Stranger Things: The Complete Scripts, Season 1

Introduction

For as long as we can remember, we wanted to make movies. There was one problem: We lived in Durham, North Carolina, which felt like a galaxy far, far away from Hollywood.

So we came up with a plan.

Step one: Get closer. After graduating high school, we enrolled in film school at Chapman University in Orange County, California—a roughly forty-five-minute drive from Los Angeles. Close enough, we figured. At Chapman, we made a few short films, landed some internships, and made our very first Hollywood connections. We even secured an agent. A real Hollywood agent! Everything was falling into place.

Then we graduated—and the bubble burst. Like so many art graduates, we struggled to find work. The years slipped by. We wrote script after script, pitched countless ideas to glassy-eyed executives . . . but had nothing to show for it. We were broke, burned out, and on the verge of giving up. But we gave ourselves one last Hail Mary. Only this time, we wouldn’t chase a big studio paycheck. We’d find independent financing and shoot on the cheap.

We came up with a simple idea: a contained thriller about a family hiding in a bomb shelter from monsters. We called it Hidden. Against all odds, our tiny indie script found its way to Warner Bros., and to our disbelief, they bought it. Not only that, they wanted us to direct. It felt like the impossible was finally happening: Our dreams were coming true.

And then everything went wrong.

After we completed Hidden, Warner Bros. decided our small film was in fact too small. They pulled its theatrical release and sent it straight to video. In the years before streaming, that was a death sentence. After a stretch of mourning and panic, we dusted ourselves off and started to toss around new movie ideas. One of them was inspired by the Montauk Project—a conspiracy theory involving secret government experiments in the early eighties. These (alleged) experiments touched on just about every supernatural phenomenon imaginable: psionic powers, interdimensional rifts, monsters. In other words, everything we loved. At the time, Paranormal Activity was a smash hit, so, in a desperate (and admittedly rather lame) attempt to appeal to the marketplace, we shaped the Montauk Project into a found footage film. There was just one problem: We didn’t actually like found footage films. The idea never sparked. So we shoved it in a drawer in our Los Feliz apartment, where it quickly began to gather dust.

Everything changed in the fall of 2013 when we saw the film Prisoners, an intense thriller about a young girl who is tragically abducted—and her family and the police chief are determined to find her and bring her home. We liked it so much that we found ourselves wishing it was longer. Perhaps, we thought, there was something to a TV show about a child’s kidnapping? It might be cool, if not exactly original.

That next morning, it struck us: What if we took the structure of a child kidnapping storyline and merged it with our old Montauk idea? A child goes missing—but instead of being kidnapped by a serial killer, he’s taken by a demonic force, stolen into an alternate dimension. Set in the 1980s, the story would channel the works of Stephen King and Steven Spielberg—the kinds of stories we grew up loving. We still vividly remember the rush of excitement when the idea clicked. We knew it could be special.

We set about writing it the very next day. In our ten-plus years of writing scripts, nothing ever wrote itself faster. We knew these kids, these voices, this world. We called it Montauk. We sent the script out to various producers and eventually teamed up with 21 Laps—just the first of many unlikely choices we made in bringing this show to life. Shawn Levy, the founder of the company, was best known for directing family films like Night at the Museum. To top it off, he had never produced television before. But unlike other producers, Shawn and his executive Dan Cohen understood Montauk in a way no one else did, and they believed in us—not just as writers but also as showrunners and directors. To us, that was everything.

Before we knew it, we found ourselves traipsing around town, enthusiastically pitching the show to studios. Our enthusiasm wasn’t exactly mirrored. Instead, we got puzzled looks, polite nods—and concern.

“Period pieces are expensive and no longer popular. Can you set it in the present day?”

“Who is this show for? It’s too dark for kids, but it stars kids. Can’t you just make it about the troubled small-town detective?”

The noes began to pile up—faster and faster, like a horror montage we couldn’t control. We despaired. But then fate—or luck—intervened when our agent had lunch with a young Netflix executive to talk about a completely different project. Almost as an aside, the Netflix exec mentioned they were looking for a supernatural show with young protagonists. “You don’t have anything like that, do you?”

Two weeks later, the show had a series greenlight.

We were elated—and terrified. Production was set to begin in the fall, it was already March, and we had one script. While we had a rough idea for the season, there were still so many things we hadn’t figured out. Over the next few months in the writers’ room, a lot came together: the setting of Hawkins, Indiana; the name and look of the Upside Down; Joyce communicating with Will through Christmas lights; Will’s fake “death”; Steve’s transformation from jock asshole to unexpected hero; and even a new title for the show, Stranger Things (a title that, we might add, wasn’t popular right away).

Casting began almost immediately. We found Gaten, Millie, Finn, Caleb, Noah, Joe, Winona, and David. Their personalities began to shape, adding depth and complexity to the characters we had written. Before we knew it—and before we even had all the scripts finished—filming began.

We’d be lying if we said we knew it was going to work. But somehow, the speed and the fear imposed on us worked in our favor. There was no time to procrastinate, no time to overthink. We wrote from the gut, relying on instinct, on memories of our childhoods, and on the movies and stories we’d always loved.

It was fun. It was stressful. It was madness.

In many ways, because of the way it all came together, this first season is scrappier—a little rougher around the edges— than the ones that followed. But we think that’s key to its success. There’s a simplicity, an honesty, a purity to the storytelling that feels uniquely tied to where we were in that moment in time. We’d never dare compare the quality of the show to Star Wars, but in our minds, this season has always been our A New Hope. Less polished, more handmade—but perhaps more endearing because of it.

We hope you enjoy looking back on it as much as we did.

Over and out,

Matt and Ross Duffer