The Duffer Brothers talk about Stranger Things and what happens next

Stranger Things is as good as your friends keep telling you. A perfect combination of 80s nostalgia, scary monsters, psychic powers and clever kids. The Duffer Brothers (twins Matt and Ross) created and executive produced the show. They also directed most of the episodes. Shawn Levy was also involved in the show quite a bit and directed some episodes.

The Duffer Brothers spoke to Variety about the show. Obviously there are major spoilers ahead, but they spoke about the kids, the Upside Down and creating the creature amongst other things.

Okay, you can read on after the next photo. I stress again, if you haven’t seen all of the show yet there will be spoilers ahead.

First, they spoke about The Upside Down (such a cool name).

Ross: There’s a lot there we don’t know or understand. Even with the Upside Down, we have a 30-page document that is pretty intricate in terms of what it all means, and where this monster actually came from, and why aren’t there more monsters — we have all this stuff that we just didn’t have time for, or we didn’t feel like we needed to get into in season one, because of the main tension of Will. We have that whole other world that we haven’t fully explored in this season, and that was very purposeful.

Matt: We wanted a simple drive and a somewhat simple mystery with bizarre pops of supernatural horror and then add a larger mythology behind this rift that we only know and refer to as the Upside Down because that’s what the boys decide to call it. Everything they’ve learned about it is kind of hypothetical. They’re theorizing based on their knowledge from fantasy gaming and their science teacher, Mr. Clarke. That’s as much as we get to understand it. I think part of it is us thinking in terms of horror, it’s scarier when you don’t fully understand what’s happening. If you were to encounter something from another world or dimension, it would be beyond comprehension. We talked a lot about Clive Barker and his stories. They’re very weird, and the weirder it is, the more inexplicable it is, the scarier it is.

Ross: We leave these dangling threads at the end. If people respond to this show and we get to continue this story — we had those initial discussions of where we might go with it. If there was going to be a season two, we would reveal more of that 30 page document, but we’d still want to keep it from the point of view of our original characters.

Although Netflix hasn’t yet given an order for season 2 there are plans for the story to continue. Shawn Levy had this to say when talking to /Film.

Shawn: Yes. The answer is yes and yes. We definitely are hopeful to go several more seasons. And the plan is to continue with this set of characters while introducing a few critical key new ones next season. So I’ll just say that a lot of the big mysteries get answered at the end of Season 1, but we are very much kind of unearthing new problems and questions that merit future stories and future investigation in the most enjoyable way. So we are in love with our cast and our characters.

Things end up being resolved to some extent at the end of Season 1, but not entirely. And that’s why we’re so hopeful we get another few seasons to live with these people a little longer.

Stranger Things

Matt and Ross spoke about what could possibly happen to Eleven and Will going forward.

Matt: Obviously something happened to Eleven when she destroyed and killed that monster and we don’t know what she went. Hopper is left with this guilt because he sold her out. We wanted to leave it sort of mysterious exactly what he knows… Have there been sightings in the woods or is he hoping she’s out there or has he already made contact with her? We don’t answer any of that, but we like the idea of potentially putting her and Hopper together.

Ross: We love the idea that [the Upside Down] is an environment that is not a great place for a human being to be living in. Will’s been there for an entire week, and it’s had some kind of effect on him, both emotionally and perhaps physically. The idea is he’s escaped this nightmare place, but has he really? That’s a place we wanted to go and potentially explore in season two. What effect does living in there for a week have on him? And what has been done to him? It’s not good, obviously.

Then there is the creature, which was extremely creepy.

Matt: It’s been a lifelong dream of ours to build a monster and put him on screen. It was very important early on that we actually create it. And that we have a person in a suit with animatronic elements so we can film it in real time with our actors. We grew up on genre films before computer graphics, so the movies that scared us the most, the horror elements were done practically. We wanted to get back that.

We had worked with a concept artist before — Aaron Sims — and he’s absolutely incredible. We talked a lot with Aaron about what we wanted this monster to look like. We talked about H.R. Giger, Guillermo del Toro, Clive Barker — we tried to find what about their monsters was so effective to us, they tended to be humanoid but there was something very bizarre about them. If you were going to encounter something from another dimension it would be very weird. We started to play around with it, and we ended up with the guy you see on the show.

Ross: The actors loved it. Sometimes you see a monster sitting down in a chair and it looks ridiculous. The toddlers on set were terrified of it. Millie, who plays Eleven, has a sister who was about three, and we had the twins who play Holly Wheeler. It was freaking them out to a major degree. Someone went up and told them that the monster was not a bad monster, it came from Monsteropolis from “Monsters, Inc.” After that it was all good.

Lots more over at Variety.

I would be extremely surprised if Netflix didn’t give the go ahead for more Stranger Things. While part of me wants to see what happens next, I do feel that this was a beautifully crafted tale that could have just been the eight episodes we got. Basically, I really hope that they don’t mess things up.
What are your theories on what happened to Eleven, Will and the rest at the send of Season 1?

Via The Playlist