Dall'«Esorcista» a «Stranger Things»: rielaborazioni dell'orrore nel contemporaneo

The success of Stranger Things, serial narrative written by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, is the result of a skillful blend of various elements, including the careful recreation of the atmosphere typical of 1980s horror films, the witty reprise of their characteristic stylistic features, but above all the numerous references to real cults of the genre. This specific quality, in truth, falls under the more general tendency of horror seriality to play with adaptations. Stranger Things, in particular, references earlier horror narratives. In this regard, it is intended to isolate, in the fabric of intertextual references that envelops the series, a specific sequence of the work, in order to understand its seminal links to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and the ways in which the Duffer brothers absorbed and rewrote the visual and semantic grammar of this cult.