EPILOGUE
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
GUYS. GALS. KIDS. LEVI’S. White words on an enormous red sign displayed in the window of the Gap advertise the shop’s array of casual fashions to the patrons of the cool new hangout in Hawkins, Indiana—the gleaming Starcourt Mall. The place is thronged with hundreds of shoppers sporting perms and polka dots, florals and fluorescents, and in the midst of them stand Matt and Ross Duffer, surveying the scene.
It’s May in the suburbs just north of Atlanta, and in one wing of a largely deserted shopping center, the T-shirt-clad writer-directors are seated in front of a bank of monitors watching as buddies Steve Harrington and Dustin Henderson reunite after several months apart. In the world of Stranger Things, it’s the summer of 1985—Fletch is playing at the mall’s multiplex; so are Return to Oz and the alien-invasion thriller Lifeforce. Ads for Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew hang in the windows of the Waldenbooks store. Shoppers in need of refreshment can head over to the food court to visit Orange Julius or Hot Dog on a Stick.
In the chronology of Stranger Things, not quite a year has passed since the tumultuous events of October 1984, when Dustin unknowingly brought home a baby Demogorgon and Eleven briefly went punk, but for the heroes at the heart of the beloved series, a lot has changed. Steve’s a high-school graduate. Mike and Eleven are officially a couple, and so are Lucas and Max. We can’t quite say what’s happening between Joyce and Hopper, except perhaps that they have a swell new place to purchase jeans.
After two very intense seasons in dark spaces with grim monsters and claustrophobia-inducing tunnels, Matt and Ross Duffer decided it was time to brighten things up—literally—with a summer-set story line fueled by young love and raging hormones. “Aesthetically it’s going to feel very different,” Ross Duffer says. “Everyone is going to this new mall, seeing movies, and, of course, the Hawkins pool is open for business. I think there’ll be a sense of fun and joy.”
And also dread. Stranger Things wouldn’t be Stranger Things without a sinister supernatural threat, and no one understands how to pair earnest character drama with straight-up scares better than the Duffer brothers. Borrowing inspiration for the third season from the master of body horror, David Cronenberg, the showrunners came up with a truly terrifying premise that ventures into some uncomfortably gory territory. The faint of heart (and stomach) would be well advised to prepare for serious eye-covering.
“While it’s our most fun season, it also turns out to be our grossest season,” Ross Duffer says. “We’re inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing. We’re inspired by Cronenberg. We have a little bit of a George Romero vibe in there as well. There are horror movies and horror masters that we haven’t really paid tribute to as much in previous seasons that we are definitely going to get into this season.” (This might be the right time for a reminder that one of Romero’s zombie classics, Dawn of the Dead from 1978, was a blood-splattered indictment of the hollowness of consumerism set inside a shopping mall.)
Naturally, the exact nature of the antagonist(s?) is top secret, but don’t rule out return appearances from two very familiar bad guys—the first being charismatic bully Billy Hargrove. (“Big-time Billy in season three,” promises executive producer Shawn Levy.) The character’s story line might surprise some fans, according to actor Dacre Montgomery, and he was excited to take the villain in some unexpected directions. “There’s much more depth to him, but also much more darkness in this particular season,” Montgomery says.
The Mind Flayer hasn’t lost interest in Hawkins yet either. The tentacled creature continues to loom near Hawkins inside the Upside Down, and its malevolent influence isn’t absent from the new season. “We ended season two with a clear signal that the Shadow Monster was not eliminated, and maybe he’s even identified his foe,” says Levy. “And that darkness, and the battle that it will require, grows in season three.”
But the biggest battle young heroes Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will are facing may simply be growing up. Burgeoning romance already has strained the ties among the original members of the party of Dungeons & Dragons adventurers, and each of the boys is struggling with awkward entry into full-blown adolescence—a stage of life when nothing is quite as simple as it once was.
“It’s really the final summer of their childhood,” Ross Duffer adds. “They’re dealing with growing up, with these complicated new relationships. They’re starting to fall apart a little bit, and maybe they don’t love playing Dungeons & Dragons as much as they used to. Naturally, that’s going to generate conflict.”
Adds Levy, “If season two was about the desperate desire for normalcy and the impossibility of normalcy in Hawkins, season three’s about change. It’s about changes in the kids’ relationships with each other. It’s about romantic relationships that change friendships. It’s about adult relationships that maybe change in tone. It’s about Hawkins, as a town, changing with the arrival of a new mall and what that means for the small town in the mid-1980s.”
As it did with Stranger Things 2, the show’s cast itself has undergone some changes—principally through three new additions: Maya Thurman-Hawke, who plays a young woman named Robin, who is bored with her job until she learns about the dark secrets of Hawkins; Jake Busey, who plays a reporter for The Hawkins Post named Bruce “with questionable morals and a sick sense of humor”; and Cary Elwes, the star of the 1980s fantasy classic The Princess Bride, as the image-conscious Mayor Kline, a politician who might not always have the best interests of the small town in mind.
It’s possible Kline has something to do with bringing the Starcourt Mall to Hawkins, but if there are nefarious origins to the place, they’re hard to spot—candle purveyor Wicks ‘N’ Sticks doesn’t exactly scream evil. To create the mall, production designer Chris Trujillo and his team went to great lengths, taking over parts of two floors of an existing shopping center and retrofitting it like it was 1985. “We found an incredible location and did a massive overhaul to a huge section of it,” he says. “We’re sparing no pain and no expense on all of our storefronts, our food court.”
“There’s no faking stores, no faux fronts or anything,” adds set decorator Jess Royal. “Every store that we’re selecting is a real store, with a couple exceptions just for script reasons. You could walk into any of these stores in theory, and all the products there are from 1985.”
To dress the mall, Royal scoured the Internet, magazines from the time, and other archival materials to study the architecture of shopping malls from the mid-1980s and what businesses were popular in Indiana at that time. The design process alone took upward of five weeks, followed by two months of construction.
“Our mall is kind of a recently opened thing, so it couldn’t look like a mall built in the 1960s or ’70s. “It has to feel very much like a current 1985 shopping mall. So there’s a Gap from 1985. [We spent time] just creating these exact replicas of what the Gap looks like and then dressing out the exact fashions of that time. It’s pretty authentic.”
Spend any time on the Stranger Things set, and you’ll hear a lot not only about the importance of authenticity, but also about how the people who make the show are part of a close-knit group, almost like a family. That’s especially true on a day when the Duffer brothers’ parents drop by to watch their sons at work.
It’s another day at the shopping mall, and Mike, Lucas, Max, and Will politely push their way past other shoppers to make their way down the escalator. They’re heading straight for Steve Harrington to ask him a favor. Before they can find him, though, they have to endure the taunts of Lucas’s sassy, scene-stealing little sister, Erica Sinclair (Priah Ferguson), who’ll be returning in season three. “Watch it, nerds!” she calls out to her brother and his pals.
As the action unfolds, actor Joe Keery, who plays Steve Harrington, stands behind the dual monitors where the Duffer brothers are seated. Keery is wearing a robe over his costume, lest prying eyes get a glimpse of the new look Steve’s rocking for the day. With so many background actors and marks to hit, it takes a few tries to get the sequence right, but once everything goes perfectly, the Duffers leap up with an excited “Yes!” and spontaneous applause breaks out.
Between scenes, the writer-directors chat with Finn Wolfhard, who is sporting a yellow T-shirt and denim vest and maybe seems just a little lankier than he used to. Both the brothers and Levy stress that as the show moves forward, they’ve tried to adhere closely to the “Harry Potter model”—namely acknowledging that their young stars are getting older and crafting story lines that reflect that new maturity.
“They have developed very strong opinions on their characters, which is a function of both age and history with their characters, and that’s very typical of series television,” says Levy. “By season two, and certainly by season three, one often sees the actors know their characters better than anyone. Their confidence in their instincts, their articulation of their instincts has definitely grown. But they’re still silly. They’re still their age and, thankfully, none of them are grossly precocious.”
“The kids are the heart of all this,” Ross Duffer says. “Those performances, I think, are winning people over who aren’t even nostalgic for the 1980s or this type of genre material. The kids and their joy is just infectious.”
Matt Duffer adds, “What’s great about this long-form type of storytelling is that we get to have the monster, we get to have all this supernatural fun. But you don’t lose out on what really makes a story work, which is the characters and the emotions that you feel by caring for those characters. [This format] allows you to explore so many different types of relationships and so many different tones. You never get bored writing because of that. The minute you get tired of writing these bickering kids, you’re writing a scene with adults, or you’re writing a scene with teenagers, and it’s got a completely different dynamic and feel. For me, that’s a big reason the show connected with so many people.”
