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Stranger Things is a show that wears its inspirations on its sleeve. From the E.T.-ness of the kids on bikes to the Freddy Krueger-esque villains to the shades of Stephen King in, well, pretty much all of the show, it's easy to tell where the Duffer Brothers are getting their ideas. And yet, there are still a few surprising strands in Stranger Things' DNA if one has a powerful enough microscope to look. For example, there's the Dan Stevens horror movie that inspired the iconic theme.

Let's back it up - in 2014, future Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer went to see The Guest, a psychological thriller that stars Legion actor Dan Stevens as a mysterious visitor whose appearance in a family's small down comes with mysterious deaths. To get a sense of what the movie (directed by future Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire helmer Adam Wingard) is like, check out Collider's retrospective on the project, which calls it "John Wick for horror fans." But even more important than what the movie felt like, for our purposes, was what it sounded like. 

The music in The Guest was created by electric band S U R V I V E, formed in 2009. The band, made up or artists Michael Stein, Kyle Dixon, Adam Jones and Mark Donica, used heavy synth tones to create suspense in the 2014 frightener, and to a pair of brothers building a pitch that would draw heavily on 80s nostalgia, the score was... well, "music to their ears" sounds a bit reductive, doesn't it?

"We used one of [S U R V I V E's] songs in that little trailer we cut together," Matt Duffer told Complex in 2016, referencing the pitch that the pair made to Netflix in its earliest stages of development, "So of course when it came time to actually find a composer, they were one of the first names to pop in our heads. We talked to the guys like, 'What would music for Eleven sound like? What would music for the monster sound like?' The Eleven theme that plays throughout the season, that's what they came up with. We immediately went, 'Oh my god, these are the guys for us.'"

Nine years later, S U R V I V E's theme for Stranger Things is one of the most well-known in Netflix's wide catalogue of entertainment, and there's an argument to be made that it helped build up the fanbase to as large as it is today. In fact, there's a further argument to be made that, without The Guest's music backing the Duffer Brothers' Netflix pitch, Stranger Things may have never made it onto our screens at all. 

Not that we are saying that. Just saying that someone else could.

Stranger Things season 5 is expected to debut on Netflix in late 2025. 

As we all collectively wait for Stranger Things season 5, here's the keys to getting ready:

• How to watch Stranger Things in chronological or release order
• Getting to know the Stranger Things season 5 cast
• There needs to be more death in Stranger Things, says co-star Gaten Matarazzo
• The Stranger Things time jump between season 4 and 5 has been confirmed by Netflix - and it raises some serious questions
• "They land the plane," David Harbour describes the Stranger Things finale, which he calls its "best episode"