IT WAS impossible to know it at the time, but it was Tim Burton’s journey to Gotham City that led Eleven to Hawkins, Indiana.
The year was 1989, and Matt and Ross Duffer were imaginative young boys living in Durham, North Carolina, when they began to see television ads for what looked like an extremely arresting story—a blockbuster retelling of the Dark Knight’s crusade against the Joker. In an era before superheroes dominated the big and small screens, Batman*1 was the event movie of the summer. Advertising for the film was inescapable. The images of a masked vigilante flying through the streets of a fictional metropolis battling a leering clown with green hair and white skin against the backdrop of Danny Elfman’s symphonic score captivated the twins.
“When we started to see TV commercials for Tim Burton’s Batman, it looked like the most mind-blowing thing I’d ever seen,” Matt Duffer says. “But we weren’t allowed to see it—it was [rated] PG-13. About a year after it had come out, once it was on VHS, we were so annoying to our parents that we finally got to see this movie. It lived up to our expectations and then some. That was really the first time we realized what a movie director was—Tim Burton’s style was just so distinct. Then we started to watch all of his films. His visual style, his art direction, the music in those films really have a very personal stamp on them.”
From then on, the Duffer brothers knew that they, too, wanted to make movies. So they did, crafting elaborate two-hour adventures for their toys. “Initially, we didn’t have a camera or anything,” Matt says. “We were just playing with our toys, but we knew movies were about two hours long, so we would put a timer on for two hours and then sort of improvise a movie. We were training very early on to tell a story in a two-hour time frame.”
When they were in third grade, they received a camera*2 as a Christmas gift, and their productions became slightly more elaborate—or at least, as elaborate as films made by elementary-school students starring stuffed animals could be. Says Matt, “We made something called the Stuffed Father Trilogy. We’d not even seen The Godfather, but it was our dad’s favorite movie. So we took the title and made these silly little movies starring our stuffed animals as mobsters.”
Their first feature-length film was based around Magic: The Gathering,*3 the collectible-trading-card game centered on battling wizards that had become something of an obsession for young Matt and Ross. The brothers recruited Tristan Smith, their best friend and next-door neighbor, to star in and codirect the production. “It was mostly just us hitting each other with plastic swords,” Matt says. “It’s pretty unwatchable.”
By the time they reached middle school, the brothers had branched into comedies. Eventually, though, they began to develop a fascination with darker storytelling, which led them to the novels of Stephen King and classic horror cinema. The 1996 Wes Craven hit Scream, which carefully walked the line between horror and comedy as it referenced various genre landmarks, sparked in the Duffers a strong desire to revisit not only Craven’s earlier films, but also movies made by such visionaries as John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and Sam Raimi.
Raimi’s Evil Dead movies—The Evil Dead*4 in 1981, and Evil Dead II in 1987—proved especially influential. When the Michigan-born director was twenty-one years old, he and his friends had created the ultimate DIY exercise in fear by scraping together all the money they could, heading to a remote cabin in the Tennessee woods, and unleashing hell on the screen with a tale of demonic forces out of control. “Sam Raimi, like Tim Burton, has a very sort of aggressive visual style,” Matt Duffer says. “We started to try to emulate that with our video camera. We made all these sort of Evil Dead–style horror shorts in high school.”
Using readily accessible filmmaking software such as iMovie, Matt and Ross Duffer began to craft short films with a more polished finish. The twins dreamed of attending the prestigious film school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the alma mater of directors George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, and John Carpenter, among many others. The thinking was that going to school on the West Coast would help a pair of brothers from North Carolina make the all-important connections that might lead toward a career in Hollywood. “We were pretty young and pretty naïve about things, but we were right about that,” Matt Duffer says.
Although they weren’t accepted into USC’s film school, they did make it to Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts in Orange, California, a private institution with fewer than 9,500 students. During their undergraduate days, the Duffers began to focus on screenwriting; before that, their films had been improvised with friends. “It was a lot of trial and error, trying to figure out how to structure a story,” Ross Duffer says.