The Monster Mash: ‘Stranger Things’ and the Pleasures of Being Scared Together
There is something faintly strange—and genuinely wonderful—about the fact that in a decade as anxious, polarized, and often joyless as the 2020s, a large and culturally diverse audience could rally around a television series so unapologetically steeped in pop-culture excess. Stranger Things is cinematic realization of the 1960s pop ditty ‘The Monster Mash’ — a wild ride through American genre films with monsters as fellow passengers.