Stranger Things

Stranger Things starts with a boy going missing from a small American town, and the friends who won't let it drop. Matt and Ross Duffer built it for Netflix, and it doesn't stay a simple missing-persons story for long. Someone else turns up too, and whatever took the boy has already started pulling at the edges of everyone else's ordinary week.

The fear here is the creeping kind, something underneath the town that shouldn't exist and clearly does. It leans on dread and a proper creature rather than jump scares stacked on jump scares, so it suits a night when you want tension with your comfort blanket rather than a full assault on the nerves.

It ran across five seasons and forty-two episodes, from 2016 to its finale in 2025, and it never quite stops being about kids growing up alongside the horror. Good one for a slow build over several evenings rather than a single sitting, ideally with someone else on the sofa to grab.