If Super 8 and, more recently, Jeff Nichols’ wonderful Midnight Special basked audiences in a familiar, Amblin glow, Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer’s upcoming Netflix series Stranger Things is poised to ramp up that nostalgia factor ten-fold.
A love letter to ’80s sci-fi and the cinematic résumé of one Steven Spielberg, the hour-long show is rooted in Hawkins, Indiana, where a paranormal mystery has citizens on a knife’s edge.
With a promising cast of big names and relative newcomers, Stranger Things is the story of “a young boy who vanishes into thin air. As friends, family and local police search for answers, they are drawn into an extraordinary mystery involving top-secret government experiments, terrifying supernatural forces and one very strange little girl.”
Of that ensemble, it is Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin’s trio of friends that anchor the spooky action, as they begin to peel back the layers of a mystery that involves Eleven (Millie Brown), an 11-year-old girl imbued with strange powers. Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Brown, Noah Schnapp, Natalia Dyer, Cara Buono, Charlie Heaton, and Matthew Modine also star. Shawn Levy (This Is Where I Leave You), meanwhile, is on board to produce.
Look for all eight episodes of Stranger Things to premiere exclusively on Netflix come July 15.
