Steven Spielberg’s classic served as a reference point, too, for Mark Steger, the actor and movement specialist who played the Demogorgon in the show’s first season. Steger says, “The Duffers were very succinct with their direction: that I was like the shark from Jaws, this creature that moves from one dimension to another to feed. I tried to make it as creepy as possible, just doing really subtle movements.” The scene was set in the wooded location known to the party as Mirkwood, its name taken from the writings of The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien.*12
The woods where Will first spies the creature also is the first place the boys encounter Eleven. The friends initially have no idea what to make of the girl with the shaved head, who’s on the run, frightened, and alone. Her arrival helps bookend the episode with a second tantalizing mystery—one character has vanished from the boys’ lives, another has appeared seemingly from nowhere.
The rhyming of certain sequences and the overall pacing is as deliberate as every other creative choice the Duffers make. Early on, the brothers worked with the first season’s editors Dean Zimmerman and Kevin D. Ross to build rhythm, alternately underlining the horror and the more comedic elements. “There were certain sequences when your heart is racing,” Zimmerman says. “That’s the way I wanted to cut it—that very fast, furious, heart-pounding pace.” He adds, “When you have these moments of high tension, you need these moments of levity to get the audience back to ground zero, to get them sitting back in their seats so when you slap them again in the face with something super scary, they’re not ready for it.”
One of the series’ most frightening environments was Hawkins National Laboratory—a warren of stark corridors, close cells, and cavernous spaces where Eleven was raised in seclusion and from which the Demogorgon escapes. Many of the scenes in the lab were shot at the former Georgia Mental Health Institute, once a psychiatric hospital that now is part of Emory University’s Briarcliff campus.*13 Whereas the boys’ homes are riots of texture and rich period detail, the facility where Eleven grows up is entirely clinical and devoid of personality.*14 Someone could spend a lifetime inside its walls without realizing how much the world outside was changing.
Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven is handled by Dr. Martin Brenner’s orderlies.
Trujillo made a point to strip the sets of anything that would make the lab feel warmer: “That was all about removing color and having it be this very kind of austere [place. We used] industrial colors, tans and whites and grays, sucking all the color out of that world and emphasizing the institutional coldness and making it feel forbidding.”
