Stranger Danger

On-set secrets! Behind-the-scenes information! Plans for the future! SFX goes in depth, upside down and inside out with the duffer brothers on a globe-spanning journey to Hawkins and beyond for season four of Stranger Things

- By Darren Scott

WHEN THEY SAID THIS was the biggest season of Stranger Things yet, they really meant it. It’s been three years since the last trip to Hawkins – and the Upside Down – and the creative team haven’t been resting on their laurels. There’s more cast, more creatures, more locations and more at stake.

It’s 1986 and coming up to spring break. SFX got to take a whirlwind tour behind the scenes and on-set via the wonders of technology. We visited Nome, Alaska – which is actually Lithuania, where they’ve built an entire worksite complete with guard towers and a railroad. The sets are absolutely huge. There’s a hangar with a small aeroplane, which we later see crashed.

“We shot all over the place,” Matt Duffer grins. “We shot in Atlanta, as usual, for Hawkins and then we were in Albuquerque for the California storyline and in Lithuania, for the Russia storyline. We called it our Game Of Thrones season because we were just all over the place.”

Creel House in Hawkins is a classic American horror movie home, as seen in the trailer. “What occurs in that house is pivotal to understanding what has been happening in Hawkins all of these years,” Ross Duffer says. “The main villain of the season, Vecna, resides in the attic of the Creel House in the Upside Down.” That attic set is gigantic – the top of a house plonked on one side of an enormous soundstage, surrounded by other sets.

In the props department we have a nose at a microfiche machine with old copies of the