[Ross] This is, uh, what we call the Demo pit. We're gonna be shooting in here a bit today with David and Winona. We're also gonna be shooting some other stuff, so come check it out.

[upbeat music plays] I think our goal with the show is always to try something different every year and make sure the show is evolving. And that comes naturally in a lot of ways because our kids are growing up. It's funny, I can't even call them kids. They're like full-blown young adults now. And so, we thought that this was a good year to put them in a full-fledged Nightmare on Elm Street-esque horror film. So there still will be some fun to be had throughout the adventures this year. But overall, I would say, that the tone is certainly darker than it's been. Part of the drive in tension this season is that we have this big new evil emerge in Hawkins. And, for the first time ever, Eleven is not there. And not only is she separated by distance, but at the end of Season 3, she's lost her powers. So, even when she learns about what has happened in Hawkins, she's unable to help them in the same way that she has before.

[mysterious music playing] In order to get her powers back, she has to revisit her entire past, which is very traumatic. She has to go back and re-experience a lot of the things she wished she had forgotten. This is the first time we're seeing our kids in high school. So they've graduated from middle school and moved into high school. And we see them kind of pulled in several different directions, which is challenging for them. We see Lucas, he's pulled over to the side of the jocks because he's athletic and he thinks he has a shot at being popular for once. Um, Dustin and Mike, who are less athletically gifted, drift more naturally to the Hellfire Club and the nerds and the outsiders.

[Matt] Steve is just focused, at the beginning of the season, on getting dates. He's feeling a little… He's very lonely, and he's struggling to find that. But while he's focused on that, Dustin, in order to find his place in high school, has really started to bond with the people in the Hellfire Club, specifically Eddie, who runs it, who he starts to really look up to. And that puts a little bit of a wedge between our favorite bromance.

[clip]

[Dustin] Eddie! This is Steve. He's not gonna hurt you.

[end clip]

[Ross] The Hellfire Club is a big part of this season. Hellfire Club is a fancy name for Hawkins High's Dungeons & Dragons club. Uh, pretty nerdy club. It's run by Eddie Munson, who's a major new character played by Joseph Quinn, who's giving an amazing performance. And he's not your typical nerd in the way that, you know, you would think of nerds at that time or think of D&D players at that time. He's into fantasy, of course, but he's also into heavy metal music. He has a band. D&D, at the time, it was a concern that it was leading to a rise in Satanism. So, to some people in Hawkins, they don't think that it's an innocent game that they're playing but that there's something more sinister beneath the surface. So, really, we're inspired by that sort of Satanic panic that was happening around this time. And, you know, Paradise Lost is a documentary series. Those were really inspirations for both the Eddie character and, uh, the Hellfire Club. Eddie Munson. He's the leader of one of these cults. They call themselves Hellfire.

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[Ross] We have so many distinct visuals. We have so many brand-new, exciting locations. We're spread out all over the place.

[Matt] We have very different aesthetics. We've got a California aesthetic, a Hawkins spring aesthetic, and then we've got a wintery Russian aesthetic. So, all of those different tones playing at the same time is a really… probably the biggest influence on this season.

[Ross] The start of our season, Joyce receives a mysterious package in the mail. In it is a letter. It almost reads like a ransom letter. It leads her to believe that Hopper is alive, actually, imprisoned in Russia. And we learn that Hopper is indeed alive. He's imprisoned in the brutal wasteland of Kamchatka, Russia. And he's reached out to Joyce to help him secure money for a possible escape attempt.

[Matt] In California, it's a very different vibe in a lot of ways because the goal for California is to kind of have that ET, Valley feel of it. The Byers are in a new sort of suburban location that's really exciting to us, and they've made some new friends. Jonathan has a new best friend named Argyle who works at some place called Surfer Boy Pizza. And Argyle is sort of your quintessential '80s stoner. Surf's up. Surfer Boy Pizza, this is Argyle speaking.

[dramatic music playing] Hawkins, which is kind of the center for our horror story, has the Creel house, which is a major new sort of haunted house location. What occurs in that house is pivotal to understanding what has been happening in Hawkins all of these years. The main villain of this season, Vecna, resides in the attic of the Creel house, in the Upside Down. We always like to introduce a new Demo creature, as you will, and so, we were excited about introducing Demo bats.

[screeching] Maybe one of them alone is not very dangerous, but when there's hundreds and hundreds of them coming at you the same time, they're very, very deadly. And they also have the ability to act as spies. So, you may not even see one in the tree, and it spies you, and then, suddenly, because everything is a hive mind, uh, in the Upside Down, every monster in there knows that you're there. We've learned more this season than we ever have about our mythology. We've learned a lot about the Upside Down and what this evil that has been threatening Hawkins all these years really wants. Exciting for us in that way, that there's a lot of story being uncovered here. And I think probably the fact that we're as spread out as we are this year defines this season more than anything. All these storylines, though disparate as they are, they do end up eventually, inevitably, coming together. But, um, it is a very unique season.

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