SOUNDBITE: Netflix offers strange but delightful things

Oh, Halloween, why are you so far away? This is certainly the question on the minds of anyone who is a fan of Matt and Ross Duffer’s Stranger Things.

With a whirlwind first season consisting of terror, suspense, rebelling teens, and a group of cute kids, it seems that Netflix, the king of online streaming, has a favorite on its hands.

Starring Millie Bobby Brown (Madison O’Donnell in Intruders) as Eleven, Girl, Interrupted’s Winona Ryder as Joyce and David Harbour as Jim Hopper (Suicide Squad and Newsroom), it seems like they couldn’t have wrangled a more cohesive cast together.

The story starts like most in the horror genre: a dark corridor with enough light to allow the viewer to see that something is clearly wrong. A man running, in this case into the elevator, which of course is slow and takes its own sweet time. I was very proud, however, when the Duffer brothers decided to axe the whole idea that the light is broken and so it blinks, and each time the light comes back up, the monster is closer. They didn’t put that old rag in, which made me suspect that I was definitely going to be pleased.

My suspicions weren’t wrong. Every time I looked over to my mom and whisper-yelled, “Betcha five bucks such and such is about to happen,” I was wrong. There were very few cliches that I noticed, which is a beautiful thing in and of itself.

Brown played the part of a frightened, strange little girl marvelously. Despite some obvious haunts, she still knew who to trust and when to be on edge. Ryder’s character, the mother of missing Will Byers (aka Noah Schnapp, aka Charlie Brown in The Peanuts Movie), reminds me a lot of my own mother. Not in the sense that she’s a single mom raising two boys (my parents have been married for 26 years, and my brother has long been moved out), but in the sense that she’s willing to sound totally batty for one of her kids.

Speaking of family comparisons, older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton who co-stars as Mark in As You Are), is a high-school aged caricature of my own brother, Cole (not that he’s a creep with a camera, just because he acts the same way toward me as Jonathan does with Will.)

A few free tips? Any time the light does something lights don’t normally do, something’s up. Eggos–he frozen waffle everyone loves–also important.

We’ve had a subscription to Netflix for as long as I can remember. I’ve watched CSI: NY, Criminal Minds, Can’t Buy Me Love and The Decoy Bride at least half a dozen times each. I honestly didn’t pay Stranger Things much attention when it first came out. Now that I have, however, I shame the younger me that was so focused on those whodunits to take a chance and try something new. Stranger Things is creepy, suspenseful, weird and wonderful.

Did I enjoy every millisecond of those 8 episodes of Stranger Things? Yes, immensely. Would I say that you need to sign up and the $8 monthly fee is totally worth it? Definitely. Netflix is constantly updating its library with new favorites and wonderful classics. It’s bound to make any movie buff’s day. Can I wait until Oct. 31 for season 2? Heck, no.