A Comic-Con trailer for Netflix’s 1980s bricolage series Stranger Things was released Saturday, and it looks like showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer are living brico-large! From Dragon’s Lair to male Ghostbusters (!), there’s no pop culture reference too small to make an appearance as we check in with Eleven and the gang before the show’s return on Oct. 27. So how are things going in the little town of Castle Rock, Maine Hawkins, Indiana?
Not so great! The Upside Down is seeping into the Rightside Up, and not even the Centipede consoles are safe. Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) has a terrifying vision of a dark future—specifically, it seems to be a premonition about Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds film—Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is stuck in the Upside Down, Jim Hopper (David Harbour) is still confused, Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) is still a jerk, and we’re off to the ARP arpeggio races.
Or rather, we’re off to the Minimoog bass line races, because the trailer, not content with giving other films the slasher treatment, also chops up Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” severing Vincent Price’s vocal, dumping it over a new synth backing track, and pasting in samples from the rest of the song. Whoever cut the trailer gets points for carefully setting up a one-to-one relationship between lyric and image—“Darkness” over a black screen fading up to a dark landscape, “Blood” over a shot of a bloodstain—before pairing “Terrorize your neighborhood” with a picture of a suburban home sporting a “Reagan/Bush ‘84” yard sign. (Fuck ’em up, Duffer Brothers!) But it’s turtles all the way down: “Thriller” also drew on an aging generation’s nostalgia for the pop culture of its youth, which is why Vincent Price is there to begin with. Plus, as fans of Stranger Things (2016), Thriller (1983), “Thriller” (1983), Thriller (1982), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), and the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834) know, the song is missing a line. It’s not true, as the trailer implies, that “whosoever shall be found” will have to “stand and face the hounds of hell and rot inside a corpse’s shell.” That fate only befalls those who are unlucky enough to lack “the soul for getting down.”
So to recap, we’ve got a show from the 2010s that carefully re-creates the look and feel of movies from the 1980s, using a song from the 1980s that recreates the sound of movies of the early 1960s, except the 2010 show slices up the 1960s part of the 1980s song in a way that will give the 1990s kids grooving along to the 2010s show’s trailer at Comic-Con a moment of pause wondering if the whole exercise is soulless. If that isn’t a tangled enough pop culture ouroboros to rip a hole in reality itself and open up a portal to the Upside Down, they’re gonna have to find a way to work Silent Hill into season three.
