The fourth season of Stranger Things is right around the corner, and the cast is out in the press teasing their hearts out. “It’s massive,” star Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin) told NME. “It’s bigger than any season we’ve had. I think it expands upon the lore that we’ve created over the course of three seasons very, very well and answers questions. It provides cool opportunities for the entire cast to do some really great stuff. There’s a great new villain, and it’s been a long time – it’s been three years so I feel like the anticipation is greater than anything else.”
Matarazzo isn’t kidding about the season being massive. Netflix recently revealed the runtimes for the upcoming episodes, and some are just ridiculous:
- “Chapter One: The Hellfire Club” — 1 hour, 16 minutes
- “Chapter Two: Vecna’s Curse” — 1 hour, 15 minutes
- “Chapter Three: The Monster and the Superhero” — 1 hour, 3 minutes
- “Chapter Four: Dear Billy” — 1 hour, 17 minutes
- “Chapter Five: The Nina Project” — 1 hour, 14 minutes
- “Chapter Six: The Dive” — 1 hour, 13 minutes
- “Chapter Seven: The Massacre at Hawkins Lab” — 1 hour, 38 minutes
- “Chapter Eight” — 1 hour, 25 minutes
- “Chapter Nine” — 2 hours, 30 minutes
Even the shorter episodes are on the longer end for the series, and I’m sorry, is the finale two-and-a-half hours long? That’s longer than most movies!
The gargantuan length of that finale is probably part of the reason Netflix is releasing this season in two chunks: the first batch of episodes come out next week, the second over a month later.
The Stranger Things characters will grow up and mature in season 4
A lot of the drama will be driven by Vecna, that “great new villain” Matarazzo mentioned. But the core of the show has always been the characters. By this point the cast has grown pretty large, and it sounds like season 4 gives them all interesting stuff to do. A sampling:
- Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair): “He’s really conflicted with trying to find himself and being with his friends. He doesn’t want to put his friends down. This season gets more into his personal life and where his thoughts are.”
- Priah Ferguson (Erica Sinclair, Lucas’ sister): “With Erica stepping in as a leader, I think it’s made her understand more about what’s been going on for the past three seasons. She comes to the realization that this is a pretty serious, dangerous situation she’s putting herself into.”
- Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield): “When you experience a trauma like , it’s interesting how your body and mind reacts and the questions that you ask yourself and the really dark places that you go to. Max is in a really tricky mental place and feeling very vulnerable, but doesn’t want anyone to know it.”
- Maya Hawke (Robin): “She used her wicked intelligence to help fight the Russians last season and I think you’ll see her learn a lot about what’s going on in the world of Hawkins.”
And on and on like that. And of course there are new characters too, like a creepy old guy named Victor Creel played by horror legend Robert Englund, best known for playing Freddy Kruger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
Now, given how much Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer love ’80s movies — they cite the Nightmare films as a big influence on season 4 — you’d figure that they reached out to Englund about this role. But apparently not. “I cannot tell you how surreal it is to be watching audition tape after audition tape and then suddenly you go, ‘Is that Robert Englund in a bathtub?’” Matt laughed. Englund sent in an audition tape like everybody else!
“It’s just a dream come true to work with him, but then for people to also see him in a role that wasn’t just Freddy Krueger,” Ross continued. “I think he gets to do something in the episode that he’s in that is really emotional and really effective.”
Stranger Things season 4 will lead right into the end of the show
Season 4 will be the penultimate season of the show. That means we’re ramping up to the end here, which the Duffers have been thinking about for a while. “It’s just one of those things that you come up with and you go, ‘That’s it, that’s right, that’s inevitable – that’s what it has to be,’” Matt teased.
And the ending is going to be huge, because unlike in previous seasons, which always more or less wrapped up that year’s storylines, season 4 will lead directly into what comes next.
“Typically in the previous seasons, everything wraps up in a nice bow,” Matt said. “Four and five are really together. , there’ll be no wind-up time – like even this season, you get to experience the kids and what they’re going through in high school before things start to escalate. Then it gets crazier and crazier and crazier – that’s typically the trajectory. Five, you’re just going to be right in the middle of it so it’s going to feel very, very different.”
The first seven episodes of Stranger Things season 4 drop on Netflix on May 27. The final two follow on July 1.
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