Summer Frights

School’s Out In Stranger Things 3… Richard Edwards Heads Down To Hawkins’ New Mall To Find Out How The 1985-set Season Is Shaping Up

- Adam Tanswell

IT’S ONE OF THOSE INDISPUTABLE FACTS of life that summers when you were a kid were way better than they are now. Halcyon days when you had no worries about getting up for school or work in the morning, those endless evenings with nothing more pressing to do than hang out with your mates, talking about absolutely nothing – nobody would have dreamed of complaining about the weather being too hot. And if you grew up in the States you can probably ratchet up that nostalgia factor by a few notches, seeing as those summer months are unlikely to have been ruined by quite so many mediocre “rainy day” activities.

So for Stranger Things, a precision-engineered nostalgia delivery mechanism in the form of an ’80s-set sci-fi drama, the fact that the upcoming third season is leaving the show’s traditional autumnal haunts behind to bring summer to Hawkins, Indiana, should see the deification of the good old days turned up to, well, Eleven.

“We always knew we wanted to set season three in the summer,” says Stranger Things executive producer and occasional director Shawn Levy, gamely talking to SFX on the phone as he boards a flight. “We wanted the fun and the kind of unique freedom that summers in the mid-’80s seemed to have. [This setting] brings the freedom that comes from not being in school, and that means summer camps, cookouts, barbecues and the swimming pool. It’s just a different ethos, and it allows season three to really start from a fairly fun, light-hearted place before it eventually devolves into far darker plotlines and threats.”

TIME AFTER TIME