Since Stranger Things became one of the most talked-about shows in the world last year, lots of things have happened, some of them strange, some of them downright far-fetched.
Stephen King tweeted that this fabulously involving saga of pre-teen friendship and sci-fi spookiness in Eighties Indiana was like “watching Steve King’s Greatest Hits. I mean that in a good way.” The Netflix show received five nominations at the Emmys. There was a surge in demand for Eggo waffles, the favourite food of Eleven, its quasi-mute psychokinetic heroine. And a US politician compared its nightmarish parallel dimension with the US under Donald Trump. “Like the main characters in Stranger Things,” said Congressman David Cicilline, “we are now stuck in the Upside Down.”
THE STRANGEST THING
For Matt Duffer, the co-creator of the show with his identical twin brother, Ross, the strangest thing of all was when it received that ultimate pop-cultural accolade: being skewered on Saturday Night Live. “Every time something like that happens you go, ‘What? How did that happen?’” he says.
The Duffers, 33, are talking from Los Angeles, where they are finishing the second season of the show, which they started working on before the first was released (they’re not cocky, they just reasoned that Netflix rarely cancels shows after one season). Stranger Things 2, as they are billing it, movie sequel-style finds 13-year-old Will (Noah Schnapp) struggling, quite reasonably, with the effects of being imprisoned in a netherworld with a multi-fanged gooey thing, as he was for most of the first season. The monster has been vanquished and Will is back in the small town of Hawkins. Yet those apocalyptic visions haven’t gone away.
“What are the repercussions of an event like that?” asks Ross (at least I think it’s Ross). “We always try to make sure our characters are responding to the stuff that they’re seeing in a realistic way. They went through some crazy things that would change you permanently.”
Fantastic events, realistic characters, it’s the ethos that drove the Duffers’ heroes: King, John Carpenter, Robert Zemeckis, M Night Shyamalan, and most of all Steven Spielberg (who is a fan of the show and has given them suggestions). It’s that brand of storytelling that they’re nostalgic about, the twins insist, not the note-perfect Eighties ephemera that has helped to earn the show cult status.
Set in 1984, a year after the first season, Stranger Things 2 features nods to Ghostbusters, the Dragon’s Lair arcade game and Ronald Reagan’s re-election battle against Walter Mondale, as well as music by Olivia Newton-John, Barbra Streisand and the new-wave band Oingo Boingo. Yet it’s not an Eighties box-ticking exercise, says Matt. “That’s one criticism that gets under my skin a little bit. I hate ironic things. It’s about being authentic, not putting in all these cute references.”
Even so, casting Winona Ryder as Will’s distraught, lightbulb-obsessed mother was a clever bit of cultural signposting. “Winona was part of my childhood,” Ross says. “Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Little Women. It started to give the show its identity and it made us feel like we were outsider rebels. Winona never fitted into the studio system. The show started to get built off her casting.”
REAL PEOPLE OVER EXTRAORDINARY ENCOUNTERS
Casting and story are always the most important things — the rise of Netflix has not changed that — and the story is where Spielberg et al come in. Films such as E.T. and The Goonies pioneered “the type of storytelling that we fell in love with,” Matt says. “Intimate stories about real people encountering something extraordinary. That’s the kind of movie we wanted to see more of. That’s really why we made Stranger Things.”
It was the real people rather than the extraordinary encounters that marked out the Duffers’ creation. “I’m not gonna name them, but there are teen shows that are hugely popular now that I can’t watch more than ten minutes of,” Matt says. “They cast stupidly beautiful people. That is not what my high school looked like.”
“We were able to cast whoever we wanted for the roles,” Ross says. “Some of them were faces that you wouldn’t normally see on a network television show. I think that helped the show.” It really did. Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin, one of Will’s friends, has cleidocranial dysplasia, which gives him a pronounced lisp. Yet he is a wonderful, engaging actor. Dustin’s believable ribbing and squabbling with his mates Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) was perhaps the biggest strength of the first season.
Not that unglamorous characters always get an easy ride in the show. There’s the infamous case of Barb, the brace-wearing, frizzy-haired best friend of Mike’s older sister who was abducted by the monster that took Will. Poor Barb is presumed dead, but the Duffers have been criticised for supposedly abandoning her. Cue a blizzard of Internet memes, #JusticeForBarb trending on Twitter, and the chat show host Jimmy Fallon doing a sketch in which Barb comes back to haunt Mike and Co.
“The idea of what’s going on with Barb, we were already getting all of those notes from Netflix,” says Matt, with the sigh of a man with plenty of online bruises. “We were always planning to delve into it a little bit more this season.” Expect to see more of her parents for a start.
STRANGER THINGS VS IT
There has also been much Internet chatter comparing Stranger Things with the recent film adaptation of King’s It. Both are Eighties-set tales of boys investigating pan-dimensional goings-on in a small town, both involve a female newcomer and both feature Finn Wolfhard. The It film was slated for release before Stranger Things, but, after a change of director, arrived in cinemas only a few weeks ago.
“A lot would have changed if it had come out before us,” Matt admits. He thinks the film is “great, and it’s got Finn in it, who’s amazing. He’s now pigeonholed: if you have a movie set in the Eighties with a child in it, you’d better call Finn....”
Even more in demand is Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven. In the first season Eleven was hidden by Mike, E.T.-style, after escaping from a government facility where scientists were experimenting on her supernatural abilities.
“We knew she was incredible from her audition,” Ross says of 13-year-old Brown, who has English parents and grew up in Dorset and Florida. “It was a crappy iPhone thing and she was crying and talking about her papa and we were blown away.”
He remembers shooting one scene, in which Brown was dragged, screaming, down a laboratory corridor. “Everybody in the crew looked at each other and said, ‘This girl is gonna be huge,’” Ross says. This season, he promises, will reveal more about Eleven’s backstory and set her on an even more fraught trajectory. “We thought, ‘We know she’s incredible, so let’s give her some really hard scenes.’”
Like most sequels, Stranger Things 2 promises to up the ante. The Duffers are attempting some “really big stuff”, Matt says. The monster will look like a labrador compared with the giant shadowy beast with tentacles that’s stalking the boys. There are new cast members, including Sean Astin, aka Sam in Lord of the Rings, a love interest for Ryder. The series is getting more complex. “Episode eight had 155 scenes for a 45-minute episode, which is unheard of. Normally that gets blocked, but Netflix are just, like, ‘Yeah, do it.’”
The streaming service’s hands-off attitude has become a cliche, but it has been vital, the brothers say, in creating a show that combines the pace of television with the feel of film. “It’s very difficult to move that quickly and make something cinematic,” Ross says. “Netflix have opened the door to that and have the budget to achieve it.”
Even so, Matt adds, “we’ve made it very clear with Netflix that we’re not going to be doing this for ever”. He thinks the show will end after four or five seasons. “Doing a TV series is sort of exhausting.” This season has the same number of special effects as a big-budget movie, but half the time to complete them, “and we have a lot less time to write than in a movie.”
GROWING UP TOGETHER
There is also what could be termed the Midsomer Effect — how many abnormal occurrences can happen in one small town? “You’re gonna start to push the believability,” says Ross. Plus, the cast are growing rapidly. “Every season feels different because the boys feel different,” says Ross. “By season three they’re gonna feel like full-on teenagers. We just have to embrace that, that they’re not these cute little muppet children any more.”
The most helpful reference point is the Harry Potter films, which had to race the growth spurts of their actors. “We talk a lot about Harry Potter,” says Ross.
So what’s next for the Duffers, once Will and the rest have departed for college/the Upside Down/a lunatic asylum? Whatever the twins do, it will be together. They have been a team since they started making “shitty little movies” at home in North Carolina as children.
They got what they thought was their big break in 2015 with the horror film Hidden, but it went straight to DVD. However, M Night Shyamalan read the script and hired them to write for his TV series Wayward Pines, which led to Stranger Things. They share all their duties: writing, directing on set, post-production. “We probably could accomplish things faster if we divided and conquered more, but we really like it, we use each other as sounding boards,” Matt says. “We’re really pretty dysfunctional apart, unfortunately.”
The brothers have turned down the chance to be involved in big Hollywood franchises, Ross says. “It’s hard to say I’ll leave my baby to go to someone else’s.”
Nor are they “excited about going back into the studio system,” Matt adds. “We’re more excited about a big-budget long-form movie that you could experience on a service like Netflix.” There is a script, but it’s in its very early stages. And they intend to go easy on the special effects, Matt says. “I love effects sequences, but in lots of movies it’s wall-to-wall and you don’t end up caring that much. It’s deadening.”
Would they mind their movie being confined to small screens? “Not so much,” says Matt. “Braveheart was the most epic shit I’d ever seen and I watched it on a 10-inch television.” In 20 years’ time, someone will be saying the same about Stranger Things.
Ed Potton
(The Times, London)
