The Story Behind Stranger Things
How the Duffer Brothers created Stranger Things — the pitch, the rejections, the inspirations and how a show about missing children and government conspiracies became a global phenomenon.Stranger Things was created by twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer and originally pitched under the title Montauk. It was rejected by approximately 15 to 20 networks and streaming platforms before Netflix bought it in 2015. The show premiered in July 2016 and immediately became one of Netflix's most watched original series.
The Duffer Brothers
Matthew and Ross Duffer were born in 1984 in Durham, North Carolina. They grew up making films together as children and teenagers, and studied film at Chapman University in California. They share a creative sensibility rooted in the popular culture of their childhood — the films of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, Stephen King adaptations, and the video games, television and music of the 1980s.
Before Stranger Things, they worked as writers on the Fox horror series Wayward Pines and had directed a feature film, Hidden (2015). Stranger Things was their first original television creation and represented the realisation of a creative vision they had been developing for years — a coming-of-age supernatural adventure story that would feel like finding an undiscovered 1980s classic rather than a modern show pretending to be one.
The Creative Inspirations
The Duffer Brothers have been exceptionally open about the wide range of influences that shaped Stranger Things. The most fundamental is Steven Spielberg — specifically E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Poltergeist. The idea of an ordinary suburban family encountering the extraordinary, filtered through the eyes of children whose perspective is both more receptive and more vulnerable than adults', is classic Spielberg territory.
Stephen King is the second great influence — the King of Castle Rock, Maine whose small-town New England settings became the model for Hawkins. It, Firestarter (which shares significant plot DNA with Stranger Things — a girl with psychokinetic powers, government experiments, escape and pursuit) and The Body (adapted as Stand by Me) all contributed. John Carpenter's The Thing provided the body horror aesthetic; Halloween contributed the suburban dread.
The show was also directly inspired by the Montauk Project conspiracy theory and by real Cold War government programmes including MKUltra — the idea that the US government was secretly conducting experiments on ordinary citizens that were every bit as monstrous as anything the supernatural world could offer.
From Pitch to Screen
The Duffers wrote a detailed series bible and several scripts and began pitching to networks and streaming platforms around 2014-2015. The pitch was initially rejected by the vast majority of potential buyers — the combination of child protagonists, a period 1980s setting and supernatural horror didn't fit comfortably into any single programming category. Netflix's willingness to take chances on unconventional content made them the right home for it, and the decision to order it straight to series without a pilot gave the Duffers the freedom to craft a consistent opening season rather than compromising for a standalone episode.
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