Real-life story Stranger Things was based off as producers reveal original name of show

The producers of hit show Stranger Things have opened up about part of the show's inspiration.

Fans of the hit show on Netflix will be intimately familiar with its tone, combining elements of mystery films like The Goonies with the 'small-town with a big dark secret' trope of 80s films like Poltergeist.

Add to that a good dose of Cold War conspiracies like Reds Under the Bed, or under the mall in this case, and children with supernatural abilities being experimented on to fight the commies, not to mention an endless stream of 80s pop culture and DnD references, and you've got yourself Stranger Things.

But what you might not realise is that the show's original concept was based on a real conspiracy.

This is the conspiracy on Montauk, an abandoned Air Force base on Long Island which supposedly had clandestine experiments going on between 1982 and 1987, during the final years of the Cold War.

Members of the cast of Season 5 and the show's creators (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

The research on Montauk was supposedly funded by Nazi gold, and tested 'everything from mind control to time travel', according to the logline for the TV project called The Montauk Experiment, or as it would become more widely known, Stranger Things.

Jim Hopper actor David Harbour told Seth Myers back in 2019 of the earlier iteration of the hit show: "The script was amazing but it was originally called Montauk. I thought that was such a good title, like really strong and simple, like one word.

"It was set in Montauk and then they changed it to be set in the Midwest, so they needed to change the title.

"They called me and they were like, 'We're calling it Stranger Things.' And I was like, 'That's the worst title I've ever heard.'"

In 2016, the Duffer brothers explained why they ended up changing the title from Montauk.

The original idea would have had a very different tone (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

Matt Duffer told the Hollywood Reporter that they decided not to shoot in Montauk, New York State because shooting around Long Island in the winter was going to be 'miserable and expensive'.

Ross Duffer said they chose to create the fictional town of Hawkins instead 'because if you have Castle Rock or whatever, it allowed us, if this goes forward, to do stuff in this town that maybe we would feel strange doing if it was a real place'.

The logline for Montauk gives an impression of a very different show from the nostalgia-steeped Stranger Things, describing it as a 'gritty and intensely realistic "found footage" presentation' of a lost film made by an O.S.S. Film Photography Unit which 'exhaustively documented the entirety of the experiments at the behest of the U.S. government'.

The Montauk Experiment was pitched as an eight hour horror series set in Long Island rather than Hawkins, Indiana, and those horror elements are still very much present in Stranger Things.

There's also a test subject, with scientists trying to develop his 'untapped psychic abilities', and after enduring brutal tests, he 'successfully develops the ability to control minds, move objects telepathically, and materialize thoughts out of thin air' - sound familiar?

The Montauk Experiment was never filmed, but development of the project saw it morphing into Stranger Things.