The Duffer Brothers

• 1. Introduction

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  Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer, identical twins credited together as the Duffer Brothers, were born on the 15th of February 1984. They work on every project as a single pair, never apart. That partnership eventually produced the horror film Hidden and the Netflix series Stranger Things, which ran from 2016 to 2025.

  This documentary follows two twins from Durham, North Carolina who built a production company inside Netflix. It asks what led them there, what eventually pulled them away, and what their lives look like away from the set.

• 2. Two Boys, One Camera

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  Their mother, Ann Marie Christensen, was a part-time real estate broker born in 1951. Their father, Allen Pace Duffer Jr., born in 1946, worked as a project director at the Research Triangle Institute and was a devoted film buff.

  In third grade, the twins picked up a Hi8 video camera their parents had given them and began making films. They studied at the Duke School for Children, a private school, from kindergarten through eighth grade. Afterward they went to Charles E. Jordan High School, a large public high school.

  Florida State University's College of Motion Picture Arts accepted them, but they turned down the offer because it would not let them study together. They toured New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, but neither school accepted them. Someone they met along the way introduced them to another contact, who pointed them toward Chapman University's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. They relocated to Orange, California, and graduated from Chapman in 2007.

  Within a few years of leaving Chapman, the brothers had written several short films and a script called Origin that would open doors neither of them expected.

• 3. Writing Their Way In

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  That script, titled Origin, gained the brothers their first agent. Soon after, Warner Bros. Pictures acquired their screenplay for the post-apocalyptic horror film Hidden, in 2011, and the brothers went on to write and direct it themselves. Hidden was released in 2015.

  Around that same period, the Fox television series Wayward Pines hired the brothers as writers and producers. That run of Wayward Pines scripts gave them a foothold in series television just as they began shopping a new idea of their own.

• 4. The Upside Down Arrives

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  Dan Cohen was the first person to carry the brothers' pitch forward, bringing their concept to producer Shawn Levy. Levy's production company, 21 Laps, backed the project, and Netflix picked it up quickly once it reached the streamer.

  The resulting series, Stranger Things, is set in 1980s Indiana and pays tribute to that decade's pop culture. Its look and feel draw on the work of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Sam Raimi, David Lynch, Stephen King, and George Lucas, among other influences.

  Stranger Things was released on the 15th of July 2016 to overwhelming praise, and it began building a cult following online soon after. That early wave of attention set the stage for a much bigger deal with Netflix, one that would arrive only a few years later.

• 5. Expanding The Universe

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  On the 30th of September 2019, Netflix announced it had signed the Duffers to create additional films and television shows in the years ahead. In March 2021, the brothers announced a new project. They would adapt Stephen King and Peter Straub's novel The Talisman as a Netflix series, working alongside Steven Spielberg. Both brothers would serve as executive producers through Amblin Partners and a production banner called Monkey Massacre. They hired Curtis Gwinn, who had worked as a writer and executive producer on Stranger Things, to write and run the new show.

  After the fourth season of Stranger Things premiered in July 2022, the Duffers launched their own production company. They called it Upside Down Pictures, after the fictional dimension at the center of the show. The new studio recommitted to Netflix with a slate of fresh projects. These included a live-action series based on Death Note and an animated Stranger Things spinoff called Tales from '85. By 2024, the brothers were also executive producers on The Boroughs, a supernatural drama set in a retirement community in the New Mexico desert.

  Even with The Boroughs still in the works, the partnership with Netflix would not last much longer.

• 6. A New Deal At Paramount

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  In August 2025, the Duffers and their company signed a four-year deal with Paramount. That agreement led directly to the end of their long-running partnership with Netflix, which the brothers left in April 2026.

  The Paramount deal covers new series for the studio's television and streaming division. It also lets the brothers produce and direct theatrical feature films, something their Netflix contract never allowed. That theatrical opportunity marks new territory for two filmmakers who, off the set, have built very different personal lives.

• 7. Lives Off Screen

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  Matt Duffer has two children with his fiancee, Sarah Hindsgaul. Winona Ryder is godmother to those children.

  Ross Duffer married Leigh Janiak, the filmmaker behind the Fear Street trilogy, in December 2015. The two met in 2006 at a Los Angeles production company, where Janiak worked as an assistant to a producer and Ross was an intern. In February 2024, after eight years of marriage, Janiak filed for divorce.

  Those personal chapters unfolded quietly compared to the very public string of awards Stranger Things collected along the way.

• 8. Recognition

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  Stranger Things drew recognition across nearly every major American television honor. In 2016, it appeared on the American Film Institute's Top 10 TV Programs of the Year list. That same year, it earned a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination for Best Drama Series.

  By 2017, the show had also drawn recognition from the Golden Globe Awards and the British Academy Television Awards. That year, Emmy nominations for Outstanding Directing, Drama Series, and Writing all pointed to the same episode, Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers. The Bram Stoker Awards nominated the show's writing twice, for Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers and for Chapter Eight: The Upside Down. A third script, Chapter One: MADMAX, received a Superior Achievement in a Screenplay nomination that same year.

  Recognition continued into 2018, when Chapter Nine: The Gate brought fresh Emmy nominations for Outstanding Directing, Outstanding Drama Series, and Outstanding Writing. In 2019, the show's soundtrack earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media. The Satellite Award for Best Genre Series followed the next year, alongside another Emmy nomination for Outstanding Drama Series, the most recent honors on record for the show.