The Upside Down is coming for you. With less than a week until the highly anticipated return of Stranger Things, “Seven Stranger Days” takes you behind the scenes and inside the lives of your Hawkins favorites with insight from the cast, crew and even the Duffer brothers. Check back daily to secure your spot in the Hellfire Club — this is one ticking clock you won’t want to run from.
Whether you’re visually bathing in ’80s nostalgia or gripping the edge of the couch as your favorite character finds themselves wrapped in the wet, sinister vegetation of another dimension, Stranger Things is always fun to look at. The magic of the ’80s multiverse can be credited to production designer Chris Trujillo and his team, who make the creation of another time and place (and then another time and place within that time and place) look easy.
Of course, easy isn’t exactly the word Trujillo would use. Visually, Stranger Things feels like a time capsule, blessed with domestic interiors that somehow feel both deliciously nostalgic but also authentic and lived-in. Dealing with an era in modern history that lives in many people’s minds as a collection of stereotypical pop culture detritus can be tricky. But just as Stranger Things hair stylists and costume designers, Trujillo and his team approach set dressing as realistically as possible, spending months sourcing much of their furniture, decor and props from estate sales in suburban areas, avoiding the trap of ’80s stereotypes at all costs.
Then there’s the matter of the Upside Down. While one might assume it’s largely created with the help of visual effects and CGI, the malevolent alternate dimension is actually applied practically to existing set designs, using raw building materials, including foam, plastic and even a healthy amount of pussy willow fluff. The result is an impossibly evil organism that looks like your worst nightmare — but also mind-bendingly mirrors the characters’ reality.
All things considered, designing the world(s) of Stranger Things was never going to be simple. Here, Trujillo tells Tudum the secrets behind creating the malicious, ever-encroaching tentacles of the Upside Down, sourcing realistic ’80s furniture, the most memorable set in show history, and what new places fans can expect to see in Season 4.
Let’s start with everyone’s favorite alternate dimension, the Upside Down, which is obviously alive and well in Season 4. It may be on a parallel plane, but it also mirrors the characters’ real world. Do you build every set twice — one regular, one dark and demented — or do you create one set and make it all look horrible? Generally, we shoot the real world of the script and then shoot the Upside Down. It’s all the same set. In the early days, when our resources were more limited [creating the Upside Down, it] was easy to talk about but not necessarily easy to figure out how to execute. At the time, we called it “Nether,” because it just felt like this netherworld version of reality. We were limited in our research and development back then, but we had a pretty specific idea of what we wanted it to look like: spreading disease and this set of tentacles and spores. We had a lot of references to mold and mildew and diseases spreading and microscopic photography that we were interested in, [so it was like] “How do we translate all that?” That’s how we went into Season 1, and we still maintain the ethos.
So you build most of the Upside Down; it’s not generated by special effects? Obviously we've expanded in such a way that visual effects have become a big part of our world and our language, just because of the scale of things. But we always wanted to attempt anything practically, so it’s about what physical materials we use. After a lot of back and forth, and a lot of experimenting with different materials — rubbers, foams, plastics, all kinds of different paints — we arrived at this approach where we build all these crazy vines and we adhere them to everything and then we have this whole method of painting around them. Visual effects does a lot of extension when we're outside in these vast environments. But when we're inside the Wheeler's house, for instance, or the Byers’ house or any interior environment where we're doing the nether, it's almost always 95% practical. We float different kinds of organic material in the air [when we shoot]. It's some sort of organic pussy willow fluff, basically. It’s a lot of trial and error, but we have a method down, and we’ve got assembly [down] — an Upside Down tentacle-building factory, essentially.
Season 4 explores a whole new creepy location for the Upside Down to encroach upon — namely, the Creel House and the clock looming inside. What is it about a grandfather clock that’s so ominous? I find grandfather clocks inherently creepy. Just by their nature, they tend to loom and surprise you with their timing. It’s such an antiquated piece of furniture. [This season,] it’s meant to be a focal point... a physical metaphor for the dark realization of power.
How did you find it? We scoured the earth looking for interesting grandfather clocks. Set decorator Jess Royal looked at dozens of options — I want to say she found it either in an estate sale or from an antique vendor. It was somewhere in the Southeast, maybe even Georgia. We modified it to our purposes, and we made copies of it. Who knows where it was from originally.
You’ve said previously that the secret to achieving the show’s look is fastidious estate sale pillaging. How much time do you spend building these worlds? What does it take to furnish an ’80s multiverse? It’s always about finding the most period-correct, authentic elements. Around Atlanta, there are constant estate sales and so many neighborhoods that represent so many demographics. In a lot of cases, these are houses that haven’t changed much since the ’70s or ’80s... including all the knickknack[s] and bric-a-brac. We’re able to get all of those life layers just really accurate. We also have a lot of industrial interiors — weird old commercial space, prisons, police stations or whatever it may be. My decorator is incredibly good at pursuing government auctions, going to different places where you can find disused school equipment or police equipment or just big office-closeout warehouses.
And this season, it’s not just Hawkins, Indiana. You’re also set dressing in California. What are some of the key differences in your approach? I think it’s a lot to do with atmosphere. There’s meant to be a little bit more warmth and a lightness to the atmosphere in that world. We didn’t shoot it in California, but the house [the characters] are meant to be in is in Southern California. We found this really great house in a suburban neighborhood in New Mexico. I think we ended up buying it for the show — it was a straight-up untouched, un-remodeled time capsule. The lighting fixtures and the hardware that existed in the space were exactly what we wanted. We added carpet and we brought our own paint colors and wallpapers, but the architectural bones of it were just quintessential. They still exist within that mid-century [modern] suburban vernacular of American architecture. It's not wildly different from something you might see in Indiana, but there's a subtle difference.
We also see the return of many of the show’s iconic locations this season, including the ever-looming Hawkins Laboratories. How do you make an office building look so sinister? It was a psychiatric facility. You feel there’s a heaviness to the building. It inspired everything we created for that set. What I was really drawn to was the symmetry and the brutalist shape, and the fact that it’s covered in those metal baffles so you don’t really see any windows from the outside. It’s very, “What are they up to in there?”
We also return to the Wheeler’s basement. What are some things you absolutely must have in an ’80s basement that’s inhabited almost exclusively by teenage boys? Well, for me, there's all the obvious little pop cultural iconography — toys, and I love the The Thing poster we put in there for Season 1. Generally, I try not to do anything that is deliberately on the nose in terms of distracting pop cultural references. In a space like that, these boys would be decorating it themselves to some extent. It gives us a chance to really show where their heads are at and what they're interested in and also, for myself and the Duffers and all of us to embed our own little pop cultural references. It’s also how we tell the story of the family in the sense that everything in the basement is essentially the stuff that no longer makes the cut in the main part of the house, like the old couch from the ’70s and the things no one is worried about presenting to company.
READ MORE: Go Behind the Scenes of ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 With These ‘80s Retro Photos
Even though the Byers are in California for Season 4, their old house in Hawkins is definitely one of the most memorable in the show, and we all know chaos happens there. From a production standpoint, what was it like to have to constantly trash it? It was fun. As a production designer, you always hope for a set that is a character in its own right or that goes through some evolution in the course of a season or gets featured in the way the Byers’ house was featured. It's always a lot of work, especially in Season 1 and 2. Both times we were doing these elaborate lights and drawings, [we had to ask ourselves,] “How do we make this space that we're going to spend a lot of time in go through this visually interesting evolution that also is moving the story along?” It's a total pain in the ass in terms of scheduling, because we didn't duplicate that set. We're always working with that same space. It was a real ordeal choreographing with all the departments that are necessary to make those big changeovers, do big lighting changes, change walls out and just physically destroy things. It's a challenge. It's a logistical headache and a continuity nightmare, but ultimately really satisfying because everybody thinks about that set when they think about Stranger Things.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
