Stranger Things
Stranger Things is an American television series created by the Duffer Brothers for Netflix. Produced by Monkey Massacre Productions and 21 Laps Entertainment, the first season was released on Netflix on July 15, 2016. The second and third seasons followed in October 2017 and July 2019, respectively, and the fourth season was released in two parts in May and July 2022. The fifth and final season is expected to be released in three parts in November and December 2025. The show is a mix of the horror, drama, science-fiction, mystery, and coming-of-age genres. Set in the 1980s, the series centers on the residents of the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana, after a nearby human experimentation facility opens a gateway between Earth and a hostile alternate dimension known as the Upside Down. The cast includes Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Cara Buono, Matthew Modine, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Joe Keery, Dacre Montgomery, Sean Astin, Paul Reiser, Maya Hawke, Priah Ferguson, Brett Gelman, Jamie Campbell Bower, Eduardo Franco, Joseph Quinn, and Amybeth McNulty. The Duffer Brothers developed Stranger Things as a mix of investigative drama and supernatural elements portrayed with horror and childlike sensibilities, while infusing references to the popular culture of the 1980s. Several thematic and directorial elements were inspired by the works of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, David Lynch, Stephen King, Wes Craven and H. P. Lovecraft. They also took inspiration from experiments conducted during the Cold War and conspiracy theories involving secret government programs. Stranger Things has received critical acclaim throughout its run, with many critics praising its characterization, atmosphere, acting, directing, writing, and homages to films of the 1980s, becoming an example of 1980s nostalgia.[6][7][8] It has garnered many accolades. Many publications consider it to be among the greatest television shows ever made. Stranger Things is a flagship series for Netflix, attracting record viewership with each season's release. The series spawned a franchise, including an animated spin-off entitled Stranger Things: Tales From '85,[9][10] a 2023 Broadway production that serves as a prequel titled Stranger Things: The First Shadow, and also inspiring many books, comics, tie-ins, a pop-up shop, and a Dungeons and Dragons board game based on the series. OverviewStranger Things is set in the fictional rural town of Hawkins, Indiana, in the 1980s. The nearby Hawkins National Laboratory ostensibly performs scientific research for the United States Department of Energy but also secretly experiments with the paranormal and supernatural, sometimes with human test subjects. They have inadvertently created a portal to an alternate dimension they refer to as the Upside Down, whose presence begins to affect the residents of Hawkins in unusual ways.[11][12] The first season begins in November 1983 when Will Byers is abducted by a creature from the Upside Down. His mother Joyce, Police Chief Jim Hopper, and a group of volunteers search for him. A young psychokinetic girl named Eleven escapes from the laboratory and is found by friends of Will. Eleven befriends and assists them in their efforts to find Will.[13] The second season is set eleven months later, in October 1984. Will has been rescued, but he begins having premonitions of the fall of Hawkins caused by a creature in the Upside Down. When it is discovered that Will is still being possessed by an entity from the Upside Down, his friends and family learn that there is a larger threat to their world.[14] The third season is set nine months later, in the days leading up to the Fourth of July celebration in 1985. The new Starcourt Mall has become the center of attention for Hawkins residents, putting the majority of other local stores out of business due to the mall's popularity. Hopper becomes increasingly concerned about Eleven and Mike Wheeler's relationship and becomes very protective of his daughter. Unbeknownst to the town, a secret Soviet laboratory underneath Starcourt seeks to open the gateway to the Upside Down. Meanwhile, the Mind Flayer uses mind control to make Billy do his bidding.[15][16] The fourth season is set eight months later, in March 1986. Joyce, Will, Eleven, and Jonathan have moved to Lenora, California for a fresh start. In California, Eleven struggles with the loss of her powers and being bullied in school. Meanwhile, in Hawkins, a being from the Upside Down—an entity later dubbed Vecna—begins killing the residents of Hawkins, opening new gates between the two worlds in the process. Planning to stop Vecna, Dr. Sam Owens takes Eleven to a facility to help her regain her powers. Simultaneously, Joyce and Murray Bauman fly to Russia to rescue Hopper from the Gulag in Kamchatka. The fifth and final season is set in the fall of 1987. The group seeks to find and kill Vecna after the Rifts opened in Hawkins. The mission becomes complicated when the military sets up shop in Hawkins and begins hunting Eleven. Near the anniversary of Will's disappearance, the group must stay together one last time for the final battle and face something more powerful and deadly than ever before. Cast and characters
Episodes
ProductionDevelopmentRoss (left) and Matt Duffer, the creators and showrunners of the series Stranger Things was created by Matt and Ross Duffer, known professionally as the Duffer Brothers,[30] who also serve as showrunners and head writers and direct many of the episodes. They wrote and produced their 2015 film Hidden, in which they emulated the style of M. Night Shyamalan. However, due to changes at Warner Bros., its distributor, it did not see wide release and the Duffers were unsure of their future.[31] To their surprise, television producer Donald De Line approached them, impressed with Hidden's script, and offered them the opportunity to work on episodes of Wayward Pines with Shyamalan. The brothers were mentored by Shyamalan during the episode's production so that when they finished, they felt they were ready to produce their own television series.[32] The Duffers prepared a script[when?] similar to the series' eventual pilot episode, along with a 20-page pitch book to help shop the series to networks.[33] They pitched the story to about 15[34] cable networks, all of whom felt a plot with children as leading characters wouldn't work and asked the brothers to either make it a children's series or drop the children and focus on Hopper's investigation into the paranormal.[32] In early 2015, Dan Cohen, the VP of 21 Laps Entertainment, brought the script to his colleague Shawn Levy. They subsequently invited the Duffer Brothers to their office and purchased the rights for the series, giving the brothers full authorship. After reading the pilot, the streaming service Netflix purchased the whole season for an undisclosed sum,[35] and in April of the same year, the series was announced for a 2016 release.[36] The Duffer Brothers stated that at the time they pitched to Netflix the company had already been recognized for its original programming in shows such as House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, with well-recognized producers behind them, and were ready to start giving upcoming producers like them a chance.[33] The brothers started casting and brought Levy and Cohen in as the other executive producers to discuss storylines, with Levy also directing for the show.[37]
— The Duffer Brothers' original pitch for Montauk[38]
 The series was originally known as Montauk. The setting was then Montauk, New York, and nearby Long Island locations. Montauk figured into a number of real world conspiracy theories involving secret government experiments.[36][39] The brothers had chosen Montauk as it had further Spielberg ties with the film Jaws, where Montauk was used for the fictional setting of Amity Island.[40] After deciding to change the narrative of the series to take place in the fictional town of Hawkins instead, the brothers felt they could now do things to the town, such as placing it under quarantine, that they really could not envision with a real location.[40] With the change in location, they had to come up with a new title for the series under direction from Netflix's Ted Sarandos so that they could start marketing it to the public. The brothers started by using a copy of Stephen King's Firestarter novel to consider the title's font and appearance, and came up with a long list of potential alternatives. Stranger Things came about as it sounded similar to another King novel, Needful Things, though Matt noted they still had a "lot of heated arguments" over this final title.[41] To pitch the series, the Duffer Brothers showcased images, footage and music from classic 1970s and 1980s films such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, Hellraiser, Stand by Me, Firestarter, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Jaws, in order to establish the tone of the series.[38] WritingThe idea of Stranger Things started with how the brothers felt they could take the concept of the 2013 film Prisoners, detailing the moral struggles a father goes through when his daughter is kidnapped, and expand it out over eight or so hours in a serialized television approach. As they focused on the missing child aspect of the story, they wanted to introduce the idea of "childlike sensibilities" they could offer, and toyed around with the idea of a monster that could consume humans. The brothers thought the combination of these things "was the best thing ever".[32] To introduce this monster into the narrative, they considered "bizarre experiments we had read about taking place in the Cold War" such as Project MKUltra, which gave a way to ground the monster's existence in science rather than something spiritual. This also helped them to decide on using 1983 as the time period, as it was a year before the film Red Dawn came out, which focused on Cold War paranoia.[32] Subsequently, they were able to use all their own personal inspirations from the 1980s, the decade in which they were born, as elements of the series,[32][42] crafting it in the realm of science fiction and horror.[43] Other influences cited by the Duffer Brothers include: Stephen King novels; films produced by Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, David Lynch, Wes Craven,[44][45][46][47] and Guillermo del Toro;[41] films such as Star Wars, Alien, and Stand by Me;[41][45][48] Japanese anime such as Akira and Elfen Lied;[41][44] and several video games including Silent Hill, Dark Souls and The Last of Us.[49][50][44] The Duffer Brothers believe that they may have brought influences from other works unintentionally, including Beyond the Black Rainbow and D.A.R.Y.L., discovered by reviewing fan feedback on the series.[40] Several websites and publications have found other pop culture references in the series, particularly references to 1980s pop culture.[51][52][53][54] The main villain for the last seasons was inspired by the villains that scared the brothers when they watched the movies and miniseries as children: Freddy Krueger, Pinhead and Pennywise.[55] With Netflix as the platform, the Duffer Brothers were not limited to a typical 22-episode format, opting for the eight-episode approach. They had been concerned that a 22-episode season on broadcast television would be difficult to "tell a cinematic story" with that many episodes. Eight episodes allowed them to give time to characterization in addition to narrative development; if they had less time available, they would have had to remain committed to telling a horror film as soon as the monster was introduced and abandon the characterization.[33] Within the eight episodes, the brothers aimed to make the first season "feel like a big movie" with all the major plot lines completed so that "the audience feels satisfied", but left enough unresolved to indicate "there's a bigger mythology, and there's a lot of dangling threads at the end", something that could be explored in further seasons if Netflix opted to create more.[56] Regarding writing for the children characters of the series, the Duffer Brothers considered themselves as outcasts from other students while in high school and thus found it easy to write for Mike and his friends, and particularly for Barb.[41] Joyce was fashioned after Richard Dreyfuss' character Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as she appears "absolutely bonkers" to everyone else as she tries to find Will.[57] Casting In June 2015, it was announced that Winona Ryder and David Harbour had joined the series as Joyce and as the unnamed chief of police, respectively.[17] Ryder's sole condition to the Duffers in accepting the part was that, if a Beetlejuice sequel ever materialized as she and Tim Burton had been discussing since 2000, they had to let her take a break to shoot it, a condition the Duffers agreed and ultimately proved to work out when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was greenlighted.[58] The brothers' casting director Carmen Cuba had suggested Ryder for the role of Joyce, which the two were immediately drawn to because of her predominance in the films of the 1980s.[32] Levy believed Ryder could "wretch up the emotional urgency and yet find layers and nuance and different sides of [Joyce]". Ryder praised that the show's multiple storylines required her to act for Joyce as if "she's out of her mind, but she's actually kind of onto something", and that the producers had faith she could pull off the difficult role.[59] The Duffer Brothers had been interested in Harbour before, who until Stranger Things primarily had smaller roles as villainous characters, and they felt that he had been "waiting too long for this opportunity" to play a lead, while Harbour himself was thrilled by the script and the chance to play "a broken, flawed, anti-hero character".[41][60] Additional casting followed two months later with Finn Wolfhard as Mike, Millie Bobby Brown in an undisclosed role, Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas, Natalia Dyer as Nancy, and Charlie Heaton as Jonathan.[18] In September 2015, Cara Buono joined the cast as Karen,[19] followed by Matthew Modine as Martin Brenner a month later.[20] Additional cast who recur include Noah Schnapp as Will,[18][23] Shannon Purser as Barbara "Barb" Holland,[61] Joe Keery as Steve Harrington,[24][23] and Ross Partridge as Lonnie,[62] among others. Actors auditioning for the children roles read lines from Stand by Me.[32] The Duffer Brothers estimated they went through about a thousand different child actors for the roles. They noted that Wolfhard was already "a movie buff" of the films from the 1980s period and easily filled the role, while they found Matarazzo's audition to be much more authentic than most of the other audition tapes, and selected him after a single viewing of his audition tape.[33] As casting was started immediately after Netflix greenlit the show, and prior to the scripts being fully completed, this allowed some of the actors' takes on the roles to reflect into the script. The casting of the young actors for Will and his friends had been done just after the first script was completed, and subsequent scripts incorporated aspects from these actors.[56] The brothers said Modine provided significant input on the character of Dr. Brenner, whom they had not really fleshed out before as they considered him the hardest character to write for given his limited appearances within the narrative.[57] Filming.jpg) The brothers had desired to film the series around the Long Island area to match the initial Montauk concept. However, with filming scheduled to take place in November 2015, it was difficult to shoot in Long Island in the cold weather, and the production started scouting locations in and around the Atlanta, Georgia, area. The brothers, who grew up in North Carolina, found many places that reminded them of their own childhoods in that area, and felt the area would work well with the narrative shift to the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.[40] Filming for the first season began in November 2015 and was extensively done in Atlanta, Georgia, with the Duffer Brothers and Levy handling the direction of individual episodes.[63] Jackson served as the basis of the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.[64][65] Other shooting locations included the Georgia Mental Health Institute as the Hawkins National Laboratory site, Bellwood Quarry, and Patrick Henry High School in Stockbridge, Georgia, for the middle and high school scenes.[66] Emory University's Continuing Education Department, the former city hall in Douglasville, Georgia, the Georgia International Horse Park in Conyers, Georgia, the probate court in Butts County, Georgia, Old East Point Library and East Point First Baptist Church in East Point, Georgia, Fayetteville, Georgia, Stone Mountain Park, Palmetto, Georgia, and Winston, Georgia.[67][clarification needed] Set work was done at Screen Gem Studios in Atlanta[67] and the first season was filmed with a RED Epic Dragon camera.[57][68] Filming for the first season concluded in early 2016.[64] After the third season finished filming, producers considered the idea of keeping the Starcourt Mall set as a permanent attraction for fans to visit, but ultimately decided against it.[69] The fourth season was expected to consist of eight episodes, with the first episode titled "Chapter One: The Hellfire Club".[70] Filming for the season was slated to begin in January 2020 and to last through August.[71] With the release of a February 2020 teaser for the fourth season, the Duffers confirmed that production had started.[72] Some filming for the fourth season took place at Lukiškės Prison and nearby in Vilnius, Lithuania.[73] In March 2020, production was stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic,[74] and resumed that September.[75] Filming for the fifth and final season was expected to start in June 2023,[76] before the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike delayed it to January 8, 2024.[77] Production began on that day and wrapped on December 20.[78] Visual effectsTo create the aged effect for the series, a film grain was added over the footage, which was captured by scanning in film stock from the 1980s.[57] The Duffer Brothers wanted to scare the audience, but not to necessarily make the series violent or gory, following in line with how the 1980s Amblin Entertainment films drove the creation of the PG-13 movie rating. 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