In episode 3, “The Monster and the Superhero,” Nancy (Natalie Dyer) and Robin (Maya Hawke) learned about the history of Victor Creel, who was believed to have murdered his entire family. They decide that the only way to find out what really happened is to talk to Creel himself, played by Robert Englund. Fans might not recognize Englund without his trademark makeup, but he also played monstrous slasher Freddy Krueger in the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies. Nancy and Robin go undercover as psychology students and manage to talk their way into the asylum, scoring a brief interview with Creel. They’re taken down into the basement and escorted in, walking down the row of cells and being jeered at by the inmates inside. If the sequence looks familiar, that’s because it’s paying heavy homage to the Academy Award-winning film “The Silence of the Lambs,” directed by Jonathan Demme. 

In “Silence of the Lambs,” investigator Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) has to walk down a similarly long hallway to the cell on the end, where her interview subject waits. The way the camera cuts between Nancy’s face, the prisoners, and the hallway itself in “Stranger Things” looks very much like Clarice’s long walk, though she finds a very different kind of person at the end.