Stranger Things season 4

• 1. Introduction

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  Stranger Things season 4 began on paper as nine scripts that together ran past 800 pages. The show's creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, said that made the season nearly double the length of any earlier one. That is a great deal of story for an American science fiction horror drama built around a group of friends and a girl named Eleven. The season reached Netflix in 2022 with a darker, more grown-up mood than the one before it. It scattered its characters across three distant places and gave its monster a name borrowed from a tabletop game. It also sent some older songs back onto streaming charts. The chapters ahead ask why the Duffers needed so much room, where their villain and their suspect came from, and how the production survived a pandemic. They also ask how a season this large was received.

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• 2. Three Storylines

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  March 1986 is when the fourth season opens, eight months after the events of the third. The story splits into three plot lines that spend most of the season apart.

  In Hawkins, Indiana, a series of mysterious teenage murders haunts the town. Eddie Munson leads the Hellfire Club, the Dungeons & Dragons group at Hawkins High School. He becomes a prime suspect when cheerleading captain Chrissy Cunningham dies in his trailer. Classmates led by Jason Carver go hunting for him. Dustin Henderson, Lucas and Erica Sinclair, Max Mayfield, Steve Harrington, Nancy Wheeler and Robin Buckley investigate to clear Eddie's name. They discover that the culprit is a powerful being living in the Upside Down, and they name him Vecna after the Dungeons & Dragons character.

  Lenora Hills, California, is home to the second plot line. Mike Wheeler travels there to visit Eleven, Will Byers and Jonathan Byers at their new home. Eleven is arrested after assaulting her bully, and she leaves with Dr. Sam Owens for a secret facility in the Nevada desert. The operation is called the Nina Project, and its aim is to restore her powers. There she meets Dr. Martin Brenner again and uses an isolation tank to confront her past at Hawkins National Laboratory. Lt. Colonel Jack Sullivan leads a U.S. military search for her, because his side believes she is behind the murders. Mike, Will, Jonathan and their new friend Argyle try to reach her before her powers return.

  The third plot line follows Joyce Byers and Murray Bauman to Russia after word spreads that Jim Hopper may still be alive. Hopper is held in a Soviet prison camp in Kamchatka. Inmates there, including Dmitri Antonov, are forced to fight a Demogorgon that the Russians have captured.

  The Duffers had a particular word for this three-part design, and it explains much of the season's size.

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• 3. Writing Bigger

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  Game of Thrones was the comparison the Duffers reached for when they explained the season's scale, its running time and its more mature tone. They called the structure an "epic" triptych, with characters split across far-apart locations, and said it was a main reason the season ran long.

  Planning began before the third season was even released. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the brothers said the creative team had already met several times to discuss the show's future. On the 30th of September 2019, Netflix announced a new multi-year television and film deal with the Duffers, reportedly worth nine figures. The same day, a minute-long teaser on YouTube announced the renewal of Stranger Things for a fourth season.

  Ross Duffer described how the team avoided writing itself into a corner. They kept only the big broad strokes in mind and filled in details later. At the end of the second season, he said, they had known about Billy and known that the Russians were coming. Matt Duffer added that most of the season would leave Hawkins, a first for the series. Loose ends from season three, including Hopper's perceived death and Eleven moving away with Joyce Byers, would all be revisited.

  A second reason for the length was the brothers' wish to answer long-standing questions about the show's mythology, which they compared to the "layers of an onion". Halfway through writing, they realised they needed an extra episode to fit everything in, and Netflix quickly approved it. During production of the first season, they had written a twenty-page document for Netflix explaining the Upside Down in clear detail. Material from that document shaped the new plots, and the brothers wanted to spend far more time in that world than the third season allowed.

  One storyline the Duffers had long wanted to tell did not fit. They had hoped to have Will Byers come out as gay in this season but lacked the space to do it properly. They later said they were glad, because it let them build the whole season toward his coming out in the fifth and final season.

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• 4. Borrowed Villains

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  Damien Echols is the real person behind Eddie Munson. Echols was one of the West Memphis Three, who were wrongly convicted in 1994 of the deaths of three boys. Residents had tied his appearance to a satanic cult. The writers drew on Paradise Lost, a documentary about Echols, when shaping Eddie's story.

  Vecna came from a game table. As with the Demogorgon in the first season, the Duffers chose a Dungeons & Dragons character so the young characters would recognise the danger through the game. The creature was fully introduced in the game's materials in 1990, through the module Vecna Lives!, and had only been hinted at before that. The Duffers reasoned that Eddie was an advanced gamemaster who could work out how Vecna would behave.

  The origin of Eleven's powers got a new explanation while the brothers worked on this season and on the play Stranger Things: The First Shadow, staged in 2023. They imagined that Martin Brenner had used the blood of Henry Creel to create more psychic children. Eleven was his most successful result, and the children were meant as living weapons for the Cold War era. Brenner had once been planned to return as early as the second season, but the Duffers found no place for him there.

  Casting for the season began by the 1st of November 2019, with four new male characters. One teenager was described as a metalhead, another as an entitled jock, and a third as sounding like the twin of the stoner Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The fourth role was an adult tied to the Russian storyline. On the 20th of November 2020, Jamie Campbell Bower, Eduardo Franco and Joseph Quinn were cast as series regulars. Robert Englund, best known as Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street films, had approached the Duffers himself, and his interest fit the horror direction they wanted. He played Victor Creel.

  Bower's casting was disguised. He was first announced as "Peter Ballard", and his credits for the first six episodes read "Friendly Orderly". The label hid the fact that his character was the grown-up Henry Creel, the first test subject of Dr. Brenner, called One, who becomes Vecna after his battle with Eleven.

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• 5. Filming Through Lockdown

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  February 2020 saw production officially begin in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Duffers and Netflix announced that cameras were rolling at the recently decommissioned Lukiškės Prison and at Kyviskes airfield.

  The crew then returned to the Atlanta area, the main base of earlier seasons. After two weeks, all Netflix productions, including this one, were halted on the 16th of March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant portion of filming took place at Albuquerque Studios in New Mexico, which Netflix had acquired in 2018. After several delays, work resumed in Georgia on the 28th of September 2020. Natalia Dyer, Sadie Sink and Gaten Matarazzo were spotted on the Hawkins Middle School and Hawkins High School sets on the 1st of October, and at Dustin's house set the next day. Late 2020 filming around Rome, Georgia, used the Claremont House as the Creel House. The Pennhurst Mental Hospital scenes were shot at Berry College in Mount Berry.

  On the 27th of January 2021, Matthew Modine was spotted filming in Atlanta. The Duffers had planned to keep his return as Dr. Brenner a surprise, but photographers snapped him in a convertible on his first day, and the secret leaked. In March 2021, set photos leaked of a trailer park in Griffin, Georgia, dressed with tendrils from the Upside Down. David Harbour said in June 2021 that filming would wrap in August. A fire with no injuries was reported near one of the sets that month. In September 2021, Noah Schnapp said filming had finished.

  Dacre Montgomery could not leave Australia for the fourth episode because of continued lockdowns. A local crew filmed his scenes while Sadie Sink acted against a stand-in months earlier. Director Shawn Levy guided Montgomery over Zoom, and the performances were edited together afterward. In the lab massacre scenes, Bower said, Millie Bobby Brown helped direct Martie Blair, who played young Eleven. That kept Eleven's mannerisms consistent between the two actors.

  Costume designer Amy Parris gave each location its own colour palette. Hawkins stayed saturated, but without the dusty, rusty browns of the first two seasons. California got baby pinks, teals and purples that felt sun-soaked. Converse designed three styles of shoes in the Hawkins High colours for a pep rally scene.

  In April 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that the season cost around $270 million, roughly $30 million per episode. That made it the most expensive Netflix show to date. The Journal placed it behind only The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power at $58 million and Citadel at $50 million.

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• 6. Practical Monsters

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  Barrie Gower, a make-up artist whose earlier work included Game of Thrones and Chernobyl, created the look of Vecna and the season's other creatures. The Duffers wanted to rely on practical effects, as they had in the first season, and Vecna was "90% practical". They felt a physical creature gave the actors something real to react to, unlike a prop awaiting computer-generated effects.

  In the show's own world, Vecna is a human who mutated after about twenty years of exposure to the Upside Down. Jamie Campbell Bower played him in prosthetics, and fitting him into the outfit took about seven hours. Gower gave the creature "anemic" skin, with roots, vines and fibrous muscle tissue that showed how deeply the environment had changed him.

  The process began with a full-body cast of Bower. The team shrank the cast by a set percentage so the pieces would fit skin-tight. Sculptors then modelled the body in Plasticine, which took several weeks. The sculpture was divided into about 18 pieces, each built on a former of fiberglass or epoxy resin. Molds of those pieces were used to make prosthetic appliances from a mixture of materials.

  Montreal-based Rodeo FX handled many of the digital effects. Its most complicated shot followed a demobat gliding toward the Creel house in the Upside Down, and it took two years to animate. For the death scenes of Vecna's victims, the artists did extensive research on broken bones and accidents so their digital doubles would look convincingly gruesome. They also redesigned the demogorgon and demodogs for the Kamchatka prison, whose brighter lighting had no equivalent in seasons one and two.

  Production went eight weeks over schedule, yet the release date did not move. Netflix brought in visual effects editors from other shows to help. The Duffers updated some shots in the first volume during its opening weekend, which Netflix had never before allowed for a release. Some second-volume shots finished rendering on the morning of the 30th of June, a day before launch. The finale went online with an estimated 20 unfinished shots. It runs two and a half hours and contains more visual effects shots than all of season three, and the team was still revising shots three weeks after release.

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• 7. The Soundtrack Surge

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  Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of the electronic band Survive composed the score, as they had for the previous three seasons. Both volumes of the original soundtrack album, titled Stranger Things 4, were released digitally on the 1st of July 2022 through Lakeshore and Invada Records. Physical editions followed on CD and vinyl. A companion album of existing songs came out through Legacy Recordings in two volumes, on the 27th of May and the 1st of July.

  Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" became the season's most talked-about song. It plays several times, including in episode 4, where Max escapes Vecna. The Duffers wanted a powerful emotional song for Max and asked music supervisor Nora Felder to find one. She proposed this track, and the brothers agreed it suited both the music and the theme of dealing with God. Winona Ryder had been dropping hints about Bush since the first season, turning up on set in her Kate Bush T-shirts. Felder knew that Bush had been cautious about licensing, but Bush turned out to be a fan of the show. After reading the script pages for the scene, she agreed to clear the song. Streaming of it rose by more than 8,700%, and it became the second-most heard song on Spotify playlists in the United States and the fourth worldwide.

  Metallica's "Master of Puppets" had its moment in the finale. Eddie plays its riffs and solo to lure and distract demobats in the Upside Down. The song climbed to number one on streaming platforms and appeared on both U.S. and UK charts for the first time since its original release in 1986.

  Other period songs got a lift of around 1,784 percent, including "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" by Dead or Alive, "Pass the Dutchie" by Musical Youth and Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus". The last two episodes added Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Spellbound", James Taylor's "Fire and Rain", Rick Derringer's "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo" and Journey's "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)".

  An unexpected choice came from the opera world. Two pieces from Philip Glass's opera Akhnaten, "Window of Appearances" and "Akhenaten and Nefertiti", play in the seventh episode.

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• 8. Release and Reception

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  A ticking grandfather clock in the Upside Down opened the season's first announcement, which ended with the tagline "We're not in Hawkins anymore". Many news outlets guessed the setting would move to Russia. A teaser on the 14th of February 2020 showed Hopper alive. Further teasers arrived on the 6th of May 2021 and the 25th of September 2021, the latter showing the former Creel family house. The final teaser, on the 6th of November 2021, showed the lives of Will and Eleven in California and revealed the episode titles. The first official trailer came on the 12th of April 2022, and the first eight minutes of episode one were released online on the 20th of May.

  The season reached Netflix in two volumes. Seven episodes arrived on the 27th of May 2022, and two more followed five weeks later on the 1st of July. The first release came three days after a mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 21 people. The first episode's cold open shows graphic images of dead bodies, including children. Netflix added a warning card before the recap, shown only to viewers in the United States. It said the season had been filmed a year earlier and expressed deep sadness over the shooting.

  Soon after release, viewers noticed that Will's friends never acknowledged his birthday in an episode set on that day. The Duffers joked they could fix it by changing the month, calling this "George Lucas-ing the situation". Some viewers took that to mean earlier scenes had been edited, including Jonathan's photographs at a pool party hosted by Steve, Nancy and Barbara. The writers stated that no scenes from previous seasons had ever been cut or re-edited. After the second volume launched on the 1st of July, Netflix reportedly crashed from server overload.

  By the 30th of May 2022, the season had been viewed for more than 287 million hours. That beat the previous first-week record of 193 million hours, held by the second season of Bridgerton. Within 28 days, it reached 1.352 billion hours, making Stranger Things the second Netflix title to pass a billion hours in that window, after the first season of Squid Game. It became the most viewed English-language series ever.

  Rotten Tomatoes counted 88% of 193 critic reviews as positive, with an average rating of 7.9 out of 10. Metacritic gave the first volume 69 out of 100 from 29 reviews and the second volume 74 from 18, both "generally favorable". Reviewers praised the performances, visuals, action, soundtrack and emotional weight, along with the darker tone. Some criticised the season as overstuffed because of its longer episodes.

  Stephen King called the season "as good or better than the previous three" and spotted a "Carrie riff", though he found the two-part split "kind of lame". Sophie Gilbert of The Atlantic was harsher, calling it "a 13-hour-plus behemoth" with undeveloped characters. Patrick Caoile of Collider praised Bower's Vecna as the first villain in the show with real layers.

  The first volume earned 13 nominations for the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series, and won five. The second volume received five nominations for the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards.

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