How Stranger Things got its retro title sequence
Netflix’s hit thriller Stranger Things does an impressive job remixing and referencing a whole lot of '80s classics. But the show’s tone owes a lot to the striking credits sequence that follows every episode’s cold open.
To give the show its retro opening look, Imaginary Forces, the production studio behind the sequence, actually went back to an old-fashioned credits-making process. The team printed out the main logo on film and set up camera tests to see what it looked like when light passed through the film sheet. Using those camera shots as references, they then animated the sequence digitally.
The main logo was based off novel covers that Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer sent to Imaginary Forces. The final result — riffing somewhere between Stephen King’s The Dead Zone and Nick Sharman’s The Cats — uses ITC Benguiat, a vaguely art nouveau font that has appeared on everything from Choose Your Own Adventure books to a 1987 album by the Smiths.