Advertisement

'Stranger Things' is coming back; here's the first trailer

 
A scene from the Stranger Things Season 2 trailer.
A scene from the Stranger Things Season 2 trailer.
Published July 23, 2017

The nostalgia-heavy, small-screen blockbuster Stranger Things returns to Netflix with a new season on Oct. 27 - just in time for a pre-Halloween weekend binge session.

Netflix unveiled the trailer for the upcoming season of the breakout hit at Comic-Con, and it's chock-full of 1980s pop cultural references. The kids are dressed as the Ghostbusters for Halloween. They're playing Dragon's Lair at the arcade. There's a Reagan/Bush '84 campaign yard sign. Vincent Price's voice-over on Michael Jackson's "Thriller" narrates the whole thing.

But the big takeaway is that Eleven is back. The mysterious girl with mysterious powers shows up at the end of the teaser, and it looks as if she's found a way to get out of the Upside Down.

The iconic character is played by Millie Bobby Brown, who is up for a best supporting actress Emmy for the role. Eleven will be a full-fledged character in the second season, the show's creators told USA Today. "Her role is substantial and really satisfying," executive producer Shawn Levy said.

The sci-fi thriller miniseries began in fictional Hawkins, Indiana, in 1983, with the disappearance of a boy, Will, after a serious Dungeons & Dragons session. There are some supernatural forces at play, and we follow Will's mother, Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), the police chief and the boy's friends - helped by Eleven - as they search for Will.

This new season begins in 1984, and it appears the main plotline is that not all is well with Will. The last time we saw Noah Schnapp's character, he was coughing up weird sluglike tentacles but pretending that everything was cool in front of his family.

Well, guess what? Everything is definitely not cool. He's seeing giant, scary creatures when he should be seeing video games. "I saw something," he says. Concerned mom Joyce is still very much concerned. "What is it?" she asks.

"I don't know," Will says with giant tears welling up in his eyes. "I felt it everywhere."

Schnapp told Entertainment Weekly that this new season is "a lot darker and scarier," adding that it will explain how Will being in the Upside Down "affected him personally and mentally, and they'll get more into everyone's story lines."

And will there be #Justice4Barb, the character played by Shannon Purser? She will not somehow be resurrected from the dead, the show's creators said at a Comic-Con panel. But "Barb will be avenged," said cast member David Harbour - and that's in addition to the guest actress Emmy nod Purser earned for the role.

The cast has also grown with the addition of Sadie Sink as Max, a girl who just moved to town from California; her older brother, Billy, will be played by Dacre Montgomery. Billy "is that Stephen King model of not all evil is paranormal" and "a very scary real-world character," Levy told USA Today.

Season 2 of "Stranger Things" will have nine episodes. Here are the episode titles, in case you want to start conjuring up story lines:

"Madmax"

"The Boy Who Came Back to Life"

"The Pumpkin Patch"

"The Palace"

"The Storm"

"The Pollywog"

"The Secret Cabin"

"The Brain"

"The Lost Brother"