Stranger Things goes full-on Lovecraft in S4 trailer, and we’re here for it

[Karlston]

Looks like we'll finally get the full scoop on the show's underlying mythology.

Netflix has released the official trailer for the fourth season of Stranger Things.

 

It's been a long wait, but the official full trailer for the fourth season of Stranger Things is finally here. The trailer is set to Journey's "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)," and it brings full-blown Lovecraftian horror vibes. We get a spooky house with a mysterious grandfather clock, spontaneous levitation, an eyeless old man, and a brief glimpse of a grotesque humanoid figure sprouting the oozing tentacles that serve as the calling card of the Upside Down. Yep, we're here for it.

 

(Spoilers for the first three seasons below.)

 

Netflix has been releasing various teasers for the last two years, each markedly different in tone—classic Goonies, Scooby-Doo, all those '80s John Hughes movies—so it has been difficult to get any real sense of what S4 will be like, both tonally and in terms of plot. We've previously reported that David Harbour is returning as Hopper, along with the rest of the main cast. Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers), Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler), Natalia Dyer (Nancy Wheeler), Noah Schnapp (Will Byers), Charlie Heaton (Jonathan Byers), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson), Joe Keery (Steve Harrington), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair), and Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield) all return.

 

We also know the fourth season is the first to take place largely outside of Hawkins, since Eleven and the Byerses have moved away and Hopper is in a Russian prison. Maya Thurman Hawke returns as Robin, Brett Gelman is back as Murray Bauman, Cara Buono returns as the Wheeler matriarch, and we'll be seeing more of Priah Ferguson, who plays Lucas' sassy younger sister Erica. Among the new cast members is Robert Englund of Nightmare on Elm Street fame, a nice little nod to classic '80s horror. Englund plays Victor Creel, the former owner of the spooky Creel House featured in one of the teasers.

 

Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) hasn't regained her powers, but her friends in Hawkins need her to recover them—fast.

YouTube/Netflix

 

Netflix also released an expanded official premise:

 

It’s been six months since the Battle of Starcourt, which brought terror and destruction to Hawkins. Struggling with the aftermath, our group of friends are separated for the first time—and navigating the complexities of high school hasn't made things any easier. In this most vulnerable time, a new and horrifying supernatural threat surfaces, presenting a gruesome mystery that, if solved, might finally put an end to the horrors of the Upside Down.

 

We got more insight into what's in store when co-creators Matt and Ross Duffer recently spoke about the new season at a Deadline Hollywood panel. For starters, S4 is the longest season yet in terms of running time; not one of its nine episodes runs less than an hour. (Prior seasons had the occasional shorter 35- to 45-minute episode, and episodes only rarely ran past one hour.) Because the main characters have been split up, there are three distinct storylines that must be woven together, prompting the Duffer brothers to call S4 their "Game of Thrones season."

 

The mysterious Creel House will play a central role in the season's events.

YouTube/Netflix

 

That certainly explains the distinctive tones of the previous teasers. As for the longer episodes, they were necessary because we're finally going to learn more about the driving mythology behind the strange events in Hawkins—including the true nature of the Upside Down. Ross Duffer says the brothers wrote a 20-page document for Netflix when they were working on S1 and have been slowly revealing bits of it over the course of the series. "But this season, we really wanted to get into it and [reveal] some of those answers," he said. "But to do that properly, we needed time, so it just became bigger and bigger."

 

The sheer length of the run times prompted the brothers (with the concurrence of Netflix) to release S4 in two installments; they made the announcement in an open letter to fans back in February. As for the tone, the Duffer brothers said on a Netflix podcast that S4 would lean into a more mature kind of horror, given that the kids aren't really kids anymore:

When we pitched it to Netflix all those years ago, we pitched it as the kids are... The Goonies in E.T. That’s their storyline. And the adults are in Jaws and Close Encounters [sic] and then the teens are in Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween. But, this year, we don’t have the kids. We can’t do The Goonies anymore. And so, suddenly, we’re leaning much harder into that horror movie territory that we love. It was fun to make that change.

Robert Englund plays Victor Creel. Looks like he hasn't fared too well in the Upside Down.

YouTube/Netflix

 

This new trailer confirms all of that. It opens with an ominous, growling voiceover saying, "You've broken everything. Your suffering is almost at an end." Then we cut to Max at Billy's grave—recall that he sacrificed himself at the Starcourt Mall battle at the ripe old age of 18—giving him an update of how badly things are going. The Hawkins gang is trying to regroup after the tragic S3 finale and pretend everything is okay—not very successfully, although Lucas has sprouted into a high school basketball star. The Byers (and a powerless Eleven) are now in California, and it looks like Hopper is forced to battle a "demo-dog" in his Russian prison.

 

But the Upside Down is gearing up for one last onslaught, and the mysterious Creel House seems to be at the center of it—specifically, the grandfather clock in the house, which is attached to the wall by those same oozing tentacles. There are also flashbacks to a young Eleven coming into her full powers, presumably from the seventh episode ("The Massacre at Hawkins Lab"). We see Paul Reiser's DOE exec Sam Owens imploring Eleven for her help. "A war is coming," he tells her. "I'm afraid your friends in Hawkins are very much in the eye of the storm... Without you, we can't win this war."

 

So she'd better find those supernatural powers again—and quick.

 

The Dungeon Master beckons

 

Max (Sadie Sink) starts levitating at Billy's grave.

 

Hopper seems to be trapped in some Russian prison "fight club."

 

Flashback to the Massacre at Hawkins Lab.

 

Keep on rockin' in the Upside Down.

 

Straight outta Lovecraft.

 

Part 1 of Stranger Things S4 releases on Netflix on May 27, 2022. Part 2 will premiere on July 1, 2022.

 

Listing image by YouTube/Netflix

 

 

Stranger Things goes full-on Lovecraft in S4 trailer, and we’re here for it