Stranger Things - The Unofficial Upside Down Companion - Updated Edition

By Blake Dylan

New revised and updated edition! The amazing story of the Netflix sci-fi horror phenomenon, season by season, from conception to the screen! Packed with fascinating trivia and incredible facts about all aspects of Stranger Things.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Dec 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9783755463160

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Copyright

© Copyright 2023 Blake Dylan

All Rights Reserved

CONTENTS

Stranger Things

Stranger Things 2

Stranger Things 3

Stranger Things 4

STRANGER THINGS

Stranger Things creators Ross and Matt Duffer are brothers from North Carolina. They made their own amateur films from an early age and later went to Chapman University's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. The Duffers made an inauspicious and rocky start to their career when they wrote and directed a science fiction horror film called Hidden in 2012. Hidden sat on the shelf and was only released three years later in 2015. It failed to spark much interest and largely sank without trace. Hidden grossed only $310,273 from a limited release and the critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes a respectable if hardly spectacular 53%. The Duffers were hurt by the lack of exposure Hidden endured and feared that their career might be over before it had even begun. Although a competent and mildly interesting mystery thriller, there was scant evidence in Hidden (a grim affair about a family who hide in a bunker after some unspecified and mysterious disaster has rendered the surface too dangerous) to suggest its creators were capable of an audience pleasing pop culture behemoth like Stranger Things.

Hidden had a Twilight Zone style twist at the end and some pop culture references (the little girl in Hidden quotes Heather O'Rourke in Poltergeist at one point) but few would have predicted great things from the Duffers on the evidence of this movie. One person you couldn't accuse of lacking clairvoyance though was the film director, writer, and producer M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan loved the screenplay for Hidden and personally hired the Duffers to join the creative staff on his mystery show Wayward Pines. Wayward Pines was like a blend of The Prisoner and Twin Peaks (but never as satisfying or interesting as that appealing description might make it sound) and had an outrageous twist a few episodes in.

Though a solid enough show, especially in the first season with Matt Dillon, Wayward Pines didn't make a huge impression (at least not compared to the early buzz it had generated) and has been rather forgotten since it aired. Fox declined to produce a third season of Wayward Pines and that was the end of the show. The Duffers worked on the first season of Wayward Pines. They were able to hone their writing skills and observe the mechanics of television production from the inside during their time working for Shyamalan. The Duffers soon began to plot a TV show of their own that would (to their delight and astonishment) eventually far surpass Wayward Pines in popularity.

The Duffers were born in 1984 and part of the last generation of children who experienced life before mobile telephones and the internet. This was a time when children still made their own entertainment and lived in their imaginations. The Duffers rode their bikes and roamed the woods - dreaming of having fantastical adventures like the ones experienced by the characters in Tolkien books or the kids in The Goonies and Joe Dante's Explorers. The happy childhood memories of the Duffers would become a big part of Stranger Things. It is no coincidence that Stranger Things takes place at a time before our modern day digital overload. The eighties seems a much more innocent and carefree time today because the intrusion of news, information, technology, and media was considerably less claustrophobic.

The Duffers rented many films from the video store (they loved to deceive their unsuspecting mother into renting an 18 certificate horror movie) and devoured the chilling stories of Stephen King and Clive Barker. All of these influences (and many more) would drip their way into Stranger Things. The films and stories of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and Stephen King in particular were baked into the DNA of the Duffers. The Duffers used the money they had made on Wayward Pines to support themselves while they planned their proposed television show. Jaws was always the favourite film of the Duffer Brothers. In deference to Steven Spielberg's classic 1975 shark thriller, the Duffers decided to give the TV show they were planning a coastal backdrop. Montauk was chosen as both the location and title of the show.

The Duffers wrote a rough story treatment for Montauk that concerned a secret and chillingly fantastical and frightening government conspiracy only exposed by the mysterious disappearance of a child. The story was a blend of science fiction and horror but the Duffers also wanted to mimic the feelgood aura of the Steven Spielberg factory Amblin in its family oriented heyday. The Duffers used the term Dark Amblin to describe what they wanted their show to be like. They wanted the show to be scary in places but still something that a family could potentially watch together. Montauk was to take place in the early 1980s. The Duffers were determined though that Montauk should not be nostalgia merely for the sake of nostalgia. The story and characters would have to justify their own existence if this show was going to work.

Montauk is a real village on the east end of the Long Island peninsula. For many years it was home to an air force base named Camp Hero. The base was originally tasked with watching out for Nazi U-boats and then became a Cold War radar station with the mission of charting the movement of any Soviet long range aircraft that might be encroaching on American airspace. The base officially closed in the early 1980s but the huge radar antenna was left standing. In 1992, a man named Preston Nichols wrote a book called The Montauk Project in which he claimed that Camp Hero was the site of secret government experiments into time travel, teleportation, ESP, monsters, space travel, and other equally unlikely areas of research.

Preston Nichols claimed that he had been in charge at Camp Hero but the memories of his time there were repressed. Now it had all come back to him. One of the many claims in The Montauk Project was that the government kidnapped children to use in these strange experiments at Camp Hero. These missing 'milk carton kids' became pawns in the battle of the Cold War. The children were given super powers, shuttled through time in experiments, and even sent into space. The Montauk Project is obviously a work of fiction and not taken seriously but it was very influential in the genesis of what would eventually become Stranger Things. The Duffer Brothers read about (and clearly enjoyed) the Montauk Project conspiracy theories and used them as inspiration in their story treatment for Montauk. They wanted the village of Montauk, the Long Island coast and beaches, and (of course) Camp Hero and its giant radar antenna to be the visible backdrop for the characters in their show.

There was though a more plausible element to the Montauk conspiracies that might have been very influential in the conception of Stranger Things. In the eighties and nineties, local teenagers in Montauk would sometimes venture up to Camp Hero at night armed with video cameras and secretly explore the abandoned base. One curious thing these kids noticed was that some of the rooms in Camp Hero had psychedelic wallpaper patterns. These garish interiors were very suggestive of Project MKUltra - a top secret CIA funded experiment into mind control that made use of the mind-altering drug LSD. MKUltra was a response to American fears that the Soviets were more advanced in brainwashing and mind control techniques. The MKUltra experiments included remote viewing and extrasensory perception. While these things were never proven to be real, the actual experiments did actually happen. Project MKUltra ended in 1973 and only became public knowledge after the experiment was terminated. The Montauk Project was fiction but Project MKUltra was fact. Project MKUltra would become a very important component of the TV show the Duffers were planning.

The Duffers attempted to attract interest in Montauk with a special pitch book or 'bible' for the proposed project. The pitch document was designed to look like a frayed eighties paperback horror novel. The pitch, in order to convey the intended atmosphere and tone of Montauk, included striking still images from the following movies - E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Altered States, Poltergeist, Hellraiser, Stand By Me, Firestarter, A Nightmare On Elm Street, and Jaws. The influence of these (and many more) films would be plain to see when Stranger Things eventually hit the small screen.

The pitch document for Montauk included a number of elements that were later discarded for Stranger Things. In the pitch document story notes for Montauk, Mike Wheeler ventures into the Upside Down to search for Will Byers. Another discarded element has Jonathan Byers (in what was clearly going to be a plot thread inspired by Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind) becoming obsessed with an inexplicable dimensional rift in the family shed where Will vanished. In the pitch book for Montauk, Terry Ives is not the catatonic mother of Eleven but an eccentric male conspiracy theorist with huge spectacles who keeps pestering Hopper with paranoid warnings about suspicious secret activity at Camp Hero. The character of Terry Ives in the Montauk pitch is clearly the basis for Murray Bauman (who would only be introduced in the second season of Stranger Things).

Joyce Byers was much blunter in the Montauk pitch. She was a loud, brassy New Yorker and larger than life. The pitch document suggested that the limited nature of Montauk (in that it would be more like a miniseries than traditional television) could entice some film actors to the adult roles. Marisa Tomei and Naomi Watts were mentioned as examples of the sort of names that might potentially be signed to play Joyce. The character of Joyce Byers swears like a trooper in the Montauk pilot script but her language is considerably tamer in Stranger Things. The head of the secret government laboratory in the Montauk pitch is not Dr Brenner but an enigmatic man known only as Agent One. Jim Hopper is more or less the same in the Montauk pitch as he is in Stranger Things. Dustin seems more vague in the pitch compared to the character we eventually saw Gaten Matarazzo play in Stranger Things and more of a simplistic trope. He is described in the pitch as an overweight bullied geek with glasses.

Lucas (who was originally named Lucas Conley rather than Lucas Sinclair) is described in the Montauk pitch as a kid who will begin the show as a comic relief character but become darker and more complex because of a bitter divorce his parents are going through at home. The divorce subplot involving the parents of Lucas was completely jettisoned by the time Stranger Things went before the cameras. In fact, we only catch the briefest glimpse of his parents in season one. When we see more of them in season two, the parents of Lucas clearly have a happy marriage. Will Byers is described in the pitch as someone who is bullied at school because of his colourful clothes and nonconformist attitude. This did not feature in Stranger Things although the description of Will as an avid fantasy gamer applied to both the pitch and the actual show.

There are things in both the pitch and the Montauk pilot script (penned by the Duffers) that didn't make it into Stranger Things. In Stranger Things, Eleven is no longer a feral girl who eats raw fish when she stumbles into Benny's diner (which was a Fish & Chip cafe in the Montauk pilot script). The scene where Ted Wheeler gives his TV a shake to tune in Knight Rider was slightly different in the pilot script. Ted was originally going to be trying to tune in CHiPs - a late seventies and early eighties NBC show about two motorcycle officers of the California Highway Patrol. In the pilot script it is Lucas and not Dustin who has a crush on Nancy Wheeler. Mike Wheeler has a birthmark in the pilot script which the bullies make fun of and Mike also has a crush on Jennifer Hays. Jonathan is described as having dark hair down to his shoulders in the pilot script and works in a cinema.

The pool party at Steve's house in Stranger Things (where Barb was killed by the Demogorgon) is a beach party in the pilot script. Barb decides to leave and go home but her car is attacked by a mysterious creature before she can drive away. She staggers along the beach and notices strange four legged creatures up ahead. Hopper's line in Stranger Things about mornings being for coffee and contemplation was not in the pilot script for Montauk. The sequence where Will Byers is stalked by the Demogorgon and vanishes is pretty much identical though in both the Montauk pilot script and The Vanishing of Will Byers.

The opening to the pilot script is more elaborate than the beginning of the first episode of Stranger Things (where the frightened scientist is desperately trying to get to the presumed safety of an elevator). The pilot script's opening has Agent One (aka Dr Brenner) encountering a number of slain scientists in the wake of the carnage created by Eleven's escape and the arrival of the unknown monster. The pilot script for Montauk cuts to the chase a lot quicker than Stranger Things. By the end of the pilot script even Hopper has deduced that something strange is going on in the village. It takes Hopper much longer in Stranger Things to come around to the fact that scary and fantastical things are happening in Hawkins.

Benny Hammond, the diner owner who is killed by Connie Frazier in the first episode of Stranger Things, was named Benny Henderson in the pilot script for Montauk. This would appear to suggest that Benny might originally have been conceived as a relative of Dustin. Benny also has a ferocious dog in the pilot script. The character who was the most different in the Montauk pitch is Scott Clarke - the school science teacher. In the pitch, Mr Clarke is clearly patterned on Indiana Jones. In the pilot script for Montauk, Mr Clarke is described as young, magnetic, and handsome. The female students in his class all have a crush on him. The pitch document promised that Mr Clarke would play a major role in the show and be the key to unlocking the mystery that is besieging the characters. It was a very different (and less important) Mr Clarke that we later got in Stranger Things.

In the pitch document, Montauk is set in the fall of 1980. The pitch proposed that the music in the show should be a synth score inspired by John Carpenter's The Fog and The Thing. It also proposed that a sequel (a second season of Montauk) would take place in 1990 when the kids are now young adults and must reunite to fight the strange forces threatening their village again. This was patently inspired by Stephen King's IT and another element in the pitch that never happened in the end. It is sometimes reported that Montauk was pitched as an anthology show but the evidence seems to contradict this. The pitch book for Montauk clearly proposed one single story and one set of characters.

The vague notion of setting a second season of the show in 1990 ten years later quickly became obsolete when Stranger Things began shooting and the Duffers saw how good the child actors were. The notion of having a second season of Strangers Things with the likes of Millie Bobby Brown and Gaten Matarazzo replaced by older actors was unthinkable.

The Duffers had very briefly considered pitching Montauk as a proposed film when they first had the idea but they always felt it would be much better as a miniseries or TV show. It is possible (though no sure thing) that they could have secured some funding to make Montauk as a movie but Stranger Things (as it would become) was clearly much better suited to be a television show. Think of all the great moments in Stranger Things we would have missed out on if the eight hours of story had been condensed down into a two hour or 100 minute movie script.

The networks and television executives did not bite when the Duffers began pitching Montauk. No one seemed convinced that Montauk was something they should really be investing in. The Duffers were an unproven commodity and few executives seemed to see much appeal in a TV show where the main characters appeared to be children. It appears from the raft of initial rejections that a number of television networks didn't really understand what the Duffers were trying to do with Montauk. Fantasy shows with science fiction elements were not exactly a rarity on television and the networks evidently didn't see anything special about Montauk that would make it stand out from the pack. There had also been a large number of underwhelming small screen miniseries and TV movies based on Stephen King stories and it is possible that the networks decided that Montauk simply sounded like another one of those. The genius pitch of Montauk, that is a Stephen King miniseries directed by the 1980s version of Steven Spielberg, was apparently lost on the networks.

When they later reflected on this very frustrating period of rejection after rejection, the Duffers said they got the impression that networks were looking for Twin Peaks or a detective show rather than a science fiction horror fantasy adventure show like Montauk. Some of the networks even suggested that the Duffers should remove the children from the pilot script and just focus on Jim Hopper. Anyone who thought Montauk would be improved by removing all the children clearly didn't really understand what the Duffers were doing at all. The pitch for Montauk received over a dozen rejections before the Duffers had a lucky and very welcome stroke of fortune. Shawn Levy, a director, producer, and writer best known for films like the Night at the Museum series and Real Steel, encountered the pitch and story treatment for Montauk and loved the concept. At long last, the Duffers had finally found someone on their wavelength who understood what they were trying to do.

The enthusiastic Shawn Levy wanted to be involved with the project and would end up as a co-producer and director on the show alongside the Duffers. A deal was struck within 24 hours with Netflix for Montauk to go into production. The budget was set at $6 million an episode. Montauk was to be an eight hour long miniseries with one long story that had a beginning, middle, and end. A capsule summary of the plot for Montauk still had a mysterious girl escaping from a secret and sinister government laboratory as a local child inexplicably vanished. This core plot would remain intact and not be changed at all.

Montauk was eventually dropped as the location for the show. The Duffers, on reflection, decided a coastal shoot would present technical and logistical problems that were probably best avoided. The weather on the coast was also an obvious concern. The Duffers were as aware as anyone that shooting Jaws on Martha's Vineyard had been a nightmare for Steven Spielberg with the bad weather and tourist sailboats constantly roaming into view and ruining shots. They didn't want Montauk to be a nightmare production. The Duffers decided that the story for their show would now take place in a more generic any town USA backdrop rather than the Amity Island inspired Montauk. Everywhere from Texas to the Pacific Northwest was considered as the new backdrop for the show. Eventually, the Duffers declared the show would now be set in Indiana in a fictional town named Hawkins that is hemmed in by nature and woodland. As a consequence of this decision, Montauk obviously had to be axed as the title of the show.

The Duffers considered many new titles after Montauk was dropped. The titles they considered were The Rift, The Nether, Sentinel, Flickers, The Keep, The Tesseract, and Wormhole. The Keep was the title of a Michael Mann horror film and The Tesseract was the title of an Alex Garland novel so no prizes for originality of those two fronts (which probably explains why they were not chosen). A title they nearly settled on was Indigo but Matt Duffer eventually came up with Stranger Things - which was inspired by the Stephen King story Needful Things. Ross Duffer hated the title Stranger Things at first but eventually got used to it.

The Duffers had to remove all the beach scenes and references to Camp Hero that featured in their pilot script and the new scripts they were formulating. In the Montauk pilot script, the Byers family lived in the shadow of Camp Hero and Hopper lived in a shack on the beach. Camp Hero played a big part in the story but a mysterious laboratory in Indiana would now have to take its place. One person who wasn't very happy at all with all these changes was the actor David Harbour - who had signed to play Chief Jim Hopper. Harbour disliked the new title Stranger Things so much he personally telephoned the Duffers to complain. The reference heavy pop culture easter eggs of the Duffers were already in evidence even at this very early stage. Hawkins and Jim Hopper are both characters in the 1987 science fiction action horror film Predator.

After the show changed its name, the Duffers found that they much preferred the location becoming a fictional town rather than a real place like Montauk. Creating a fictional town enabled them to follow in the footsteps of Stephen King with Castle Rock and David Lynch with Twin Peaks. The Duffers never considered calling their show Hawkins because they felt that having a show named after the town in which it takes place was an idea that had been done too many times before. This was another reason why, in hindsight, they were glad that Montauk became Stranger Things.

Most of the cast for Stranger Things was assembled when the show was still called Montauk. Winona Ryder, a cult eighties and nineties film star adored by the Duffers, was signed to play Joyce Byers - the mother of the missing child Will Byers in Stranger Things. Ryder was the first cast member to officially sign up for the show. The casting of Winona Ryder happily mitigated any desire Netflix might have had to pursue better known actors for the other parts. This allowed the Duffers and their casting director to cast who they wanted - even if those people were complete unknowns who hadn't done anything else.

Winona Ryder didn't really know what Netflix was or what streaming meant but she found herself charmed by the geeky enthusiasm of the Duffer Brothers. She also relished the chance to play a part where she was finally acting her own age for a change. Ryder had been offered many horror projects over the years but turned nearly all of them down because they simply didn't appeal to her. She made an exception with Stranger Things because she could see that the show might potentially have broad appeal to people of all ages (rather than just horror fans). The chance to play completely against type and portray a blue collar single mother was also very appealing to Ryder.

The Duffers, who had grown up watching Winona Ryder movies (like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Lucas, and Heathers), were completely in awe of Ryder on the set when they first began directing her in Stranger Things but this soon passed. They found Winona Ryder to be remarkably down to earth and modest. She didn't act like a star at all. Ryder, who does not have children of her own, consulted her mother on how to play Joyce Byers. She asked her mother how a real parent would act if their child was missing. Her mother said that any parent in that awful situation would be highly strung, emotional, and willing to do absolutely anything to get the child back. This then, was how Winona played Joyce in season one. She decided she would not hold back at all. Ryder had to convincingly fake all of Joyce's emotion, even the tears, in Stranger Things because she is allergic to the chemical actors use to make them appear teary eyed.

The burly New York born David Harbour was a perennial background player before Stranger Things made him famous. He was in his forties but had never been a leading man in anything. Harbour was a supporting actor seemingly destined to forever play second fiddle in any number