Yesterday Netflix announced that it has officially renewed Stranger Things for a second season, and creators Ross and Matt Duffer – a.k.a. the Duffer Brothers – have been chatting to Entertainment Weekly, offering up a few details about what we can expect when we return to Hawkins, Indiana next year.
“I don’t think we ever thought anthology,” states Ross Duffer, revealing that the second season will take place in 1984. “I think we talked like a larger time jump where the kids are older now and it’s a different decade. That’s something we batted around from the very beginning. But for us, there’s still more story here [in the 1980s], there’s still things that are unresolved.”
“I know movie sequels get a lot of shit, but the ones we look up to aspire to pivot and do something different,” adds Matt. “There’s Temple of Doom, Aliens, Terminator 2. I guess a lot of this is James Cameron. But he’s brilliant. And I think one of the reasons his sequels are as successful as they are is he makes them feel very different without losing what we loved about the original. So I think we kinda looked to him and what he does and tried to capture a little bit of the magic of his work.”
“We kinda just peeled back the curtain and revealed a tiny bit of the Upside Down, so we definitely want to explore a little bit more. There’s a lot we don’t know about the Upside Down at the end of season 1,” Matt states, with Ross adding that, “We obviously have this gate to another dimension, which is still very much open in the town of Hawkins. And a lot of questions there in terms of, if the Monster is dead, was it a singular monster? What else could be out there? We really don’t go in there much until they go in to find Will at the end. So we’ve opened up this doorway, and to us it’s exciting to talk about, like, what else is behind there? There’s a lot more mystery there to be solved.”
The first season of Stranger Things is available now on Netflix.
Originally published September 1, 2016. Updated November 30, 2022.
