If you too have been binging seasons 1-4 of Stranger Things in anticipation of the Season 5 drop, you may have noticed some similarities between the 1980’s core show and a legit 1980’s cinema icon.
There is something about Stranger Things season four that feels less like a straight horror series and more like a warped fairy tale – specifically, a really dark reimagining of Labyrinth. Yes, there are obvious eighties vibes baked into the show, but season four does something more interesting than just throw in references and needle drops. It builds a kind of psychic maze that looks and behaves a lot like the Goblin King’s domain – only this time the goblins are trauma, grief and guilt, and the king is Vecna.
Once you start looking at it through a Labyrinth lens, the whole season shifts. Vecna’s lair, Nancy’s bedroom in the Upside Down, Max caught in her own mind at the school – it all starts to feel like modern, horror-soaked versions of Sarah’s journey. Same emotional skeleton. Far less mercy.
Vecna’s Lair and the Escher Staircase
Let’s start with the visuals, because the show practically hands you the comparison.
In the final act of Labyrinth, Sarah chases Toby into a gravity-defying room of staircases inspired by Escher’s famous artwork. Paths run upside down, sideways and into nowhere; Sarah and Jareth walk past and over each other in ways that should not be physically possible. The whole sequence feels like someone has smashed reality, then reassembled it according to dream logic instead of physics.
Now look at Vecna’s lair in season four. We see a house pulled apart and suspended in the air like broken memories. Corridors drift in the dark. Chunks of flooring and walls hang at odd angles. At one point you get a clear shot of a broken staircase just hanging there in the void, and it is so reminiscent of that Escher sequence with Jareth and Sarah walking around each other, never quite on the same plane.
In both stories, the setting is doing more than just looking cool. The staircase spaces are metaphors. In Labyrinth, Sarah is trying to navigate her own confusion about growing up, responsibility and desire. In Stranger Things, the fragmented house becomes a visual representation of shattered psyches: a home exploded and frozen mid-destruction, like the mind of someone who has been through too much. The characters are literally climbing through the wreckage of someone’s memories.
Neither world plays by normal rules. Gravity does not behave, doors do not lead where they should, and the only way out is through. That is very Labyrinth energy.
Nancy’s Bedroom and the Junkyard of the Self
One of the creepiest things season four does is take spaces we know – bedrooms, houses, familiar rooms – and show us their Upside Down versions. Nancy’s bedroom in particular feels like it is echoing the junkyard / trash heap sequence in Labyrinth.
In Labyrinth, Sarah is dumped into a junkyard piled high with old toys, furniture and childhood clutter. Then, suddenly, she is in what looks like her bedroom. The stuffed animals are in their places, the posters are on the walls, everything is as it should be – except it is not. It is a constructed set, a trap. The “Junk Lady” keeps piling Sarah’s old belongings around her, urging her to stay in this cosy little cave of nostalgia and forget why she came.
It is such a clever way of showing how the past can become a prison. Everything is familiar, and that familiarity is precisely what makes it dangerous.
Nancy’s bedroom in the Upside Down has the same uncomfortable feeling. It is her room, but preserved like an insect in amber – stuck in a particular moment in time, coated in that grey, dusty growth that covers everything in the Upside Down. You recognise the layout, the furniture, the “this is where she would have felt safe” vibe, but the air is wrong. The room is wrong. It is her old life held hostage.
Both scenes – Sarah’s false bedroom and Nancy’s frozen one – are like time capsules that have rotted. The details are technically right, but the soul is off. They become eerie mirrors of the characters they belong to: a version of home that no longer fits who they are, and absolutely does not protect them.
In Labyrinth, Sarah snaps out of it when she remembers her quest and realises, “This is not my room. This is still the Labyrinth.” In Stranger Things, the kids have the same dawning awareness. Even when a place looks familiar, they cannot let themselves believe they are safe. The Upside Down is a liar.
Max at the School vs Sarah at the Ball
Another big parallel is the way both stories use dreamlike, glamorous settings to distract their heroines from what really matters.
In Labyrinth, Jareth lures Sarah into a masquerade ball. It is visually stunning: crystal balls, masks, romantic waltzing, soft-focus lighting. Sarah is dressed up, admired, swept into this intoxicating fairy-tale moment. It is also completely fake. The ball exists to keep her from remembering her purpose, to tempt her into staying in a fantasy rather than facing the mess and responsibility of real life.
Season four gives Max a strangely similar moment when she is pulled into her own mind and finds herself at the school. The corridors, the gym, the school dance – they are all re-created inside her mind when Vecna is trying to trap her. On the surface it looks like memory, like a safe place she knows well. But again, something is off. The scene has that same dreamy, suspended feeling the ball has in Labyrinth.
Max in her mind-palace school and Sarah in the Goblin King’s ballroom are both being distracted by an illusion carefully tailored to their vulnerabilities. Sarah’s temptation is a glamorous fairy tale where she is wanted and adored. Max’s is more complex: her school memories are tied to grief, guilt and the sense that she does not deserve to move on. If she gives in, she stays stuck in that moment of trauma for ever.
In both cases, the girl has to fight her way out not with weapons, but with clarity. Sarah literally smashes the illusion by rejecting Jareth’s offers. Max claws her way out by remembering who she is, who she loves and what she still wants from life. The surroundings are magical and surreal, but the real battle is internal.
Vecna and Jareth: Monsters, Men and Relatability
Then there is the question of the villain.
Jareth, the Goblin King, has become one of those characters people now see very differently to how he might have been read in the eighties. On the surface he is the antagonist who steals a baby and sets impossible challenges. Underneath that, though, there is a strange emotional complexity. He offers Sarah a fantasy version of growing up. He clearly has feelings – whether you read them as romantic, manipulative, or both. He is part threat, part desire, part reflection of Sarah’s own inner turmoil.
Season four takes a similar approach with Vecna. He is not just a mindless Big Bad from another dimension. He is Henry Creel – a boy with abilities, a subject in Dr Brenner’s programme, someone who suffered and then chose to embrace cruelty. The show spends real time on his backstory, his motivations, his philosophy about the rot at the heart of the human world.
That choice matters. It nudges Vecna away from being a faceless monster and into the territory of the complicated, almost mythic villain – the kind people end up picking apart and analysing, rather than simply cheering against. It also opens up the possibility that season five might lean into this even more. Are we being set up to understand Vecna the way people have come to “understand” Jareth – not to excuse him, but to see the contours of his pain and the logic of his cruelty?
Jareth is often read now as a figure of frustrated desire and liminal adulthood – that dangerous, glittering thing between childhood and maturity. Vecna is what happens if someone shatters at that point instead. Where Jareth is theatrical and seductive, Vecna is raw and rotting. But they both stand at the centre of a maze built from someone else’s mind.
The Clocks: Time as a Weapon, a Warning, and a Trap
One major parallel we haven’t touched yet — and it might be the most chilling — is the presence of clocks. Both stories use time not just as a narrative device, but as an antagonist, an ever-present threat that ticks closer to doom with every second.
In Labyrinth, Sarah’s entire journey is bound to the countdown on the Goblin King’s clock. Every time we see it, the hands move impossibly, reminding her that she is losing ground. The sound of those ticks isn’t just background noise — it is pressure, fear, consequence. It’s the slow tightening of a noose made of time.
Stranger Things 4 mirrors this beautifully, but more horrifically. Vecna’s victims don’t just see clocks — they hear them before anything else. The grandfather clock strikes from nowhere, echoing through hallways, bedrooms, minds. It doesn’t tell time — it tells doom. It is death’s arrival bell. Max hears it before she is taken. Chrissy hears it. The sound is a premonition, a countdown to the moment Vecna finds you.
What Labyrinth uses as fairy-tale urgency, Stranger Things converts into psychological horror. Time is not just running out — it is hunting you.
Both stories say the same thing, just in different tones: time will take something from you. A childhood. A life. A mind.
Sarah races the clock to save her brother. Max runs from the clock to save herself.
In both worlds, the ticking isn’t just sound design. It is prophecy. A warning. A heartbeat you cannot ignore.
The Eighties as a Shared Language
The Duffer Brothers have spoken openly about how deeply Stranger Things is rooted in eighties film, television and pop culture. It is not just set in the eighties – it is made to feel as if it belongs to that era, borrowing the mood of everything from Spielberg to Stephen King, from teen movies to horror classics.
Labyrinth sits squarely in that same cultural soup: weird, experimental fantasy; practical effects; rich synth-heavy sound; slightly off-kilter fairy-tale energy. Even if the Duffers have never name-checked it as a direct influence, it is hard not to see how a film like that could seep into the DNA of their show. You have:
– A girl drawn into another realm that feeds on her emotions.
– A villain who is part man, part otherworldly menace.
– A reality that twists into impossible architecture, false bedrooms and dreamlike parties.
– A coming-of-age story disguised as a fantasy / horror quest.
That is very much the space that Stranger Things season four occupies. It is as if the show has taken the bones of an eighties fantasy like Labyrinth and skinned it with modern horror and trauma awareness. The result feels familiar and new at the same time.
From Fairy Tale to Trauma Story
When you put it all together – the Escher-like staircases, the false bedrooms, the mental masquerades, the complex villain with a tragic backstory – season four looks less like “kids versus monsters” and more like a twisted fairy tale about trauma.
In Labyrinth, Sarah’s journey ends with her accepting responsibility and letting go of childish selfishness. She tells the Goblin King, “You have no power over me,” and the maze collapses. It is painful, but ultimately hopeful. She goes home. The fantasy world remains as a kind of inner place she can visit, but she is no longer trapped there.
Stranger Things is far crueller. The Upside Down is not an imaginative playground; it is a wound that keeps reopening. Vecna’s labyrinth of trauma is still there when the season ends, and the real world is literally cracking under the strain. The characters do not get to neatly separate fantasy from reality, or childhood from adulthood. Everything is spilling into everything else.
If season four is the dark Labyrinth, then season five is poised to be the part where the characters either break free of that maze or are swallowed by it. To defeat Vecna, they are probably going to have to do more than stab him. They will need to face the parts of themselves he feeds on – the guilt, the grief, the memories they would rather bury.
That is what makes the comparison so satisfying. It is not just aesthetic. It is structural. Both stories use impossible spaces and seductive illusions to force their characters into emotional growth. Labyrinth does it through fairy-tale symbolism. Stranger Things does it through horror. But underneath the monsters, both are asking the same question: what does it really take to grow up and walk out of the maze?
Maybe that is why season four hits so hard. It feels like someone took the comforting weirdness of our eighties childhood films and turned them inside out, exposing all the anxiety, loss and fear that was always hiding in the shadows. It is a labyrinth we recognise – just stripped of its glitter, and lit by lightning instead.
