Stranger Things has dominated pop culture discourse since its release in 2016, combining ’80s teen nostalgia with an ambitious supernatural mystery to critical acclaim. However, a similarly nostalgic indie film released in 2019 also seized on this retro sci-fi trend, so much so that it’s invariably drawn comparisons with the Duffer Brothers’ popular Netflix series.
Directed by Andrew Patterson, The Vast of Night was sH๏τ on a shoestring budget of $700,000 and persevered to win the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2019. Crafted as an almost Twilight Zone-like mystery, the film garnered praise from critics and audiences alike for its eerie cinematography and gripping teen sci-fi narrative.
The Vast Of Night Has A Lot In Common With Stranger Things
Set in 1950s’ New Mexico, The Vast of Night follows teenage DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) and switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) as they stumble upon a strange frequency that’s part of a larger government cover-up. Like Stranger Things, the film features many of the same Americana elements: basketball games, high-school cliques, and an eerie mystery bubbling beneath the community’s surface.
The radio station Everett and Fay work for is called “WOTW” as a homage to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
Furthermore, The Vast of Night also falls comfortably into the Stranger Things trope of a group of young outsiders investigating supernatural phenomena. Plus, just as Stranger Things drew influence from the real-life M.K. Ultra Program and the “Satanic Scare,” the film was also inspired by two alleged supernatural incidents that occurred in Roswell, New Mexico and Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, respectively.
The Vast Of Night Does Something Stranger Things Still Hasn’t
However, despite the undeniable similarities found between The Vast of Night and Stranger Things, there is still one avenue that the latter has yet to explore—the extraterrestrial. Indeed, the aforementioned incidents in Roswell and Kecksburg hold one central throughline that formed the basis of The Vast of Night—the long-reported presence of UFOs and aliens in our society.
Patterson’s film preys on this paranoia, framing it through the eyes of two inquisitive teens outside the fray of the community’s high school basketball game who first encounter the extraterrestrial beings through an unsettling radio frequency (which is another similar plot device in Stranger Things) high in the skies.
By pursuing this extraterrestrial angle, The Vast of Night distinguishes itself from other teen mysteries by leaning into the UFO-fueled anxiety of the ’50s and ’60s, placing us in the foreboding Cold War-era where the fear of the unknown was as terrifying as the night sky itself.
