Editorials
How ‘Stranger Things’ Can Help Shape the Future of Horror Games
Most video games rely on giving the player a power fantasy, which can be at odds with the ethos of the survival horror genre. Even among the horrific environments of Doom, we want to be able to rip and tear with reckless abandon. While many games like Amnesia or Outlast try to completely de-power the player, there’s something that doesn’t feel completely natural about it. With the new season of Stranger Things on Netflix, I thought it would be a good time to look at how the tone of the TV show can be adapted into the video game medium.
While there is a Stranger Things video game, it seems to mostly be cashing in on the nostalgia factor that so many fans seem to focus on. To me, Stranger Things addresses the power fantasy problem for horror by making the main characters a group of children. So many elements of this kids-on-bikes tone give you the perfect blueprints for a horror game that it’s a shock to me that more horror games don’t utilize it.
Children are immediately more vulnerable than adults, and can believably be denied effective means of defending themselves. It always seemed weird to me that the main character of Outlast wouldn’t arm themselves in some way, but if you cast your main character as a kid, then it’s feasible that they wouldn’t be able to purchase a handgun, much less wield it effectively in a panic. A child could access rudimentary melee weapons or slingshots, providing a good opportunity to make combat less about permanently defeating a monster and more about temporarily stunning or distracting them to create an opportunity for escape.
Using kids as protagonists also gives you an easy in-game reason for investigating something creepy or evil: kids are curious. There’s a natural sense of wonder that we all remember having while wandering as children, and that’s something that could be perfectly captured by giving a game a Stranger Things-esque tone. Would an adult break into the haunted house down the road because they heard chains rattling in the night? No, but the combination of perceived immortality and freedom from consequence that most kids feel creates a perfect storm of motive for your video game protagonist to sneak in.
Even though nostalgia isn’t what I go to Stranger Things for, there are some interesting design opportunities that come from setting a game in the 80s. The decade helps limits technology that would give you easy narrative outs. In the 80s, there are no cell phones for the characters to call the police while they are lost in the creepy government facility. There’s no internet available to look up information about sightings of elongated creatures near the city park. Limiting the technology ratchets up the mystery by not allowing those easy avenues for discovery, forcing your characters to hang out in the park all night to get a glimpse of what lurks there rather than letting them look for pictures online.
One of the strongest elements of Stranger Things is its deep bench of compelling characters. Not only are the kids interesting to follow, but the older siblings and the adults also offer different perspectives on the action unfolding. I’ll always remember someone describing the first season to me as: “The kids are in a Steven Spielberg movie, the teens are in a Stephen King book, and the adults are in a John Carpenter film.”
The Blackout Club
Horror games often suffer when they get repetitive, so building in multiple sets of character like this gives you the perfect opportunity to mix things up just when the player gets comfortable. Imagine a game set up where the kids are focused on stealth, the teens focused on melee combat and the adults focused on shooting. Each gameplay style offers a different take on the horror genre, keeping things fresh.
Multiple perspectives also gives the option to raise the stakes of the game to life or death by allowing permadeath. This is something a game like Until Dawn excels at. When you have a large set of characters you control, losing some will not derail the story. Often time the only consequence involved in a horror game is being forced to replay a section, so allowing characters to actually die makes every encounter tense and meaningful.
There are some games out there that have taken these kinds of inspirations from Stranger Things. The Blackout Club casts you as a group of mystery-solving kids, Generation Zero drops you in the middle of 1980s Sweden where hostile machines are at war with small-town teenagers, and A Plague Tale: Innocence gives you control of a young girl who has to sneak around in order to survive 1300s Europe. In the tabletop space, Tales from the Loop was met with massive acclaim for capturing the same tone as Stranger Things (with direct inspiration from the gorgeous artwork of Simon Stålenhag) and was met with massive acclaim. As Stranger Things once again rockets back into the cultural zeitgeist, the new season was seen by over 40 million viewers in its first week alone, it’s only a matter of time before a AAA studio starts mining it for ideas.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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