“We met in the womb. It was very dark. We’ve been together our entire lives.”
From their offices in Los Angeles, over Skype, Matt Duffer and his twin brother Ross are discussing the origins of their creative partnership, and how, 32 years later, it gave birth to the spooky TV phenomenon Stranger Things. It’s been just over a year since the summer of 2016, when this nostalgic supernatural series went from word-of-mouth must-see to TV game-changer seemingly overnight.
It became almost impossible to go online without coming across Stranger Things, as its stars, scenes and snappy dialogue were dissected, hashtagged and meme-ified. There was the campaign to #savebarb, after the fan-favourite played by Shannon Purser — who earned an Emmy nomination for the performance — was dragged off to the Upside Down during a pensive poolside moment. There was the ever-present, Stephen King-esque font, which inspired an online Stranger Things title-card generator, meaning everyone could make their name or a puerile combination of swear words look spooky; and there was Eleven’s shaved head and unique dress sense, making her an immediate Halloween-costume favourite.
Stranger Things became the kind of TV talking point not seen since Sean Bean first led a family of gruff northerners to King’s Landing. Nobody, not even Netflix, saw it coming. “Netflix was even afraid to put the monster on the marketing,” recalls Ross. “They didn’t want to put people off.” Certainly, the brothers could never have anticipated just how huge the series would become and how quickly.
“You just kind of get lost,” says Matt. “First we had this idea for a show, and never in a million years did we think we’d get it on a place like Netflix.”
The Duffers were born in 1984 and raised in North Carolina. They were obsessed with movies for as long as they can remember. “It was Tim Burton’s Batman in, what, ’89, I think?” says Ross. “What we could see was there was someone behind the curtain controlling all of this, and you could see it from one Tim Burton film to the next, that the guy who made Edward Scissorhands also made Batman. You could connect the dots because his style was so distinct. He was the first director we became obsessed with as kids.” Their parents bought them a Hi8 video camera and they started to make their own versions of Burton movies.
“Then,” Matt picks up, “you start tracking directors. You find a movie you love and you figure out who directed it, then you go to the video store and go through all the John Carpenter stuff and all the Sam Raimi stuff. We fell in love with movies through directors. Very early on we knew that was what we wanted to do.” By their early teens, they were already formulating plans to study film-making.
They made it to film school in California and after graduating wrote and directed their first feature script, Hidden — a 2015 thriller about a global viral outbreak and, true to form, creepy monsters on the other side of a barrier — but its few reviews were middling. It doesn’t sound as if it was the fairy tale that the brothers had dreamed about.
“We had a difficult experience at Warner Bros with our first studio movie,” Matt says. “We came away a little disillusioned. Then we went around pitching a lot of movie ideas and no one seemed to care about them. They really wanted to know if we had any television ideas.”
LEARNING ABOUT TV
They had been kicking around an early form of Stranger Things between themselves, but at this stage still saw it as a film, and not one they were particularly enthusiastic about. They took a writing job on M Night Shyamalan’s series Wayward Pines, having long been fans of the director’s scary movies — and started to learn about how television worked.
The cogs began to whir, and they started to think about Stranger Things as a more longform idea. “We were seeing TV becoming increasingly cinematic, with stuff like True Detective,” Ross says. “And Game of Thrones opened up ‘genre TV’ and showed it doesn’t have to be cheesy.”
They couldn’t seem to make Stranger Things work as a film, so why not expand it? “The idea was: could we take what Spielberg did in the 80s, with these B-movie ideas of flying saucers and killer sharks, and elevate it? We could see that audiences were hungry for it, because The Walking Dead was exploding,” says Ross.
For Matt, it happened at the perfect time. “I don’t think anyone imagined, six years ago, that a show with dragons in it would be the biggest show in the world. When I was reading the Game of Thrones books in college, I couldn’t get anyone else to read them cos they looked so nerdy. It had a puffy sword on the cover, you know what I mean?” With Stranger Things, the Duffers have both tapped into nerd culture going mainstream and given it a strong push forward. Why are people so into it now?
“I don’t know,” laughs Matt, adding, with a perfect nerd flourish: “Because I think people realised it was cool?”
He points out that Marvel movies are huge, even for people who have never read a comic book in their lives. There are plenty of people watching Game of Thrones who have never played an online role-playing game and may not know what one is. It is cause and effect, but there’s an additional factor, too: more money is being spent, and what’s known as “genre TV” is no longer plagued by wobbly walls and dreadful special effects.
Like the Stranger Things kids, it is not difficult to imagine the Duffer brothers holed up in their own basement playing Dungeons and Dragons. “I always loved fantasy, or the fantastical,” concedes Matt. “I loved the Lord of the Rings books, The Hobbit. And my parents, they still don’t understand it because they hate fantasy stuff. Neither of them are into it. So I don’t know where it comes from. We just loved scaring ourselves.”
Whether Stranger Things is a horror series is a matter of debate. The first episode is truly frightening, and there are moments of creeping dread throughout — #poorbarb — but the scares tapered off during season one; the brothers’ homage-filled cut-and-paste approach made it more of a combination of family drama, high-school romance, coming-of-age story and conspiracy thriller than a straight-up monster flick. Which ultimately gives it heart, and may be partly why its following is so devoted and so invested. Ross says that is another benefit of moving to TV: there is less pressure for “constant jump scares” than there is in movies. “Also, we’re not very good at it. It’s a skill,” he says.
“It’s really hard to do,” agrees Matt. “You can go: ‘Oh, that’s a cheap scare’, but those cheap scares are hard to achieve, so we’re working on it. I think we have a couple of better ones this year. Our inability to be so scary ended up paying off, but it wasn’t intentional.”
One of the big draws of the series is, of course, its knack for channelling a certain kind of nostalgia — all BMX bikes, skinny T-shirts and 80s board games — and one of the great pleasures of watching it is trying to spot the references, from The Goonies to Poltergeist to Stand By Me. When Matt and Ross pitched the show to Netflix, they made a kind of “lookbook” filled with the films they were drawing on. “We took an old Stephen King book cover and had a lot of images from the movies that inspired us,” Ross explains. “We also made a fake trailer, where we took 30-something clips from movies. John Carpenter mashed up with ET was really cool. So that was where we started to figure out the tone of the show.”
The pair’s early Tim Burton obsession came full circle when, early in the process, they cast Edward Scissorhands star Winona Ryder. Ryder’s involvement also helped them tease out their Stranger Things vision. In an early script, her character Joyce, the mother of missing boy Will, was not the nervy, Ouija-lights-loving Joyce we know today.
“She was a tough-talking Long Island mom — [expletive] this, [expletive] that, a lot of [expletive]-bombs — a very different character. So when we cast Winona, we were like, we have to Winonafy this. She is so much more interesting than the character we had written. She’s got this very unique energy about her,” says Matt.
She got them thinking about Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and how everyone assumes he’s crazy. “Everyone thinks he’s making a mountain out of mashed potatoes. And I thought: I want to see Winona making a mountain out of mashed potatoes. That’s gonna be a great scene.”
At 33, Matt and Ross were born after many of the films they reference — such as Close Encounters and ET — were made, but it came as a big surprise to them when the show picked up an even more youthful audience. “We thought we would appeal to people like us who grew up on this kind of storytelling,” says Ross. “We were just harking back to the classics. We’re beyond excited that it appealed to the younger generation, but we were not expecting it at all.”
“Well, we told Netflix it would,” laughs Matt. “We were BS-ing a little bit.”
When the first season appeared on Netflix last summer, the Duffers’ main concern was that enough people would actually watch it, given the sheer amount of good TV that there is to get through. But in the last two months, 10 million people have watched the trailer for season two. The brothers say Stranger Things 2 will be bigger and wider in scope, tackling PTSD, love triangles and a new enemy in the form of a “shadow monster”. For them, the principal difference of having a hit under their belts is that they can push a bit harder for scenes they want to include, even if it will take longer to shoot them or be a little more expensive.
For the cast of the show, though, life has changed immeasurably, particularly for the younger actors, who have found themselves on red carpets and magazine covers in almost constant rotation since Stranger Things was released. “I didn’t really realise until we were walking down the street with all of them, and you couldn’t walk without someone trying to take a picture of them,” explains Ross. “Their lives are completely changed. I can say that none of them have turned into brats or anything. I mean, we’ll see, but so far, so good. They’re very much bonded in a way that’s going to last for the rest of their lives.”
Unsurprisingly, anticipation for the second season is feverish. Matt and Ross Duffer may be TV converts now, but the movie nerds in them are still loud and proud. “That’s why I wanted to say Stranger Things 2, because I don’t want to think about it as a TV show,” says Matt. “Maybe it’s a snobby thing, but it’s like: ‘Oh, I want it to be a movie. I want it to be a movie sequel.” He smiles. “I’m still doing movies, in my head, you know.”
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Don’t miss it
Stranger Things 2 will be available on Netflix from October 27.
