Ross and Matt Duffer know how far they and “Stranger Things” have come. On the heels of the giant, glitzy world premiere of the Netflix phenomenon’s fifth and final season at the historic TCL Chinese Theatre, they can’t help but think back to Season 1’s debut. “We had folding chairs, there were two fans, a couple reporters,” Ross recalls. Despite the series’ rise in popularity, Matt insists that not much has changed in the experience of making it. “It’s a different type of stress,” he says. “But even as the noise around the show has reached deafening levels, it has felt oddly intimate.”
Growing up in North Carolina, the identical twins don’t remember a time when they weren’t filmmakers. In kindergarten, they began acting out movies with their toys, even setting a timer for two hours, knowing that was the standard running time. They upgraded in third grade when their parents bought them a Hi8 camcorder for Christmas, soon creating their first live-action movie, an adaptation of the fantasy trading card game “Magic: The Gathering.” “It was really bad,” Matt recalls. “We just stuck the camera on a tripod, played Danny Elfman music, and acted out scenes. We continued to make movies every summer, and they increasingly became more watchable.”
They eventually attended film school at Chapman University, learning just as much from their fellow students as the professors. “You’d work on the seniors’ sets and they’d teach you how it runs and what an AD does,” Ross says. “By the time we made our first movie for Warner Bros., there were a few more people around, but, generally, it felt the same as film school.”
The duo had their feature debut with the 2015 dystopian thriller “Hidden,” which caught the attention of horror master M. Night Shyamalan, their longtime inspiration. Impressed by their work, Shyamalan brought the Duffer brothers on to Fox’s sci-fi mystery series “Wayward Pines” as staff writers, marking their first television writing job. Writing for the series, which was created by Chad Hodge and executive produced by Shyamalan, would prove to be a crucial experience for the brothers.
Courtesy of Netflix
“We had the idea for ‘Stranger Things,’ but we were worried about it never getting made because we had no television experience,” Matt says. “Then we got this offer. And if you look at our movies that we were making in high school, we were just attempting to replicate his style. ‘Hidden’ was basically a Shyamalan rip-off. Night liked it and brought us on to ‘Wayward Pines,’ and we learned how to write and run a TV show.”
Influenced by the 1980s legends they grew up watching and reading, like Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and Stephen King, Ross says they put “all of our favorite things together” to create “Stranger Things,” a genre mashup set in the ’80s depicting supernatural mysteries in a small Indiana town. “When I look back, I’m proud, because we made wild decisions in Season 1 that were pretty bold,” he adds.
Premiering in 2016, just a few years into Netflix’s major investment in original content, “Stranger Things” instantly went from a quietly promoted series to a pop culture sensation. “Everything just seemed to have worked out in terms of us finding Netflix at a time when we needed them and they needed us,” Ross says. “And we rode that wave through peak TV and the streaming wars.”
That aggressive approach continues with the final season, premiering Nov. 26. Many of the forthcoming answers to the series’ mysteries, such as what exactly the Upside Down is, have been long planned. “We’ve been dreaming about the final 10 minutes of the show for years,” Ross teases. “That gave us our North Star. We learn every season what the strengths of the show are, and we like to allow it to continue to evolve.”
After graduating from “Stranger Things,” the Duffers are finishing up their time at Netflix with the shows “The Boroughs” and “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen,” set for release in 2026. They’re then set to move to Paramount, where they will create original series along with films. “We’re dying to get out of the ’80s,” Ross says with a laugh. “It’s been fun, but I think we’ve said everything we want to say. We haven’t written a movie in a very long time, and, as anyone who watches the show knows, we’re very used to writing some long stories that get longer every season, so it’s an exciting challenge to go back and tell a shorter story.”