Here’s what we know about the second instalment of everyone’s favourite science-fiction horror mystery comedy adventure supernatural period drama.
Netflix has announced a second season of Stranger Things, the surprise hit of the summer that finally answers the question we’ve all asked – what would a Stephen Spielberg/Stephen King collaboration have looked like in the eighties?
The online streaming service announced the new season, with the most Stranger Things teaser ever.
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXWG_kKDZlY
As expected, the teaser gives us very little to go on, but the eerie synth music and new chapter titles, which include ‘The Boy Who Came Back to Life’, ‘The Pollywog’ and ‘The Lost Brother’, promise a familiar second season.
The second season will follow on directly from the first, but will be entitled ‘Stranger Things 2‘ (rather than season 2), so don’t expect it to have exactly the same feel, say the Duffer brothers, who are taking inspiration from director James Cameron for the second instalment:
‘I know movies sequels get a lot of shit, but the ones we look up to aspire to pivot and do something different. There’s Aliens, T2; I guess a lot of this is James Cameron, but he’s brilliant, and I think one of the reasons his sequels are as successful as they are is he makes them feel very different without losing what we loved about the original.’
So the follow-up, or sequel, will return to its alternate dimension, the Upside Down, but won’t be limited to the same small Indiana town.
‘We just peeled back the curtain and revealed a tiny bit of the Upside Down, so we definitely want to explore it a little more. There’s a lot more mystery to be solved – we obviously have this gate to another dimension, which is still very much open in Hawkins, but we will venture a little bit outside of Hawkins too. I will say the opening scene [of the premiere] does not take place in Hawkins.’
The same goes for the cast. Most of the major players are returning, but there are enough small changes to the line-up to keep it fresh.
‘I think we talked [about] a larger time jump where the kids are older and it’s a different decade. But for us, there’s still more story here [with these characters], but we don’t know about Eleven. We leave that up in the air.’
The Duffers also revealed that there will be four new additions to the main cast, so we’ll have to see if they can make up for the potential absence of Millie Bobby Brown, whose portrayal of a certain telekinetic eggo-enthusiast was the highlight of season 1.
Stranger Things 2 is expected to drop in 2017.
