14-20 Oct 2017^ guide^10
e met in the womb. It
was very dark. We’ve
been together our entire
lives.” From their offices in Los
Angeles, Matt Duffer and his
twin brother Ross are discussing
the origins of their creative
partnership and how, 33 years
later, it gave birth to the spooky
TV phenomenon Stranger
Things. It has been just over a
year since the summer of 2016,
when this nostalgic supernatural
series went from word-of-mouth
must-see to TV game-changer
seemingly overnight.
It became almost impossible to
go online without coming across
Stranger Things, as its stars,
scenes and snappy dialogue were
dissected, hashtagged and meme-
ified. There was the campaign to
#savebarb, after the fan-favourite
played by Shannon Purser – who
earned an Emmy nomination for
the performance – was dragged
off to the Upside Down during a
pensive poolside moment. There
was the ever-present, Stephen
King-esque font, which inspired
an online Stranger Things
title-card generator, meaning
everyone could make their name
or a puerile combination of
swear words look spooky; and
there was Eleven’s shaved head
and unique dress sense, making
her an immediate Halloween-
costume favourite.
Stranger Things became the
kind of TV talking point not
seen since Sean Bean first led
a family of gruff northerners
to King’s Landing. Nobody, not
even Netflix, saw it coming.
“Netflix was even afraid to put the
monster on the marketing,” recalls
Ross. “They didn’t want to put
people off.” Certainly, the brothers
could never have anticipated
just how huge the series would
become and how quickly.
“You just kind of get lost,”
says Matt. “First we had this idea
for a show, and never in a million
years did we think we’d get it on
a place like Netflix.” The Dufferswere born in 1984 and raised
in North Carolina. They were
obsessed with movies for as long
as they can remember. “It was
Tim Burton’s Batman in, what,
89, I think?” says Ross. “What we
could see was there was someone
behind the curtain controlling all
of this, and you could see it from
one Tim Burton film to the next,
that the guy who made Edward
Scissorhands also made Batman.
You could connect the dots
because his style was so distinct.
He was the first director we
became obsessed with as kids.”
Their parents bought them a Hi
video camera and they started
to make their own versions of
Burton movies.
“Then,” Matt picks up, “you
start tracking directors. You find a
movie you love and you figure out
who directed it, then you go to
the video store and go through
all the John Carpenter stuff, and
all the Sam Raimi stuff. We fellin love with movies through
directors. Very early on we knew
that was what we wanted to do.”
By their early teens, they were
already formulating plans to
study film-making.
They made it to film school in
California, and after graduating
wrote and directed their first
feature script, Hidden – a 2015
thriller about a global viral
outbreak and, true to form,
creepy monsters on the other
side of a barrier – but its few
reviews were middling, and it
doesn’t sound as if it was the
fairytale that the brothers had
dreamed about.
“We had a difficult experience
at Warner Bros with our first
studio movie,” Matt says. “We
came away a little disillusioned.
Then we went around pitching
a lot of movie ideas, and no one
seemed to care about them. They
really wanted to know if we had
any television ideas.” They had‘‘W
JACKSON LEE DAVIS/NETFLIX