55 Things You Didn't Know About Stranger Things
It was originally called Montauk and set on Long Island.
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You've already finished your Stranger Things binge (or binges—we won't judge) and you're eagerly awaiting the arrival of Season 4, Volume 1 on May 27. This time around, prepare for scenes outside of everyone's favorite creepy fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. The gang, now all grown up, might not all live near one another anymore, but they'll be reuniting to (what else?) battle the monsters of the Upside Down. Sounds exciting, right? While you wait, click through to discover 55 things you didn't know about your favorite show.
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It was created by twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer.
They made a movie, Hidden, and worked on M. Night Shyamalan’s Wayward Pines before writing a script based on the premise, "What if Steven Spielberg directed a Stephen King book?"
The show was originally called “Montauk.”
It took place on Long Island in 1980, but the Duffers had to change the show's location when they realized it would be too difficult to shoot there in winter.
The Montauk Project inspired the show.
The alleged government experiment took place in the early '80s and involved kidnapping kids from Long Island to experiment on them. You can read all about it here.
The Duffers auditioned 906 boys and 307 girls for the children's roles.
And they made each kid read parts from Stand By Me in the audition.
The now-iconic title sequence was inspired by motion graphics designer Richard Greenberg.
He designed the titles for films including Alien, Superman and The Goonies.
The Upside Down's real name is the Nether.
But they got so used to calling it the "Upside Down" on set, it stuck, Millie Bobby Brown revealed in Beyond Stranger Things. The same thing happened with the Shadow Monster in Season 2; it's supposed to be called the Mind Flayer.
The Duffers cast Gaten Matarazzo after watching his first audition tape.
"When you see someone like Gaten, and he pops the way he does, you’re just like, 'This kid, we’re putting him in the show, 100 percent,'" Matt told the New York Times.
Gaten Matarazzo, Sadie Sink and Caleb McLaughlin knew each other before filming the show.
The three young stars met while starring on Broadway at the same time. Matarazzo was in Les Misérables, Sink was in Annie, and McLaughlin was in The Lion King.
Stephen King "found" Millie Bobby Brown.
Long before the Duffers cast her as Eleven, King tweeted his love for Brown on the British show Intruders: “Millie Brown, the girl in Intruders, is terrific. Is it my imagination, or are child actors a lot better than they used to be?”
The Duffers convinced Winona Ryder to play Joyce during a four-and-a-half-hour meeting.
“We actually talked very little about the show or the character of Joyce; we were mostly just getting to know each other,” the Duffers told EW. Ryder joined the project the next day.
Finn Wolfhard is a movie fanatic.
He already watched all the movies the Duffer Brothers assigned for research, Ross told the NYT.
In the original script, the teens (Nancy, Jonathan and Steve) used the Christmas lights to find the monster.
But one of the writers pitched the idea of Joyce using them to communicate with Will. "Seeing Winona react with joy, then terror, then hope to a glowing ball of Christmas lights is now one of our favorite scenes from the show," they wrote in EW.
Season 4 took two years to film.
It involved nine scripts, 800 pages, thousands of visual effect shots, and "a runtime nearly twice the length of any previous season," the Duffers revealed in an open letter to fans.
David Harbour wanted Hopper to wear a hat in homage to Indiana Jones.
"Early on, he even asked if we could have a giant boulder roll after him at one point in the show," the Duffers wrote in EW. "We’re still not sure if he was joking or not."
Joyce’s hairstyle was inspired by Meryl Streep in Silkwood.
Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Marsha Mason in Max Dugan Returns and Audrey Rose influenced Winona Ryder's performance.
It was Caleb McLaughlin’s idea for Lucas to wear a bandana in Season 1.
"Sometimes our kids have great ideas, and this is one of those times!" the Duffers told EW.
Steve was supposed to be "the biggest douchebag on the planet."
"A lot of credit goes to Joe Keery because he was much more likable and charming than we originally had envisioned," Ross Duffer told Variety.
Matthew Modine helped to create his character, Dr. Brenner.
Dr. Brenner was particularly hard for the Duffers to write because you see the character so little on the show. "He informed it, and I’m really happy with where we wound up with him at the end, with something that was discovered during the course of shooting," Matt Duffer told Empire.
Millie Bobby Brown’s performance was inspired by E. T.
“Matt and Ross were like, ‘Basically you’re going to be an alien,'" she told Indiewire.
The Duffers used the fake body of Will to scare Noah Schnapp's mother.
"We took Noah’s mom aside, told her we had something to show her, and led her into a dark closet where we had propped up this frighteningly realistic corpse of her son," they write in EW. "She was startled at first, and we felt like maybe we crossed a line… But after the initial shock, she loved it."
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