgia fix elsewhere? Or find that cocktail of monster-hunting mayhem, synthy vibes, and kids-vs-cosmic-horror energy that made Hawkins feel so much like home?
No it does not mean that.
Netflix is bursting with shows that scratch that same supernatural, teens-in-danger, reality-bending itch. Here are five of the best of them.
Imagine: you’re a teenage layabout gamer walking across that famous multi-zebra crossing in Shinjuku, Tokyo. It’s teeming with people then suddenly it’s not. The lights everywhere flicker and now you’re trapped in a real-life game where losing means death. While in Stranger Things the sledgehammer inference is that THIS IS NOT A GAME, in Alice in Borderland it very much is.
Why? Doesn’t matter. Because now you’re standing in a room with four other people before two doors marked “live” and “die”. You have two minutes to choose the right one. The person next to you steps through the marked “live” and is shot through the head with a laser from the sky.
If you loved watching the kids of Hawkins navigate monsters and government secrets, Alice in Borderland should give you a similar thrill – just with deadly games, Tokyo streets, and an adrenaline-soaked survival twist.
This is the OG; the founding father of small-town mystery television. Twin Peaks is the show that birthed – slippery and screaming – a thousand weird imitators of small-town Americana. It's David Lynch so Stranger Things fans who tune in for supernatural kicks are well served, just more subtly.
And for what it lacks in flower-faced lizard monsters from Hell, it makes up tenfold in surreal, haunting atmosphere, Lynchian humour, and the uncanny, constant niggle that something is deeply wrong beneath this veneer of ordinary life. Like Stranger Things, it’s about a small town hiding dark secrets and the lengths a group of friends (and a dogged outsider) will go to get to the truth.
A found-footage horror thriller for the streaming age. Archive 81 follows a video archivist called Dan, as he is tasked by a shady billionaire with restoring a collection of fire-damaged tapes. They are what’s left of a history project by a young grad student named Melody in 1994. The story flips between these two timelines which coil around each other like fighting snakes.
At the centre of it all is the Vissner building – a crumbling, labyrinthine apartment block full of secrets. As Dan and Melody’s stories intertwine, the building itself becomes a living, not-quite-breathing focus of evil. “Can you hear it?” says a young friend to Melody. “There’s something in the place that calls to you.” Like Stranger Things, it’s about ordinary people, including young adults, getting pulled into something terrifying they don’t understand, where every clue could save them, or doom them.
Difficult to say too much about this brooding, weird show about life and death and whatever the Hell lies in between (it might actually be Hell). Death is just a state of mind, right? No, wait, I mean life… Do I? The OA tackles heavy, existential stuff, but it never slows down or loses its sense of suspense and wonder. When it premiered in 2017, it became a monster hit for its mysterious, mind-bending narrative.
It’s about Prairie Johnson, a young blind girl who went missing for seven years, presumed dead. But suddenly she’s back able to see, hear, and do all sorts of things she couldn’t before… such as a strange performance dance that may or may not open up a portal to a parallel world. Like Stranger Things, The OA blends the supernatural with human drama: teens and young adults taking on forces beyond their understanding. Intense bonds, derring-do, a hunt for truth.
Whoever first called this twisty German mystery “Stranger Things for grown-ups” may have had a point but likely lost an army of readers in making it. Still, it stuck. Dark isn’t as family friendly as Stranger Things, no (not least because, for non-German speakers, you have to read subtitles). But it does other things, darker things, weirder things, German things that give it more than a dollop of Stranger Things.
Set in the gloomy little town of Winden, Dark starts with a missing kid (sound familiar?). Then there are the great dollops of 1980s nostalgia splattered throughout the show thanks to a time-travel subplot that you don’t quite need a degree in theoretical physics to understand, but it probably helps. No matter if not; the narrative pulls us along faster than a Delorean through a labyrinth of time travel, secret societies, caves, tunnels, and family trees so tangled they make the Upside Down look right-way up. Dense, foreboding, and Germanically, well, dark, Dark is a hypnotic descent into fate and trauma and time. One of the most rewarding sci-fi mysteries of the decade.
Esquire Malaysia
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