The Demagorgon is a truly terrifying monster that the kids from Stranger Things had to defeat, but what if they faced off against your run-of-the-mill slasher villain? It wouldn’t be pretty — we’re talking violence, strong language, adult content— all things that may be a bit too mature for the 11-something kids who saved the day and Will Byers.
While we may not get a guy with a chainsaw chasing the kids around Hawkins, this spoof of the Stranger Things trailer imagines what it would be like if the small Indiana town was terrorized by Jason from Friday the 13th or Pennywise the Clown from It. Unsurprisingly, it matches up perfectly.
While Stranger Things may be on the more sci-fi side of the horror genre, it’s not afraid to make homages to the gory slasher films that inspired it. Hence the steady release of ’80s-inspired posters to market the upcoming second season of the Netflix hit.
This YouTube trailer spoof byJosh Nitsche, titled Slasher Things, puts that into practice by intercutting the Stranger Things trailer with scenes from the Hellraiser movies, the Friday the 13th movies, the Halloween series, A Nightmare on Elm Street films, Saw, and the It miniseries. So that includes a Rogues Gallery of Pinhead, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Pennywise the Clown, Chucky, and Jigsaw. It begins with the gang playing an arcade game where they battle Jason from Friday the 13th and promptly lose, with an ominous coin screen stating “You and all your friends are dead.”
Instead of the new, nameless monster from the Upside Down that Will Byers keeps seeing, it’s various villains from the above slasher movies, as well as various scenes of the teen heroes of these films before they get slaughtered. It works — if you think of the small town of Hawkins as having an endless supply of high schoolers. The trailer even keeps Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as the background music, which also fits marvelously well.
It’s retro overload, but it’s a lot of fun. That’s the power of Stranger Things, that it can fit so well with any movie within the sci-fi horror genre, because of how heavily inspired it is by those exact films. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve end up in a slasher-lite subplot at some point in the second season. It would fit co-creator Ross Duffer‘s hints that the second season will be darker and a “lot more horror-oriented” than the first season. For now, though, the kids are better off finding Eleven and fighting the alternate dimension monster that’s about to invade their lives.
The second season of Stranger Things debuts on Netflix on October 27.
The post ‘Stranger Things’ Kids Get Terrorized by Pennywise and Pinhead in Slasher Trailer Spoof appeared first on /Film.
