When Will Byers suddenly goes missing, the whole town of Hawkins, Indiana, turns upside down. Many people are on the search for Will, including his mother Joyce, his brother Jonathan, his friends Mike, Dustin, and Lucas, Police Chief Jim Hopper, and other notable people. But one thing leads to another, creating a supernatural trail. And things get even weirder when a little girl with a shaved head comes into the story.
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Maya Hawke, who plays the sharp-tongued Robin Buckley from Season 3 onward, is the real-life daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, two actors who defined a lot of 80s and 90s cinema themselves. It's a fun bit of casting trivia that only clicks once you notice the resemblance.
The rustic cabin where Hopper gets attacked in Season 3 cost the production a grand total of one dollar to use, because it belongs to an Atlanta escape room company called Escape Woods. They later turned the actual cabin into one of their own attractions, letting fans try to outsmart their own version of the Mind Flayer on site.
The unsettling corridors of Hawkins Lab have been shot inside a genuine decommissioned psychiatric hospital owned by Emory University in Atlanta. The building was actually scheduled for demolition back in 2023, but the writers' and actors' strikes that year delayed filming, which ended up pushing back the building's destruction too.
For one key Season 5 scene, the visual effects crew didn't just rely on computers. They 3D-printed a full-size Demogorgon corpse, cast it in silicone and rigged it with an articulated frame so it would flop convincingly. The finished thing weighed close to 200 pounds and needed a stretcher and four crew members just to carry it around set.
Turning into Vecna wasn't a quick job. Jamie Campbell Bower estimates he clocked around 70 hours across the season sitting in the prosthetics chair, wearing custom contact lenses and dentures so he could still act through all the latex. Season 5 actually required less coverage than before since only his head, shoulders and one arm needed prosthetics, with the rest handled through a tracked bodysuit and digital effects.
Building out the tangled, organic look of the Upside Down for Season 5 took a genuinely absurd amount of materials, roughly 27.3 miles of pool noodles and 81 miles of rope, all turned into around 52 miles of finished tendrils. One crew member reportedly hand-rubbed 70 percent of the noodles themselves just to keep the texture and colour consistent throughout.
Steve introduces a chocolate bar called Peanut Butter Boppers in the final season, and it's not a made-up prop. It's a genuine 1980s treat, and the props team went as far as consulting the original manufacturer to recreate the packaging accurately. The timing worked out nicely too, since the company ended up rereleasing the actual bar not long after the show came out.
