Stranger Things (Season 1)
Introduction of Stranger Things (S1):
On July 15, 2016, Netflix, the streaming service, launched the first season of the American science fiction horror drama television series Stranger Things globally. In addition to serving as executive producers of Stranger Things, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and the Duffer Brothers conceived the series.
With Noah Schnapp, Joe Keery, and Shannon Purser in recurring roles, this season features Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Cara Buono, Matthew Modine. Widespread praise was bestowed upon Stranger Things‘ debut season, especially for its uniqueness, 1980s-inspired references, characters, tone, aesthetics, and performance.
Cast:
The storyline of Stranger Things:
Episode 1 :
A scientist at a U.S. government laboratory in Hawkins, Indiana, is attacked on November 6, 1983, by an unseen entity. While riding home from a Dungeons & Dragons game with his pals Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson, and Lucas Sinclair, 12-year-old Will Byers encounters the creature and then abruptly disappears. When Will Byers’s single mother Joyce Byers reports his absence to Jim Hopper, the police chief, the next day, he begins a search but tells Joyce that most missing children are discovered very soon.
Dr. Martin Brenner, the director of the facility, looks into an organic liquid that seems to be coming out of the basement, saying that “the girl” couldn’t have gone very far. A little girl, anxious and dressed in a hospital gown, enters a nearby diner. Her name is Eleven, which the owner, Benny, discovers when he notices a tattoo of “011” on her arm.
While keeping an eye on the phone lines, Brenner dispatches agents to the diner following Benny’s social services call. Eleven uses his telekinetic powers to escape after the agents kill Benny. After receiving an enigmatic call that she thinks to be from Will, Joyce’s phone short circuits. Mike, Dustin, and Lucas find Eleven in the woods while looking for Will.
Episode 2 :
After bringing Eleven to Mike’s house, the boys can’t agree on what to do. Eleven’s plan, devised by Mike, is to pose as a runaway and approach his mother Karen for assistance. But when Eleven refuses, she confesses that “bad men” are pursuing her. Jonathan, Will’s brother, goes to Indianapolis to look for his estranged father Lonnie, but Lonnie rejects him.
A piece of hospital gown is found next to the lab by Hopper’s search team. Eleven persuades the lads to believe her when she shows them that she can locate Will using telekinesis and identifies Will from a picture. Eleven symbolizes that Will is on the “Upside Down” side of the board and is being pursued by the “Demogorgon” (the creature) by using a Dungeons & Dragons board. Mike’s sister Nancy attends a party with her boyfriend Steve Harrington and Barbara ‘Barb’ Holland, Nancy’s friend. Nancy has been driven there by Barb in her 1983 Volkswagen Golf.
Jonathan surreptitiously captures party photos while looking for Will close to Steve’s residence. Joyce gets a call from Will again, notices a thing coming through the wall, and hears music coming from his speakers. When Barb is left alone by the pool, the Demogorgon attacks her and takes her away.
Episode 3 :
Barb wakes up in the Upside Down, an overgrown, rotting parallel universe. As she tries to flee, the Demogorgon attacks her. Joyce thinks that pulses in lightbulbs are how Will is communicating. When Hopper visits Hawkins Lab, the staff allows him to watch manipulated surveillance footage from the night Will disappeared. This prompts Hopper to look into Brenner and learns of his connection to Project MKUltra as well as the fact that Terry Ives, a woman, claimed years prior that Brenner had stolen her kid. Recalling Brenner as “Papa,” Eleven gets punished for not using telekinesis to harm a kitten. After seeing the party images, Steve breaks Jonathan’s camera.
Later, Nancy finds a picture of Barb while also learning that she has vanished. When Nancy goes back to Steve’s house to look into it, she discovers Barb’s undamaged Volkswagen and runs into the Demogorgon, but she escapes. Joyce uses Christmas lights to create an alphanumeric board on her wall, which Will uses to signal to her that he is “RIGHT HERE” and that she must “RUN” when the Demogorgon bursts through the wall. Assuming Eleven is aware of Will’s location, the lads request her assistance in locating him. They are frustrated when Eleven takes them to Will’s residence. Just after Will’s body is pulled out of the water, they follow rescue vehicles to a nearby quarry.
Episode 4 :
Joyce doesn’t think Will’s body was discovered in the quarry. Until Eleven uses Mike’s walkie-talkie to demonstrate that Will is still alive, Mike feels deceived by Eleven. The lads speculate that Eleven could talk to Will using a ham radio at their school. Jonathan understands that the figure Nancy saw behind Barb in his photo matches his mother’s description of the Demogorgon. Nancy reports Barb’s disappearance to the authorities. Later, she gets into an argument with Steve, who is just concerned with keeping his father out of trouble.
When
Hopper finds out that the regular coroner was sent home, he begins to doubt the
veracity of the body found in the quarry. After confronting the state trooper
who discovered it, Hopper attacks him until he confesses that he was told to
lie. While Will’s voice can be heard through Joyce’s living room wall, the guys
sneak Eleven into their school to use the radio. She tears the wallpaper away
to reveal him. Eleven listens to Will chatting to his mother on the radio.
After discovering that the body at the morgue is phoney, Hopper gets into the
lab because he believes Brenner is the one who is to blame.
Episode 5 :
Before the lab’s guards knock him out, Hopper explores the facility. When the lads ask Mr. Clarke, their scientific instructor, if it would be possible to travel across different dimensions, he responds that there might be a hypothetical “gate” between dimensions. When Hopper discovers a concealed microphone in his home upon awakening, he realizes that Joyce was correct. The guys look for a gate that could open and cause disruption to Earth’s electromagnetic field by following their compasses. Eleven remembers being put in a sensory deprivation tank to listen in on a man speaking Russian telepathically; during the conversation, she heard about the Demogorgon.
Eleven reroutes the compasses out of fear of running into the Demogorgon again. Because Lucas believes this to be a betrayal, Eleven uses telekinesis to hurl Lucas away from Mike during their altercation. Eleven flees as Dustin and Mike tend to the unconscious Lucas. Jonathan and Nancy come up with a scheme to destroy the Demogorgon. They find an injured deer in the woods while conducting their search. Nancy unintentionally attracts the attention of the Demogorgon when she climbs through a little gate to the Upside Down.
Episode 6 :
Jonathan opens the gate and drags Nancy out again. Nancy begs Jonathan to spend the evening in her bedroom because she is terrified to be by herself. Steve suspects they are dating after seeing them together via Nancy’s bedroom window to make amends. Joyce and Hopper locate Terry Ives, who is being cared for by her sister Becky and is in a catatonic state. Terry believes Brenner abducted her daughter Jane at birth because of her purported telekinetic and telepathic skills, according to Becky, who clarifies that Terry was a Project MKUltra member while unknowingly pregnant.
Because they believe the Demogorgon is drawn to blood, Nancy and Jonathan gather weapons in anticipation of its arrival. Steve calls Nancy a slut, which leads to a fistfight with Jonathan. Eleven enters a grocery store and proceeds to pilfer multiple Eggo waffle cartons. While searching for Eleven, Mike and Dustin are approached by a group of thugs.
She uses her abilities to break one of the bullies’ arms after he tries to kill Mike, saving them. When Eleven passes out, she remembers being instructed by Brenner to get in touch with the Demogorgon and, in her panic, unintentionally opening the portal. With tears in her eyes, she tells Mike that she let the Demogorgon into this dimension. Agents who have located Eleven are about to launch an ambush on Mike’s home, as Lucas witnesses.
Episode 7 :
Agents are looking for Eleven, Lucas informs Mike. Dustin, Mike, and Eleven escape the house. While the kids flee, Eleven uses telekinesis to flip one of the vans that are in their way. The kids hide in the junkyard as Lucas makes amends with Mike and Eleven. Joyce and Hopper learn of Nancy and Jonathan’s familiarity with the Demogorgon. After getting in touch with the children, the group meets at the Byers’ residence.
Eleven is identified as Jane Ives by Joyce and Hopper. Eleven’s previous exploits have weakened her, so the group asks her to use telepathy to look for Will and Barb. To strengthen Eleven’s abilities, they break into the middle school and construct a homemade sensory deprivation tank. Eleven discovers Will hiding in his upside-down backyard fort while he is dead and Barb deceased.
When Hopper and Joyce break into the lab after realizing that the gate is located in the basement, security officers catch them. To lure and kill the Demogorgon, Nancy and Jonathan return to the Byers’ residence. Will’s fort is broken into by the Demogorgon in the Upside Down.
Episode 8 :
A troubled man, having lost his daughter Sara to cancer years before, Hopper tells Brenner where Eleven is, and Brenner grants Hopper and Joyce permission to go into the Upside Down and save Will. When they got to the Byers’ house, Nancy and Jonathan cut their hands to draw the Demogorgon. Steve shows up right before the Demogorgon emerges, trying to apologize to Jonathan for their altercation. The Demogorgon is forced to flee to the Upside Down after Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan battle it and set it on fire.
As Brenner and his operatives approach to abduct Eleven, she kills most of them before passing out from exhaustion as Eleven and the boys hide in the middle school. A horrified Brenner is attacked as the boys flee with Eleven while Brenner and a few of his men lock Eleven and the boys down. The Demogorgon, drawn to the bloody carcasses of the agents Eleven murdered, then emerges and attacks the remaining agents.
After finding Will comatose with an impregnating tendril down his throat, Hopper and Joyce explore the Upside Down’s version of the Hawkins library. There, they come across multiple corpses of the Demogorgon’s victims, including Barb’s. They then do CPR on Will to bring him back to consciousness.
The Demogorgon discovers the boys, and after multiple unsuccessful attempts to harm it with Lucas’ slingshot, Eleven surprisingly overcomes her fatigue and disintegrates the Demogorgan before vanishing. As Will heals in the hospital, he gets back to see his loved ones. A month later, on Christmas Eve, Nancy and Steve are once again together and are friends with Jonathan. Will sees visions of the Upside Down and coughs up a larva that resembles a slug, but he keeps these things from his family.
Filming of Stranger Things (S1):
The brothers had wanted to stay true to the original Montauk premise and film Stranger Things on the Long Island region. But because filming of Stranger Things was supposed to begin in November 2015 and it was too cold to shoot on Long Island, the producers of Stranger Things began looking for venues in and around Atlanta, Georgia. The brothers felt the region would fit in well with the narrative move to the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana because they saw numerous sites there that brought back memories of their childhoods. The boys grew up in North Carolina.
The Duffer Brothers and Levy directed individual episodes of Stranger Things during the first season’s extended filming, which started on September 25, 2015, in Atlanta, Georgia. The imaginary Indiana town of Hawkins, Indiana, was modelled after Jackson.
In addition, Stranger Things was shot at the Georgia Mental Health Institute, which served as the site for Hawkins National Laboratory; Bellwood Quarry; Patrick Henry High School in Stockbridge, Georgia, for the scenes of Stranger Things involving middle and high school students; Emory University’s Continuing Education Department; the former Douglasville city hall; Georgia International Horse Park; the probate court in Butts County, Georgia; East Point, Georgia; Fayetteville, Georgia; Stone Mountain Park; Palmetto, Georgia; and Winston, Georgia. At Atlanta’s Screen Gem Studios, the set work of Stranger Things was completed. A Red Dragon digital camera was used to record Stranger Things. Early January 2016, the Stranger Things‘ first season’s filming came to an end.
The brothers made a point of getting photos during the production of Stranger Things that appeared to pay homage to as many of the references to the 1980s as they could remember. They intended to give the impression that Stranger Things was a 1980s movie rather than to overdo it with allusions. They went by memory and didn’t take much time to go over those works. A fan-made movie that contrasts the program with many 1980s productions side by side highlights Matt’s realization that some of their filming homages were not intentional.
About the video, Matt said, “Some were deliberate and some were subconscious.” After the brothers noticed that many of the well-known sequences from these 1980s films, such as the one in Poltergeist, were about “taking a very ordinary object that people deal with every day, their television set, and imbuing it with something otherworldly,” they decided to use the Christmas light strings to let Will speak to Joyce.
The set and costume designers of Stranger Things as well as the soundtrack composers of Stranger Things who assisted in helping them reproduce the era gave the brothers a lot of credit for the 1980s vibe. Head of props Lynda Reiss had, like most filmmakers, a budget of roughly $220,000 to gather 1980s items via eBay, flea markets, and estate auctions for Stranger Things in the Atlanta region. Only a few components, such as the replica Dungeons & Dragons volumes, were actual 1980s props that made up the majority of the set.
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Release Date of Stranger Things (S1):
July 15, 2016, saw the global debut of Stranger Things‘ first season on Netflix in Ultra HD 4K and HDR, with episodes lasting an hour each.
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