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Today, reporters are running with a TMZ story describing a lawsuit filed by Charlie Kessler against Ross and Matt Duffer and Stranger Things. This is a major story that is grabbing headlines because of the popularity of the work in question, but articles lack substantial details necessary to inform readers.

All we know is that Kessler claims that he created a short film called “Montauk” in 2012 and pitched it as a series to the brothers in 2014. A cursory look shows that yes, the general idea of “Montauk” could be connected to Stranger Things due to the use of the name in their original pitch:

Montauk is an eight-hour sci-fi horror epic. Set in Long Island in 1980 and inspired by the supernatural classics of that era, we explore the crossroads where the ordinary meet the extraordinary…emotional, cinematic and rooted in character, Montauk is a love letter to the golden age of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King – a marriage of human drama and supernatural fear.

The problem for Kessler is that Montauk is based on actual (or supposed) events. There have been many conspiracy theories surrounding experiments that took place on Montauk Air Force Station on Montauk, Long Island, theories that predate Kessler’s supposed pitch by decades.

Most of the stories regarding the Montauk Project formed the basis for a fiction series about secretive government experiments into extra sensory perception and related abilities called The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon from 1992. This work predates Kessler’s film by 20 years.

It is uncertain if Nichols and Moon created these stories wholesale or if there were conspiracy theories about the base that predate the series, but the series and the conspiracies are deeply related. There are connections between the Montauk Project and claims surrounding what took place during the Philadelphia Experiment. The latter was a conspiracy regarding the US Navy’s experiments with advanced technology that turned out to be a 1950s era hoax.

What is certain is that conspiracy theories, especially those related to government experimentation, have a long standing basis in US culture. There have been hundreds of films and television programs, fiction and non-fiction, that share similar ideas, especially The X-Files. The usage of this generic conceit by the Duffer brothers is verified by their moving the location from Montauk Island to Hawkins, Indiana.

A comparison between Stranger Things and Kessler’s Montauk is impossible due to previously available versions of Kessler’s short film being disabled. This taking down of the film to prevent third parties from verifying claims is a bad sign if it is not coincidental. However, it is unlikely that Stranger Things, packed full of hundreds of references and homages to 80s cinema, has more than a generic relationship to Montauk.

When looking at Kessler’s claims, it is apparent that Nichols and Moon should be suing for appropriating their novel into his short film. It is a shame that reporters were unable to perform basic research to find the novel series that Kessler most likely lifted his ideas from.