NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The official behind-the-scenes companion guide to the first two seasons and beyond, featuring exclusive color photos and stunning concept art.

Note: This book has been designed to mimic a used book. The marks, scuffs, and tears on the cover and pages are an intentional design element.

Stranger things have happened. . . .

When the first season of Stranger Things debuted on Netflix in the summer of 2016, the show struck a nerve with millions of viewers worldwide and received broad critical acclaim. The series has gone on to win six Emmy Awards, but its success was driven more than anything by word of mouth, resonating across generations. Viewers feel personal connections to the characters. Now fans can immerse themselves in the world—or worlds—of Hawkins, Indiana, like never before. Inside you’ll find

• original commentary and a foreword from creators Matt and Ross Duffer
• exclusive interviews with the stars of the show, including Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, and David Harbour
• the show’s earliest drafts, pitches to Netflix, and casting calls
• insights into the Duffers’ creative process from the entire crew—from costume and set designers to composers and visual-effects specialists
• deep dives into the cultural artifacts and references that inspired the look and feel of the show
• a map of everyday Hawkins—with clues charting the network of the Upside Down
• the Morse code disk Eleven uses, so you can decipher secret messages embedded throughout the text
• a look into the future of the series—including a sneak preview of season three!

Adding whole new layers to enrich the viewing experience, this keepsake is essential reading for anyone and everyone who loves Stranger Things.

UP IN THE AIR

It’s one of the most eye-popping displays of Eleven’s amazing powers: as the young heroes are pursued by Brenner and his “bad men” through the streets of Hawkins, the gifted girl stares down a white van coming straight toward Mike and her and sends it soaring overhead. The vehicle crashes to the street below, blocking the pursuers’ path and allowing the kids to escape. Special effects coordinator Caius Man explains how he helped Eleven make the van fly:

“From our standpoint, it really wasn’t that supremely complicated. A flying car is a flying car. There were some unusual aspects to that because of the unnatural way they wanted it to fly, where it lifted sort of straight up and then tipped forward, so it took a little engineering. But it worked when we did it.

“We actually physically fired a van. We towed one down the street, and the van had in it two nitrogen cannons, two nitrogen sleeves that fired a high-density plastic slug out of the bottom of them to push it up into the air. One was just hitting a little harder than the other, which is what resulted in it going end over end the way it was supposed to.

“We built a small test in our shop. Basically, we built a plywood van with a couple of pneumatic cylinders, and we hopped it around the shop a bunch of times and were satisfied that it was going to function. [The Duffers]
wanted to see a full-size version of it to make sure that we could get it sufficiently high [so that they] could composite the children on the bicycles underneath it. What we did is, we shot it in the air, and then we had the kids ride down the street with the camera in the same position. Then we just cropped the two images together. We didn’t shoot the van over kids. That would be insane.

“We took it to a parking lot—a similar van, not exactly the same van—to a parking lot at Screen Gems, at our studio, and shot it. It launched, and everybody was excited. It landed exactly where I told them it was going to land, and pretty much everything was as it should be. On the day, we pointed three cameras at it, and we had a camera in the middle of the street that was aimed straight at it. It was the POV of the kids, and we fired it up over the camera. The first time we did it, we had a mechanical flaw. Instead of jumping up in the air, the front end jumped up and not the back, and it shark-attacked the camera in the middle of the street and destroyed it. So that didn’t work as well as we would’ve liked.

“It turned out to be a mechanical failure in a part that we replaced. The body shop fixed up the bumper in a couple of days, and we shot it again two weeks later. It was flawless and beautiful. As Shawn [Levy] described it, the gag’s so nice, we did it twice.”

Gina McIntyre is a veteran entertainment journalist who has covered movies, TV, and music for the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and Entertainment Weekly. She is the author of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water: Creating a Fairy Tale for Troubled Times and The Art of Ready Player One. Her writing has also appeared in Rolling Stone online. She lives with her husband and daughter in Riverside, Illinois.

Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer are film and television writers, directors, and producers, as well as twin brothers. They are the creators of Stranger Things, which has won five Emmys as well as awards from the Producers Guild of America and the American Film Institute.

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