'Stranger Things': How Two Brothers Created Summer's Biggest TV Hit

Matt and Ross Duffer, the twin masterminds who wrote and directed Netflix's Eighties nostalgiafest Stranger Things, have a confession: They're sorta Nineties kids.

The North Carolina–bred brothers were born in 1984 — a year after the show's setting — and, while they have murky recollections of Cold War anxiety, they grew up playing Magic: The Gathering more than Dungeons & Dragons. "We were like, 'Shit, the kids in the show can't be playing Magic: The Gathering; it hasn't been invented yet,'" Matt says with a laugh. "My brother and I played D&D. We just weren't particularly great at it."

"We have vague memories of the Eighties," Ross says. "But we were still pre-Internet and pre–cell phone for most of our childhood. We were the last generation to have the experience of going out with our friends to the woods or the train tracks and the only way our parents could connect with us was to say, 'It's time for dinner.' ... We were also movie nerds and had all these VHS tapes of all these classic Eighties films that we would watch over and over again. That was our point of reference for what it was like in the late Seventies and early Eighties."

Regardless of when they grew up, the Duffer Brothers, as they're professionally known, crafted the fictional Reagan-to-Rubik's-Cube era of Stranger Things in such a believable, authentic way that it amplifies the show's central mystery without becoming a distraction. The series, which notably features Eighties actors Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine, tells the story of how a small Indiana town reacts to the disappearance of a boy at the same time a girl escapes a military testing facility; they ultimately stumble on a dark, fantastic portal to another dimension. As fans have begun parsing and picking apart all of its familiar signifiers and references to the decade's most celebrated movies, books and records online, Stranger Things has become a buzzed-about breakout hit.

It's been a sudden success for the brothers, who began their film careers in late 2011, after graduating college. Prior to Stranger Things, the two most notable productions on their C.V. were the 2015 thriller Hidden and a few episodes of M. Night Shyamalan's sci-fi book adaptation Wayward Pines that same year.

So how do two relative newcomers to filmmaking sell a fantasy series to Netflix? "We've never asked to do TV before, and we've never met with anyone about TV before," Ross says. "Then [producer] Donald De Line told us he'd read our script for Hidden and asked us to do Wayward Pines. That became our training ground, and M. Night Shyamalan became a great mentor to us. By the time we came out of that show, we were like, 'OK, we know how to put together a show.' And that's when we wrote Stranger Things."

The brothers initially took inspiration for the plot from Prisoners, the 2013 Hugh Jackman thriller about a man who searches for his missing daughter and goes into a moral free-fall. "We thought, 'Wouldn't that movie have been even better in eight hours on HBO or Netflix?'" Matt says. "So we started talking about a missing-person story."

"It was great seeing those characters in that tone on the big screen, but we thought it needed more," Ross offers. "It was taking that idea of a missing child and combining it with the more childlike sensibilities that we have. You know, can we put a monster in there that eats people? Because we are nerds and children-at-heart, we thought it was the best thing ever."

After discussing the movie as a jumping-off point, the brothers began talking about what Matt describes as "bizarre experiments we had read about taking place in the Cold War," specifically Project MKUltra, a mind-control program the CIA led from the Fifties through the Seventies. That led them to placing the show in the 1983, a year before the Cold-War–hysteria epic Red Dawn came out, and it brought into focus the fantasy aspect of the story they'd wanted to include. "We wanted the supernatural element to be grounded in science in some way," Matt says. "As ridiculous as it is, the monster [in the alternate dimension] doesn't come from a spiritual domain and it's not connected to any religion. It made it scarier. I don't believe in ghosts, but I believe in aliens and alternate dimensions.

"Once we decided that the Eighties would be the best time for that," he continues, "we realized it would allow us to pay homage to all the things that inspired us most. Maybe we could catch a little bit of the feeling of Stephen King's books and the Spielberg movies. We allowed all these influences to converge into the idea for the show."