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Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley (season 3–present), a girl who works alongside Steve at the mall ice cream shop. She later comes out as a lesbian. She and Steve become close friends, working together at Scoops Ahoy and later the video store.

-
Priah Ferguson as Erica Sinclair (season 3–present; recurring: season 2), Lucas's younger sister who helps the group. She is very smart and has an avid interest in D&D.

-
Brett Gelman as Murray Bauman (seasons 4–present; recurring: seasons 2–3), a conspiracy theorist, private investigator, and longtime friend of Hopper who assists Nancy and Jonathan in season 2 and helps Hopper and Joyce in seasons 3 and 4.

-
Linda Hamilton as Dr. Kay (season 5), the leader of the military investigating the rifts in Hawkins and hunting Eleven.

-
Jamie Campbell Bower as Henry Creel / One / Vecna (season 5; recurring: season 4), a murderous psychic being from the Upside Down. Born as Henry Creel with supernatural abilities, he murdered his family and was subsequently placed under Brenner's care. Flashbacks in season 4 reveal that Eleven banished him to an inter-dimensional space when she was eight years old, where he was disfigured and later emerged in the Upside Down, eventually taking control of the dimension.

Episodes

=================

Production

=================

Development

=================

Stranger Things was created by Matt and Ross Duffer, known professionally as the Duffer Brothers, who also serve as showrunners and head writers and direct many of the episodes. They wrote and produced their 2015 film Hidden, in which they emulated the style of M. Night Shyamalan. However, due to changes at Warner Bros., its distributor, it did not see wide release and the Duffers were unsure of their future. To their surprise, television producer Donald De Line approached them, impressed with Hidden's script, and offered them the opportunity to work on episodes of Wayward Pines with Shyamalan. The brothers were mentored by Shyamalan during the episode's production so that when they finished, they felt they were ready to produce their own television series.

The Duffers prepared a script similar to the series' eventual pilot episode, along with a 20-page pitch book to help shop the series to networks. They pitched the story to about 15 cable networks, all of whom felt a plot with children as leading characters would not work and asked the brothers to either make it a children's series or drop the children and focus on Hopper's investigation into the paranormal.

In early 2015, Dan Cohen, the VP of 21 Laps Entertainment, brought the script to his colleague Shawn Levy. They subsequently invited the Duffer Brothers to their office and purchased the rights for the series, giving the brothers full authorship. After reading the pilot, the streaming service Netflix purchased the whole season for an undisclosed sum, and in April of the same year, the series was announced for a 2016 release.

The Duffer Brothers stated that at the time they pitched to Netflix, the company had already been recognized for its original programming in shows such as House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, with well-recognized producers behind them, and were ready to start giving upcoming producers like them a chance. The brothers started casting and brought Levy and Cohen in as the other executive producers to discuss storylines, with Levy also directing for the show.

Montauk is an eight-hour sci-fi horror epic. Set in Long Island in 1980 and inspired by the supernatural classics of that era, we explore the crossroads where the ordinary meet the extraordinary...emotional, cinematic and rooted in character, Montauk is a love letter to the golden age of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King – a marriage of human drama and supernatural fear.

— The Duffer Brothers' original pitch for Montauk

The series was originally known as Montauk. The setting was then Montauk, New York, and nearby Long Island locations. Montauk figured into a number of real world conspiracy theories involving secret government experiments. The brothers had chosen Montauk as it had further Spielberg ties with the film Jaws, where Montauk was used for the fictional setting of Amity Island. After deciding to change the narrative of the series to take place in the fictional town of Hawkins instead, the brothers felt they could now do things to the town, such as placing it under quarantine, that they really could not envision with a real location.

With the change in location, they had to come up with a new title for the series under direction from Netflix's Ted Sarandos so that they could start marketing it to the public. The brothers started by using a copy of Stephen King's Firestarter novel to consider the title's font and appearance, and came up with a long list of potential alternatives. Stranger Things came about as it sounded similar to another King novel, Needful Things, though Matt noted they still had a "lot of heated arguments" over this final title.

To pitch the series, the Duffer Brothers showcased images, footage and music from classic 1970s and 1980s films such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, Hellraiser, Stand by Me, Firestarter, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Jaws, in order to establish the tone of the series.

Writing

=================

The idea of Stranger Things started with how the brothers felt they could take the concept of the 2013 film Prisoners, detailing the moral struggles a father goes through when his daughter is kidnapped, and expand it out over eight or so hours in a serialized television approach. As they focused on the missing child aspect of the story, they wanted to introduce the idea of "childlike sensibilities" they could offer, and toyed around with the idea of a monster that could consume humans. The brothers thought the combination of these things "was the best thing ever".

To introduce this monster into the narrative, they considered "bizarre experiments we had read about taking place in the Cold War" such as Project MKUltra, which gave a way to ground the monster's existence in science rather than something spiritual. This also helped them to decide on using 1983 as the time period, as it was a year before the film Red Dawn came out, which focused on Cold War paranoia. Subsequently, they were able to use all their own personal inspirations from the 1980s, the decade in which they were born, as elements of the series, crafting it in the realm of science fiction and horror.

Other influences cited by the Duffer Brothers include: Stephen King novels; films produced by Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, David Lynch, Wes Craven, and Guillermo del Toro; films such as Star Wars, Alien, and Stand by Me; Japanese anime such as Akira and Elfen Lied; and several video games including Silent Hill, Dark Souls and The Last of Us. The Duffer Brothers believe that they may have brought influences from other works unintentionally, including Beyond the Black Rainbow and D.A.R.Y.L., discovered by reviewing fan feedback on the series. Several websites and publications have found other pop culture references in the series, particularly references to 1980s pop culture. The main villain for the last seasons was inspired by the villains that scared the brothers when they watched the movies and miniseries as children: Freddy Krueger, Pinhead and Pennywise.

With Netflix as the platform, the Duffer Brothers were not limited to a typical 22-episode format, opting for the eight-episode approach. They had been concerned that a 22-episode season on broadcast television would be difficult to "tell a cinematic story" with that many episodes. Eight episodes allowed them to give time to characterization in addition to narrative development; if they had less time available, they would have had to remain committed to telling a horror film as soon as the monster was introduced and abandon the characterization. Within the eight episodes, the brothers aimed to make the first season "feel like a big movie" with all the major plot lines completed so that "the audience feels satisfied", but left enough unresolved to indicate "there's a bigger mythology, and there's a lot of dangling threads at the end", something that could be explored in further seasons if Netflix opted to create more.

Regarding writing for the children characters of the series, the Duffer Brothers considered themselves as outcasts from other students while in high school and thus found it easy to write for Mike and his friends, and particularly for Barb. Joyce was fashioned after Richard Dreyfuss' character Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as she appears "absolutely bonkers" to everyone else as she tries to find Will.

Casting

=================

In June 2015, it was announced that Winona Ryder and David Harbour had joined the series as Joyce and as the unnamed chief of police, respectively. Ryder's sole condition to the Duffers in accepting the part was that, if a Beetlejuice sequel ever materialized as she and Tim Burton had been discussing since 2000, they had to let her take a break to shoot it, a condition the Duffers agreed and ultimately proved to work out when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was greenlighted. The brothers' casting director Carmen Cuba had suggested Ryder for the role of Joyce, which the two were immediately drawn to because of her predominance in the films of the 1980s.

Levy believed Ryder could "wretch up the emotional urgency and yet find layers and nuance and different sides of [Joyce]". Ryder praised that the show's multiple storylines required her to act for Joyce as if "she's out of her mind, but she's actually kind of onto something", and that the producers had faith she could pull off the difficult role. The Duffer Brothers had been interested in Harbour before, who until Stranger Things primarily had smaller roles as villainous characters, and they felt that he had been "waiting too long for this opportunity" to play a lead, while Harbour himself was thrilled by the script and the chance to play "a broken, flawed, anti-hero character".

Additional casting followed two months later with Finn Wolfhard as Mike, Millie Bobby Brown in an undisclosed role, Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas, Natalia Dyer as Nancy, and Charlie Heaton as Jonathan. In September 2015, Cara Buono joined the cast as Karen, followed by Matthew Modine as Martin Brenner a month later. Additional cast who recur include Noah Schnapp as Will, Shannon Purser as Barbara "Barb" Holland, Joe Keery as Steve Harrington, and Ross Partridge as Lonnie, among others.

Actors auditioning for the children roles read lines from Stand by Me. The Duffer Brothers estimated they went through about a thousand different child actors for the roles. They noted that Wolfhard was already "a movie buff" of the films from the 1980s period and easily filled the role, while they found Matarazzo's audition to be much more authentic than most of the other audition tapes, and selected him after a single viewing of his audition tape.

As casting was started immediately after Netflix greenlit the show, and prior to the scripts being fully completed, this allowed some of the actors' takes on the roles to reflect into the script. The casting of the young actors for Will and his friends had been done just after the first script was completed, and subsequent scripts incorporated aspects from these actors. The brothers said Modine provided significant input on the character of Dr. Brenner, whom they had not really fleshed out before as they considered him the hardest character to write for given his limited appearances within the narrative.

Filming

=================

The brothers had desired to film the series around the Long Island area to match the initial Montauk concept. However, with filming scheduled to take place in November 2015, it was difficult to shoot in Long Island in the cold weather, and the production started scouting locations in and around the Atlanta, Georgia, area. The brothers, who grew up in North Carolina, found many places that reminded them of their own childhoods in that area, and felt the area would work well with the narrative shift to the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.

Filming for the first season began in November 2015 and was extensively done in Atlanta, Georgia, with the Duffer Brothers and Levy handling the direction of individual episodes. Jackson served as the basis of the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. Other shooting locations included the Georgia Mental Health Institute as the Hawkins National Laboratory site, Bellwood Quarry, and Patrick Henry High School in Stockbridge, Georgia, for the middle and high school scenes.

Emory University's Continuing Education Department, the former city hall in Douglasville, Georgia, the Georgia International Horse Park in Conyers, Georgia, the probate court in Butts County, Georgia, Old East Point Library and East Point First Baptist Church in East Point, Georgia, Fayetteville, Georgia, Stone Mountain Park, Palmetto, Georgia, and Winston, Georgia. Set work was done at Screen Gem Studios in Atlanta and the first season was filmed with a RED Epic Dragon camera. Filming for the first season concluded in early 2016.

After the third season finished filming, producers considered the idea of keeping the Starcourt Mall set as a permanent attraction for fans to visit, but ultimately decided against it.

The fourth season was expected to consist of eight episodes, with the first episode titled "Chapter One: The Hellfire Club". Filming for the season was slated to begin in January 2020 and to last through August. With the release of a February 2020 teaser for the fourth season, the Duffers confirmed that production had started. Some filming for the fourth season took place at Lukiškės Prison and nearby in Vilnius, Lithuania. In March 2020, production was stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and resumed that September.

Filming for the fifth and final season was expected to start in June 2023, before the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike delayed it to January 8, 2024. Production began on that day and wrapped on December 20.

Visual effects

=================

To create the aged effect for the series, a film grain was added over the footage, which was captured by scanning in film stock from the 1980s. The Duffer Brothers wanted to scare the audience, but not to necessarily make the series violent or gory, following in line with how the 1980s Amblin Entertainment films drove the creation of the PG-13 movie rating. They said such films were "much more about mood and atmosphere and suspense and dread than they are about gore", though they were not afraid to push into more scary elements, particularly towards the end of the first season.

The brothers had wanted to avoid any computer-generated effects for the monster and other parts of the series and stay with practical effects, so they created an animatronic to play the part of the Demogorgon. However, the six-month filming time left them little time to plan out and test practical effects rigs for some of the shots. They went with a middle ground of using constructed props including one for the monster whenever they could, but for other shots, such as when the monster bursts through a wall, they opted to use digital effects. Post-production on the first season was completed the week before it was released to Netflix.

The title sequence uses closeups of the letters in the Stranger Things title with a red tint against a black background as they slide into place within the title. The sequence was created by the studio Imaginary Forces, formerly part of R/GA, led by creative director Michelle Doughtey. Levy introduced the studio to the Duffer Brothers, who explained their vision of the 1980s-inspired series, which helped the studio to fix the concept the producers wanted. Later, but prior to filming, the producers sent Imaginary Forces the pilot script, the synth-heavy background music for the titles, as well as the various book covers from King and other authors that they had used to establish the title and imagery, and were looking for a similar approach for the series' titles, primarily using a typographical sequence.

-

Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley (season 3–present), a girl who works alongside Steve at the mall ice cream shop. She later comes out as a lesbian. She and Steve become close friends, working together at Scoops Ahoy and later the video store.

-

Priah Ferguson as Erica Sinclair (season 3–present; recurring: season 2), Lucas's younger sister who helps the group. She is very smart and has an avid interest in D&D.

-

Brett Gelman as Murray Bauman (seasons 4–present; recurring: seasons 2–3), a conspiracy theorist, private investigator, and longtime friend of Hopper who assists Nancy and Jonathan in season 2 and helps Hopper and Joyce in seasons 3 and 4.

-

Linda Hamilton as Dr. Kay (season 5), the leader of the military investigating the rifts in Hawkins and hunting Eleven.

-

Jamie Campbell Bower as Henry Creel / One / Vecna (season 5; recurring: season 4), a murderous psychic being from the Upside Down. Born as Henry Creel with supernatural abilities, he murdered his family and was subsequently placed under Brenner's care. Flashbacks in season 4 reveal that Eleven banished him to an inter-dimensional space when she was eight years old, where he was disfigured and later emerged in the Upside Down, eventually taking control of the dimension.

Episodes

=================

Production

=================

Development

=================

Stranger Things was created by Matt and Ross Duffer, known professionally as the Duffer Brothers, who also serve as showrunners and head writers and direct many of the episodes. They wrote and produced their 2015 film Hidden, in which they emulated the style of M. Night Shyamalan. However, due to changes at Warner Bros., its distributor, it did not see wide release and the Duffers were unsure of their future. To their surprise, television producer Donald De Line approached them, impressed with Hidden's script, and offered them the opportunity to work on episodes of Wayward Pines with Shyamalan. The brothers were mentored by Shyamalan during the episode's production so that when they finished, they felt they were ready to produce their own television series.

The Duffers prepared a script similar to the series' eventual pilot episode, along with a 20-page pitch book to help shop the series to networks. They pitched the story to about 15 cable networks, all of whom felt a plot with children as leading characters would not work and asked the brothers to either make it a children's series or drop the children and focus on Hopper's investigation into the paranormal.

In early 2015, Dan Cohen, the VP of 21 Laps Entertainment, brought the script to his colleague Shawn Levy. They subsequently invited the Duffer Brothers to their office and purchased the rights for the series, giving the brothers full authorship. After reading the pilot, the streaming service Netflix purchased the whole season for an undisclosed sum, and in April of the same year, the series was announced for a 2016 release.

The Duffer Brothers stated that at the time they pitched to Netflix, the company had already been recognized for its original programming in shows such as House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, with well-recognized producers behind them, and were ready to start giving upcoming producers like them a chance. The brothers started casting and brought Levy and Cohen in as the other executive producers to discuss storylines, with Levy also directing for the show.

Montauk is an eight-hour sci-fi horror epic. Set in Long Island in 1980 and inspired by the supernatural classics of that era, we explore the crossroads where the ordinary meet the extraordinary...emotional, cinematic and rooted in character, Montauk is a love letter to the golden age of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King – a marriage of human drama and supernatural fear.

— The Duffer Brothers' original pitch for Montauk

The series was originally known as Montauk. The setting was then Montauk, New York, and nearby Long Island locations. Montauk figured into a number of real world conspiracy theories involving secret government experiments. The brothers had chosen Montauk as it had further Spielberg ties with the film Jaws, where Montauk was used for the fictional setting of Amity Island. After deciding to change the narrative of the series to take place in the fictional town of Hawkins instead, the brothers felt they could now do things to the town, such as placing it under quarantine, that they really could not envision with a real location.

With the change in location, they had to come up with a new title for the series under direction from Netflix's Ted Sarandos so that they could start marketing it to the public. The brothers started by using a copy of Stephen King's Firestarter novel to consider the title's font and appearance, and came up with a long list of potential alternatives. Stranger Things came about as it sounded similar to another King novel, Needful Things, though Matt noted they still had a "lot of heated arguments" over this final title.

To pitch the series, the Duffer Brothers showcased images, footage and music from classic 1970s and 1980s films such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, Hellraiser, Stand by Me, Firestarter, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Jaws, in order to establish the tone of the series.

Writing

=================

The idea of Stranger Things started with how the brothers felt they could take the concept of the 2013 film Prisoners, detailing the moral struggles a father goes through when his daughter is kidnapped, and expand it out over eight or so hours in a serialized television approach. As they focused on the missing child aspect of the story, they wanted to introduce the idea of "childlike sensibilities" they could offer, and toyed around with the idea of a monster that could consume humans. The brothers thought the combination of these things "was the best thing ever".

To introduce this monster into the narrative, they considered "bizarre experiments we had read about taking place in the Cold War" such as Project MKUltra, which gave a way to ground the monster's existence in science rather than something spiritual. This also helped them to decide on using 1983 as the time period, as it was a year before the film Red Dawn came out, which focused on Cold War paranoia. Subsequently, they were able to use all their own personal inspirations from the 1980s, the decade in which they were born, as elements of the series, crafting it in the realm of science fiction and horror.

Other influences cited by the Duffer Brothers include: Stephen King novels; films produced by Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, David Lynch, Wes Craven, and Guillermo del Toro; films such as Star Wars, Alien, and Stand by Me; Japanese anime such as Akira and Elfen Lied; and several video games including Silent Hill, Dark Souls and The Last of Us. The Duffer Brothers believe that they may have brought influences from other works unintentionally, including Beyond the Black Rainbow and D.A.R.Y.L., discovered by reviewing fan feedback on the series. Several websites and publications have found other pop culture references in the series, particularly references to 1980s pop culture. The main villain for the last seasons was inspired by the villains that scared the brothers when they watched the movies and miniseries as children: Freddy Krueger, Pinhead and Pennywise.

With Netflix as the platform, the Duffer Brothers were not limited to a typical 22-episode format, opting for the eight-episode approach. They had been concerned that a 22-episode season on broadcast television would be difficult to "tell a cinematic story" with that many episodes. Eight episodes allowed them to give time to characterization in addition to narrative development; if they had less time available, they would have had to remain committed to telling a horror film as soon as the monster was introduced and abandon the characterization. Within the eight episodes, the brothers aimed to make the first season "feel like a big movie" with all the major plot lines completed so that "the audience feels satisfied", but left enough unresolved to indicate "there's a bigger mythology, and there's a lot of dangling threads at the end", something that could be explored in further seasons if Netflix opted to create more.

Regarding writing for the children characters of the series, the Duffer Brothers considered themselves as outcasts from other students while in high school and thus found it easy to write for Mike and his friends, and particularly for Barb. Joyce was fashioned after Richard Dreyfuss' character Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as she appears "absolutely bonkers" to everyone else as she tries to find Will.

Casting

=================

In June 2015, it was announced that Winona Ryder and David Harbour had joined the series as Joyce and as the unnamed chief of police, respectively. Ryder's sole condition to the Duffers in accepting the part was that, if a Beetlejuice sequel ever materialized as she and Tim Burton had been discussing since 2000, they had to let her take a break to shoot it, a condition the Duffers agreed and ultimately proved to work out when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was greenlighted. The brothers' casting director Carmen Cuba had suggested Ryder for the role of Joyce, which the two were immediately drawn to because of her predominance in the films of the 1980s.

Levy believed Ryder could "wretch up the emotional urgency and yet find layers and nuance and different sides of [Joyce]". Ryder praised that the show's multiple storylines required her to act for Joyce as if "she's out of her mind, but she's actually kind of onto something", and that the producers had faith she could pull off the difficult role. The Duffer Brothers had been interested in Harbour before, who until Stranger Things primarily had smaller roles as villainous characters, and they felt that he had been "waiting too long for this opportunity" to play a lead, while Harbour himself was thrilled by the script and the chance to play "a broken, flawed, anti-hero character".

Additional casting followed two months later with Finn Wolfhard as Mike, Millie Bobby Brown in an undisclosed role, Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas, Natalia Dyer as Nancy, and Charlie Heaton as Jonathan. In September 2015, Cara Buono joined the cast as Karen, followed by Matthew Modine as Martin Brenner a month later. Additional cast who recur include Noah Schnapp as Will, Shannon Purser as Barbara "Barb" Holland, Joe Keery as Steve Harrington, and Ross Partridge as Lonnie, among others.

Actors auditioning for the children roles read lines from Stand by Me. The Duffer Brothers estimated they went through about a thousand different child actors for the roles. They noted that Wolfhard was already "a movie buff" of the films from the 1980s period and easily filled the role, while they found Matarazzo's audition to be much more authentic than most of the other audition tapes, and selected him after a single viewing of his audition tape.

As casting was started immediately after Netflix greenlit the show, and prior to the scripts being fully completed, this allowed some of the actors' takes on the roles to reflect into the script. The casting of the young actors for Will and his friends had been done just after the first script was completed, and subsequent scripts incorporated aspects from these actors. The brothers said Modine provided significant input on the character of Dr. Brenner, whom they had not really fleshed out before as they considered him the hardest character to write for given his limited appearances within the narrative.

Filming

=================

The brothers had desired to film the series around the Long Island area to match the initial Montauk concept. However, with filming scheduled to take place in November 2015, it was difficult to shoot in Long Island in the cold weather, and the production started scouting locations in and around the Atlanta, Georgia, area. The brothers, who grew up in North Carolina, found many places that reminded them of their own childhoods in that area, and felt the area would work well with the narrative shift to the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.

Filming for the first season began in November 2015 and was extensively done in Atlanta, Georgia, with the Duffer Brothers and Levy handling the direction of individual episodes. Jackson served as the basis of the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. Other shooting locations included the Georgia Mental Health Institute as the Hawkins National Laboratory site, Bellwood Quarry, and Patrick Henry High School in Stockbridge, Georgia, for the middle and high school scenes.

Emory University's Continuing Education Department, the former city hall in Douglasville, Georgia, the Georgia International Horse Park in Conyers, Georgia, the probate court in Butts County, Georgia, Old East Point Library and East Point First Baptist Church in East Point, Georgia, Fayetteville, Georgia, Stone Mountain Park, Palmetto, Georgia, and Winston, Georgia. Set work was done at Screen Gem Studios in Atlanta and the first season was filmed with a RED Epic Dragon camera. Filming for the first season concluded in early 2016.

After the third season finished filming, producers considered the idea of keeping the Starcourt Mall set as a permanent attraction for fans to visit, but ultimately decided against it.

The fourth season was expected to consist of eight episodes, with the first episode titled "Chapter One: The Hellfire Club". Filming for the season was slated to begin in January 2020 and to last through August. With the release of a February 2020 teaser for the fourth season, the Duffers confirmed that production had started. Some filming for the fourth season took place at Lukiškės Prison and nearby in Vilnius, Lithuania. In March 2020, production was stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and resumed that September.

Filming for the fifth and final season was expected to start in June 2023, before the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike delayed it to January 8, 2024. Production began on that day and wrapped on December 20.

Visual effects

=================

To create the aged effect for the series, a film grain was added over the footage, which was captured by scanning in film stock from the 1980s. The Duffer Brothers wanted to scare the audience, but not to necessarily make the series violent or gory, following in line with how the 1980s Amblin Entertainment films drove the creation of the PG-13 movie rating. They said such films were "much more about mood and atmosphere and suspense and dread than they are about gore", though they were not afraid to push into more scary elements, particularly towards the end of the first season.

The brothers had wanted to avoid any computer-generated effects for the monster and other parts of the series and stay with practical effects, so they created an animatronic to play the part of the Demogorgon. However, the six-month filming time left them little time to plan out and test practical effects rigs for some of the shots. They went with a middle ground of using constructed props including one for the monster whenever they could, but for other shots, such as when the monster bursts through a wall, they opted to use digital effects. Post-production on the first season was completed the week before it was released to Netflix.

The title sequence uses closeups of the letters in the Stranger Things title with a red tint against a black background as they slide into place within the title. The sequence was created by the studio Imaginary Forces, formerly part of R/GA, led by creative director Michelle Doughtey. Levy introduced the studio to the Duffer Brothers, who explained their vision of the 1980s-inspired series, which helped the studio to fix the concept the producers wanted. Later, but prior to filming, the producers sent Imaginary Forces the pilot script, the synth-heavy background music for the titles, as well as the various book covers from King and other authors that they had used to establish the title and imagery, and were looking for a similar approach for the series' titles, primarily using a typographical sequence.