Dust off your VHS tape of The Neverending Story, throw on your rattiest pair of high-tops, and pop a few Eggo waffles in the toaster. It’s been nearly three years since the third season of Stranger Things premiered and we’re finally getting a glimpse of the upcoming fourth season.
The first photos from the new season of Netflix’s ’80s nostalgia-fest show off a darker look—and some questionable hairstyles for its protagonists. In the supposed six months between the events of the third season and the start of the fourth season, the Hawkins gang has aged several years and all gotten bangs.
When Stranger Things filmed its first season, the ensemble cast of child actors, including Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, and breakout star Millie Bobby Brown, were very much tweens, all somewhere around the age of 12. Now, they’re essentially young adults, with the younger kids closer to 20 and the older siblings approaching 30.
According to series creators Matt and Ross Duffer, the unignorable maturity of the cast relative to previous seasons will factor into the tone and themes of the upcoming episodes. In other words, Stranger Things is about to get a lot spookier.
“When we pitched it to Netflix all those years ago, we pitched it as the kids are…The Goonies in E.T.,” Ross Duffer explains during a forthcoming episode of the podcast Present Company With Krisa Smith. “That’s their storyline. And the adults are in Jaws and Close Encounters and then the teens are in Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween. But, this year, we don’t have the kids. We can’t do The Goonies anymore. And so, suddenly, we’re leaning much harder into that horror movie territory that we love. It was fun to make that change.”
Much of the joy of watching Stranger Things comes from the meticulously rendered homages to iconic pop culture moments from the 1980s. Every element of the sci-fi series can be traced to specific cinematic influences, from plotlines inspired by Spielbergian family-friendly creature features to the prominent backdrop of the mall last season à la Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It will be interesting to see if the Duffer brothers decide to go full Friday-the-13th-style slasher flick. (We, personally, would not be mad if they did.)
Season four will be unveiled in two “volumes” with the first batch of episodes dropping on May 27 and the second on July 1. In addition to Wolfhard, Schnapp, Matarazzo, McLaughlin, and Brown, cast members Winona Ryder, David Barbour, Natalia Dyer, Sadie Sink, Joe Keery, Charlie Heaton, Maya Hawke, Priah Ferguson, Cara Buono, and Brett Gelman are all returning. The fourth season will also feature new characters played by Robert Englund, Jamie Campbell Bower, and Eduardo Franco, to name a few.
The action picks up in the aftermath of the Battle of Starcourt. Per the logline, “our group of friends are separated for the first time—and navigating the complexities of high school hasn’t made things any easier. In this most vulnerable time, a new and horrifying supernatural threat surfaces, presenting a gruesome mystery that, if solved, might finally put an end to the horrors of the Upside Down.”
