Inside The Upside Down

As Stranger Things comes to an end, the stakes for Hawkins—and for Netflix—couldn't be higher

- - BY ELIANA DOCKTERMAN/ ATLANTA,SIMMONE SHAH

Their show Stranger Things became a phenomenon when it debuted in 2016 and has achieved unrivaled popularity in a fractured TV landscape.

But the identical twin showrunners knew it would stretch credulity if the citizens of their '80s-era Spielbergian hamlet continued to live in a town overrun by extradimensional threats. So for years, they kept the series' supernatural showdowns to abandoned malls and far-flung Soviet prisons. But now, in the fifth and final season of Netflix's biggest show, the brothers can finally unleash hell on Main Street.

I step onto the Atlanta set in July 2024, ready to watch the mayhem unfold. It's day 135, about halfway through filming, and somewhere between 400 and 500 cast and crew members are working today. Nearly 100 camo-clad extras mill outside the library and enjoy shawarma beside fake bloodied corpses. Stuntmen wait to be thrown into the air by people in gray bodysuits with orange ping-pong balls attached to their heads, who will be transformed into monsters called Demogorgons by the magic of CGI. And it's not even the biggest scene they're shooting this year. "The sets were no less ambitious than the ones I used with Marvel," executive producer Shawn Levy tells me later. Levy directed his last two episodes of Stranger Things between wrapping Deadpool & Wolverine and starting a Star Wars film. "It happens to be a television series, but it's epic storytelling by any metric."