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44 Things You Didn't Know About 'Stranger Things'
It was originally called 'Montauk' and set on Long Island
It was originally called 'Montauk' and set on Long Island
It was created by twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer.
They made a movie, Hidden, and worked on M. Night Shyamalan's Wayward Pines before writing a script based on the premise, "What if Steven Spielberg directed a Stephen King book?"
The show was originally called "Montauk."
It took place on Long Island in 1980, but the Duffers had to change the show's location when they realised it would be too difficult to shoot there in winter.
The Montauk Project inspired the show.
The alleged government experiment took place in the early '80s and involved kidnapping kids from Long Island to experiment on them. You can read all about it here.
The Duffers auditioned 906 boys and 307 girls for the children's roles.
And they made each kid read parts from Stand By Me in the audition.
The now-iconic title sequence was inspired by motion graphics designer Richard Greenberg.
He designed the titles for films including Alien, Superman, and The Goonies.
The Upside Down's real name is the Nether.
But they got so used to calling it the "Upside Down" on set, it stuck, Millie Bobby Brown revealed in Beyond Stranger Things. The same thing happened with the Shadow Monster in Season 2; it's supposed to be called the Mind Flayer.
The Duffers cast Gaten Matarazzo after watching his first audition tape.
"When you see someone like Gaten, and he pops the way he does, you're just like, 'This kid, we're putting him in the show, 100 percent,'" Matt told the New York Times.
Stephen King "found" Millie Bobby Brown.
Long before the Duffers cast her as Eleven, King tweeted his love for Brown on Intruders: "Millie Brown, the girl in Intruders, is terrific. Is it my imagination, or are child actors a lot better than they used to be?"
The Duffers convinced Winona Ryder to play Joyce during a four-and-a-half-hour meeting.
"We actually talked very little about the show or the character of Joyce; we were mostly just getting to know each other," the Duffers told EW. Ryder joined the project the next day.
Joyce's hairstyle was inspired by Meryl Streep in Silkwood.
Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Marsha Mason in Max Dugan Returns and Audrey Rose influenced Winona Ryder's performance.
It was Caleb McLaughlin's idea for Lucas to wear a bandana in Season 1.
"Sometimes our kids have great ideas, and this is one of those times!" the Duffers told EW.
Steve was supposed to be "the biggest douchebag on the planet."
"A lot of credit goes to Joe Keery because he was much more likeable and charming than we originally had envisioned," Ross Duffer told Variety.
Matthew Modine helped to create his character, Dr. Brenner.
Dr. Brenner was particularly hard for the Duffers to write because you see the character so little on the show. "He informed it, and I'm really happy with where we wound up with him at the end, with something that was discovered during the course of shooting," Matt Duffer told Empire.
Brown's performance was inspired by E. T.
"Matt and Ross were like, 'Basically you're going to be an alien,'" she told Indiewire
The Duffers used the fake body of Will to scare Noah Scnapp's mother.
"We took Noah's mom aside, told her we had something to show her, and led her into a dark closet where we had propped up this frighteningly realistic corpse of her son," they write in EW. "She was startled at first, and we felt like maybe we crossed a line… But after the initial shock, she loved it."
Millie Bobby Brown once showed up to set covered in glitter.
It held up production for a half hour, the Duffer Brothers told EW.
Production did, in fact, use 1,200 pounds of Epsom salts...
...to make Brown float in the kiddie pool.
Barb was Shannon Purser's first role.
"I was thinking, this is the biggest thing I've ever done and how cool would it be if I actually got this? And I did!" she tells Esquire US.
The Demogorgon is an animatronic.
And it scared the little kids on set, including the twins who played Holly Wheeler and Millie Bobby Brown's little sister. Someone told the kids the monster came from Monstropolis in Monsters, Inc. to calm them down, the Duffers wrote in EW.
The movement of the "petals" on the Demogorgon's head never repeat.
"They had a life of their own, moving in unpredictable and bizarre patterns," the Duffers told EW.
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