In an interview with IGN, Matt and Ross Duffer discussed the upcoming Stranger Things Season 2. Since Season 2 is still early in development, the Duffers are still considering the 80s pop culture influences that will go into the new episodes of the Netflix series.
“We like thinking of these as movies,” Matt Duffer said, “I’m sure that a lot of people are going to prefer Season 1, but I think a lot of people will prefer Season 2, because I think it’s going to be a little darker and a little weirder. I think we feel like we have a license to go a little weirder in this season, so that’s been a lot of fun. We’re going to have a bit more VFX to play around with.”
Stranger Things Season 1 was set in 1983. Since Season 2 will take place the following year, the Duffers have been looking closely at 1984. “1984 was a fucking amazing year, especially the movies that came out in the summer of 1984,” Matt told IGN. “Ghostbusters just came out, Temple of Doom, Karate Kid, Gremlins - it was an awesome year for cinema."
Matt Duffer singled out Temple of Doom in particular. “I actually really love Temple of Doom, I love that it gets a little darker and weirder from Raiders, I like that it feels very different than Raiders did. Even though it was probably slammed at the time - obviously now people look back on it fondly, but it messed up a lot of kids, and I love that about that film - that it really traumatised some children. Not saying that we want to traumatise children, just that we want to get a little darker and weirder.”
The Duffers want Stranger Things Season 2 to feel as much like a sequel as possible, more like a movie than a TV series. “We want to call it Stranger Things 2. It was important in Season 1 that we have this very clear tension - Will Byers goes missing and it's about finding him and bringing him back. And we resolved that main tension, obviously. There are lingering questions, but the idea with Season 2 is there's a new tension and the goal is can the characters resolve that tension by the end. So it's going to be its own sort of complete little movie, very much in the way that Season 1 is,” Ross Duffer said.
Stranger Things Season 1 is streaming on Netflix now, with no release date in sight for Stranger Things 2.
