1
THINGS COME TOGETHER
THE SCRIPT for the pilot of Stranger Things was written in a matter of weeks—except it wasn’t actually titled Stranger Things. In tribute to their favorite film of all time, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the brothers set their story on the East Coast and called it Montauk.
The sleepy Long Island town proved an ideal location for an eerie mystery. Montauk Air Force Station,*1 colloquially known as Camp Hero, rivals Nevada’s Area 51 as a favorite touchstone for the conspiracy-minded.*2 Initially established in 1942 to guard against a German invasion, the facility was later expanded during the Cold War. Rumors began to circulate that the government conducted unsettling experiments involving electronic surveillance and mind control in a warren of offices and hallways concealed beneath the sand.
Although certain key details were different, the broad strokes of the first episode were all there. In the early 1980s, in the basement of Mike Wheeler’s nondescript suburban two-story home, twelve-year-old Mike and his best friends, Lucas Sinclair, Dustin Henderson, and Will Byers, are in the throes of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.*3 Confronted by the sinister Demogorgon, the party of adventurers can’t agree on the best course of action. Chaos erupts as the boys shout out ideas for how to defeat the monster, but they lose a critical roll against the beast, and young Will’s wizard appears doomed.
Riding his bike back home that night, Will encounters another kind of beast—a mysterious creature that chases him through the woods and into a shed behind the Byerses’ ramshackle home. And then, suddenly, silently, the boy is just . . . gone.
“The first scene we wrote was the Dungeons & Dragons scene,” Ross Duffer says. “It just sort of wrote itself. The voices were easy to get. That gave us a lot of confidence, as far as the script was concerned. We figured if it’s working this quickly, that’s a really good sign.”
From the outset, the Duffers knew that they wanted to structure the series like a feature film, with the search for Will serving as the spine of the story. As they fleshed out ideas, they broke the narrative into three acts,*4 as they would have done for a feature screenplay. The first three episodes would examine what happens once Will goes missing. The next three episodes would see the town become increasingly haunted as the characters edged closer to solving the mystery. Finally, the heroes would be forced to outsmart the military to save Will and restore peace in the community.
Once they had a completed draft of the first episode in hand, the Duffer brothers assembled a “look book” that would serve as a companion document, describing in detail their ideas for the series and the inspirations behind it. For the cover, they channeled the popular Signet paperbacks from the era.*5 A single image of Will’s abandoned bike lying on the side of an empty rural road appeared on a black background beneath the one-word title rendered in red. A tagline beneath the image promised readers “An epic tale of sci-fi horror.”
The document ran twenty-three pages and included a summary of the story, character breakdowns and biographies, and explanations of the tone and style the Duffers imagined for the show. “It was still rough, but it gave a hint of where things were going,” Ross Duffer says. “We included pictures and stuff from the movies that had inspired us—whether it was Stand by Me, or E.T., or A Nightmare on Elm Street—and we put it all together so people could see the tone we were going for.”
The Duffers’ original vision for the series was somewhat darker than the tone eventually struck in Stranger Things. In the look book, the twins posit that the horror elements would be supernatural in nature yet rooted in science, and the design of the monstrous entities would reference the work of Guillermo del Toro,*6 Clive Barker,*7 and H.R. Giger,*8 the Swiss experimental artist who designed the terrifying Xenomorphs for Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien. Silent Hill, a terrifying video game about a town consumed by shadows and overrun with sinister malformed creatures, also served as an influence.
As the brothers began pitching Montauk to various companies around Hollywood, they found little to no interest—it was rejected between fifteen and twenty times. The 1980s period setting was a strike against the project, as was the fact that the show centered on middle-school protagonists yet wasn’t targeted to children. “A lot of the concerns were based on the fact that this is a show about kids, but it’s not a kids’ show,” says Matt Duffer. “People couldn’t figure that out. The other big thing was that no one wanted a show set in the 1980s. It’s funny, the two things that made the show successful were the two things that were red flags for everybody.”
But for the brothers, the 1980s setting was essential to the premise. Not only was the show a love letter to the films that had influenced them growing up, almost all of which took place in the decade, but it was also vital to the plot. Mike and his friends needed to have a certain degree of autonomy that kids in the era of helicopter parenting*9 and social media are rarely afforded.
“We grew up a little bit later than the period when the show is set,” Ross Duffer says, “but without the internet and without cell phones, we weren’t as tethered to the world. I remember growing up, I felt like I could step out of my house, go with a friend out into the woods, and feel like we were going on some grand adventure. I feel like it’s harder to have that experience nowadays when your mom can just text you and say, ‘It’s time to come home for dinner.’ That sense of freedom, and nostalgia for that freedom, was something that we really wanted to capture.”
Eventually, Montauk made its way to Dan Cohen, an executive at 21 Laps Entertainment, the production company overseen by Shawn Levy. Filmmaker Levy is known principally for directing family-oriented hits, such as the Night at the Museum movies, Real Steel, and Cheaper by the Dozen, and for producing such acclaimed films as Arrival*10 and The Spectacular Now. He’d never worked in television, and neither had Cohen.
In searching out new projects, Cohen had been in the market for a project that recaptured the sense of wonder of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment*11 movies or Stephen King’s classic novels, but none of the scripts he’d read quite found the mark. “There was really nothing that resembled that storytelling of yesteryear,” Cohen says. “I was constantly hearing about this love for this forgotten genre from people, and I was always looking for something in the vein of it. When I came across the Duffers’ pilot, the quality was so high, the characters were so real. It wasn’t trying to be any of the things that inspired it. It just was great and felt like you were transported to 1980.”
He brought the project to Levy’s attention. “He is never wrong in matters of taste,” Levy says. “It was an undeniably great script.” After meeting with the Duffers, Levy agreed to back the show. “It became very clear to us that he got the show and he didn’t want us to change anything,” Matt Duffer says. “He wanted it exactly as it was.”
Around the same time, Netflix tasked content-development executive Matt Thunell with finding programming that might appeal to viewers in their teens and twenties. The streaming service had enjoyed outsize success with prestige projects House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black and was looking to broaden the scope of its original series offerings.*12 The Duffers’ script made its way to Thunell, who read it over the course of a weekend and was hooked. He brought it to his bosses, vice president of original series Brian Wright and vice president of original content Cindy Holland, who also responded to the show’s compelling mix of supernatural suspense and emotional character drama.
“They both thought the writing was remarkable [and] loved how fresh the coming-of-age story was, the fact that it had all these really sincere themes like a great 1980s movie*13 does,” Thunell says. “The Duffers were great at capturing a feeling. You really feel something on the page. You feel like you did when you were a child. You feel what it was like to grow up, to be innocent, to have your whole life in front of you.”
Thunell scheduled a meeting with the Duffers and Levy in March 2015 to talk in more depth about the series. The writer-directors by that point had assembled a “sizzle reel,” essentially a short teaser trailer for the show, using clips from other films to convey the spirit and visual language they had in mind, all accompanied by music from director John Carpenter. At the end of the sizzle reel, they spliced together a montage and used a moody instrumental track from the Austin-based synth quartet Survive to punctuate the action.
The idea always was to underscore the cinematic nature of the project. In conversations with Thunell and other executives, the Duffers and Levy emphasized that Montauk would play out as an eight-hour movie with the brothers serving as the directors for every installment. “The lower episode count was important, because the Duffers have a really fast-paced style,” Thunell says. “I think stretching it over ten or thirteen episodes would’ve just diluted what was a really special, tight story.”
After relatively little deliberation, Netflix ordered the series in April 2015. It was a leap of faith for both parties. “We were green-lighting a season of television from two creators who had no track record whatsoever, and we’re going to give them, say tens of millions of dollars to make a season of television,” Thunell says. “This was absolutely terrifying. It was a trial by fire.”
“This is the kind of thing I can’t underline enough—none of us in that room had ever produced hit television, so this was a real big bet,” Levy says.
With shooting slated to begin that fall, the Duffers and Levy had enormous challenges ahead of them—finding a home for the production, casting actors for each of the key roles, writing or hiring writers to complete the remaining seven scripts, bringing on the behind-the-scenes crew members who would help them shape the series.
They began by scouting locations on the northern tip of Long Island, but the community—so integral to the script—didn’t look as they had imagined, and its distance from New York City made the idea of anchoring the production there unfeasible. A new approach was required. “We started talking about some of our favorite films. Whether it was Breaking Away*14 or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, those were movies that were set in Indiana, which is sort of an Anywhere, USA, kind of place,” Ross Duffer says.
The Duffers realized that, given their own backgrounds, they were better suited to telling a story that took place in a conventional suburban setting than they were to setting a story in a beachside town. “I know what it’s like to grow up in a small inland town,” Ross Duffer says. “It was a more familiar environment to us. Even though it was heartbreaking at the time, it made for a better show.” Suddenly, Hawkins, Indiana, was born, and the series was no longer titled Montauk.
It would now be called Stranger Things.