The ‘Stranger Things’ Opening Credits Are the Best Thing on TV Right Now

By Joe Reid @joereid
Published July 15, 2016, 3:00 p.m. ET

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Stranger Things

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When the logline description for the new Netflix series Stranger Things first crossed my path — “When a young boy disappears, his mother must confront terrifying forces in order to get him back” — my thoughts first drifted to something close to that Julianne Moore movie The Forgotten, where her don goes missing and she becomes obsessed with finding him, and you’re not sure if she’s insane or not and then — SPOILER — oops, there are aliens. Which was not necessarily a dealbreaker. The Forgotten  is a bad movie, but Winona Ryder doing a pulpy Julianne Moore knockoff on a summer TV series still sounded pretty good. But that’s not what Stranger Things is about. All I needed to understand exactly the plot, tone, and vibe of Stranger Things was to watch 45 seconds’ worth of the show’s superb opening credits:

What a beautiful thing that title sequence is! For one thing, the music is this perfectly ominous, vague, unsettling mood-setter. And having the letters — which are very slightly strobing in a way that makes them feel hot — slowly come into focus is equally creepy. But it’s that font that’s the most thrilling element. Honestly, this is a show with missing kids, gross monsters, MK Ultra experiments, and kids with special powers, and STILL the most thrilling element is a font. But it communicates SO much about the show. That font is instantly familiar to anyone who ever read a book in the 1980s. That, my friends, is the Stephen King font.

And before the actual font police get all up on me, no, I don’t think it is EXACTLY the same font. But it’s close enough, and more importantly, it is designed to evoke memories of specifically these book covers. Stranger Things borrows heavily, overtly, and lovingly from sources ranging from E.T. to The Goonies, and it is most definitely borrowing from Stephen King’s work. (At one point, there’s a slingshot moment straight out of It.) The actual plot of Stranger Things takes several episodes to really unfold, before you find out the nature of the beast, where it comes from, who’s after it, who it’s after, how it operates. But thanks to the visual cues in those main titles (and in the Dungeons & Dragons interlude in the first episode; and in all those scenes of the boys riding their bikes at night), the audience knows precisely what kind of universe they’re in.

All of which doesn’t even get into the astounding nostalgic appeal of those old Stephen King covers. I was a teenager in the early ’90s, and King’s books were the first for-grown-ups books that I ever read. I devoured them, one after another, and the constant as I blazed a trail from Carrie to The Dead Zone to The Stand to It was that bold, blocky cover font that hollered the author’s name from the back of the shelf. In many ways, that experience of inhaling King’s entire bibliography between the ages of 14 and 17 — that discovery of a dark, engrossing world that was scary and made me feel like I was an adult doing adult things — can never be experienced again. But Stranger Things comes awfully close.

[Stream Stranger Things on Netflix]