The Duffer brothers have named It repeatedly, and the show is built on its skeleton:
- A group of bullied children who are the only people who understand the threat
- A small town whose adults are useless, complicit or absent
- A monster that lives beneath the town and feeds on what the children are afraid of
- A bond formed in one summer that the story keeps returning to
The casting closed the loop: Finn Wolfhard was cast as Mike here and then as Richie Tozier in the 2017 film of It. The graph already holds E.T., The Goonies and D&D pointing at this show; It is the one that supplies the horror rather than the bicycles.