One of the most anticipated television events of the year has arrived—well, at least part one of it has—and with it comes the return of our favorite monster-fighting 80s teens. It’s been a long three-year wait, but Stranger Things season five has begun. The only bummer is that it’s dropping in three volumes. While we’d all love for the final season to drop at once, we must be patient.
To help ease the pain of sitting still in this strung-out seasonal storyline, here are 10 shows to watch on Netflix while you wait for the next Stranger Things batch to drop.
10
Alice in Borderland
Fans of Stranger Things, Squid Game, and manga will love Alice in Borderland. The series offers a compelling mystery with just as much psychological depth, action, and suspense.
The Japanese sci-fi thriller series follows an obsessed gamer and his two friends as they find themselves trapped in a parallel version of Tokyo, only this one is strange and deserted. To make it out alive, the teens will have to compete against each other in a series of dangerous, high-stakes, sadistic games. This action- and tension-ridden survival drama is adapted from Haro Aso’s manga of the same name. Its third and final season released in September 2025.
9
All of Us Are Dead
If you haven’t seen this gem of a series, prepare to encounter your next obsession. This story about a group of kids fighting for their lives involves a creepy favorite of mine: zombies. It doesn’t matter if they’re in a movie or a series. I’m watching.
All of Us Are Dead is a catastrophic coming-of-age story about a group of students hellbent on surviving a zombie outbreak that originated at their school. Based on a webtoon by Joo Dong-geun, the South Korean series is chock-full of bloodthirsty action and has been so popular, Netflix has renewed it for a second season.
Season one of All of Us Are Dead was such an international success, it ranked among Netflix’s Top 10 most-watched non-English series of all time after charting in the Top 10 in more than 90 countries.
8
Archive 81
An intriguing story, atmospheric and psychological horror, and a found-footage-style mystery? Yep, I’m in for all eight of these episodes!
Based on the podcast of the same name, Archive 81 follows a young archivist who takes a job restoring damaged videotapes. When he’s hired by a mysterious company to restore footage of a graduate student’s 1994 documentary project on a burned-down apartment building, our archivist gets pulled into the vortex of a mystery involving a missing director and the demonic cult being documented. I believe in Hawkins they call that Sunday.
7
Dark
This isn’t just another missing child tale. In Dark, the missing child is more the impetus for an ominous, mind-bending, time-twisting story and less the focus of it. The three-season thriller series combines internal family drama with time travel to create a much heftier mind trip than the Upside Down.
In the wake of a child’s disappearance, four German families frantically search for answers as they unearth a brain-splitting mystery spanning three generations. What I love about Dark is that, right off the bat, we’re thrust into a mysterious conspiracy, time travel, and a handful of people suddenly learning about a supernatural phenomenon plaguing their town. This is indeed familiar, but keep in mind that this series is a very different show than Stranger Things.
6
Dead Boy Detectives
Even though, you know, they’re dead and all, the supernatural, mystery-solving teens in Dead Boy Detectives have way more fun and many fewer threats to face than our Hawkins crew.
Set in the same universe as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, the series follows two teenage ghosts who decide not to enter the afterlife but instead to stay on Earth and investigate supernatural crimes alongside a clairvoyant. That’s the plan—at least until a powerful witch sticks her nose where it doesn’t belong and complicates their plan to stop the forces that keep their ghost brethren from ascending.
Dead Boy Detectives
- Release Date
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2024 – 2024-00-00
- Showrunner
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Steve Yockey, Beth Schwartz
- Writers
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Steve Yockey
5
Locke & Key
If you’re able to approach Stranger Things with an open mind, you’re certainly capable of investing in Locke & Key, a story about a family living in a house filled with magical, reality-bending keys.
The three-season horror series by Joe Hill (NOS4A2) and Gabriel Rodriguez is based on their comic book of the same name. It follows a mother and her three kids as they move into their late patriarch’s childhood home in Massachusetts. While at Keyhouse, the kids discover numerous keys that can be used to unlock doors in various ways. They soon learn, though, that they aren’t the only ones obsessed with them—a demonic entity is hunting them for malevolent purposes.
4
Mortel
While the Hawkins crew didn’t have much of a choice when it came to fighting Upside Down monsters like the Demogorgon and the Mind Flayer, that’s not the case for the kids in Mortel, which is French for mortal.
In this two-season supernatural series, teenagers Sofiane and Victor make a pact with a voodoo god in exchange for extraordinary superpowers that will help them solve and avenge the murder of Sofiane’s brother. While Victor is granted the ability to read minds, Sofiane is able to manipulate peoples’ actions. When they enlist the help of a voodoo practitioner to free themselves of the god’s grip, they realize what they should’ve known from the beginning—they had it coming.
3
Raising Dion
If you love how Stranger Things rations its time between the multi-generational storylines of the adults and kids of Hawkins, you’ll enjoy Raising Dion.
This two-season sci-fi series revolves around the evolution and emergence of a young kid’s superpower, but it centers on his mother and her efforts. As a widow, Dion’s mother attempts to reconcile her son’s remarkable abilities while also protecting them from those who would surely take advantage of him and his powers if they knew. As she investigates the origin of her son’s abilities, as well as the mysterious circumstances of her husband’s death, dangers emerge when a mysterious force comes after her son.
2
Safe
America’s favorite vigilante serial killer (Michael C. Hall, of Dexter) stars in Safe, an eight-episode mystery-drama miniseries that is also Harlan Coben’s first for Netflix.
Tom (Hall) is a widowed surgeon struggling to raise his two daughters in the year since his wife—their mom—died. Though he’s currently dating a police detective and has his family living in a gated community with family and friends nearby, that doesn’t mean their life is on the right track. When Tom’s oldest daughter and her boyfriend go missing, he enlists his girlfriend’s help. As their investigation intensifies, Tom uncovers dark secrets and learns more than he ever thought possible about the people closest to him in his affluent neighborhood.
1
The Umbrella Academy
A heavy thematic element of Stranger Things is the unification of a dysfunctional family in support of a common goal. This is exactly what the unique Hargreeves clan does in The Umbrella Academy, which is loosely based on the comic book series by Gerard Way.
While we aren’t hanging out in the 80s, we do begin there, with seven inexplicably born infants adopted by a billionaire industrialist, then transformed and prepared by him to save the world. The family disbands after divergent personalities and abilities fracture their bond in their teenage years, but in the wake of their father’s death, they reunite to discover what actually happened to him. Over four seasons, The Umbrella Academy features some witty dialogue, as well as some extremely impressive visual effects and a righteous soundtrack. Sound familiar?
There’s much more to keep you plugged into Stranger Things between volume releases. Stick around in the strangeness of 1987 and see what films and television shows the characters would be watching. If you feel like hopping back to 2025, be sure to check out Netflix’s December releases.
