STRANGER THINGS PRODUCTION
“It’s a balance of the epic and the intimate”
Stranger Things turned the world upside down. As the sci-fi saga comes to a close, we sit down with DOP Caleb Heymann, who explains how he kept the supernatural, increasingly grandiose story grounded in reality
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WORDS KATIE KASPERSON IMAGES NETFLIX
F ew shows achieve international phenomenon status, but Stranger Things is certainly one of them. Premiering on Netflix in 2016 to critical acclaim, the series ran through five seasons, 42 ‘chapters’ (episodes) and a collective runtime of nearly 48 hours, giving audiences an ensemble cast of lovable characters, a hefty dose of eighties nostalgia and a sci-fi story that pays homage to both the classics and hidden gems of its genre. Following a group of kids – by the end, they’re well into their teens and twenties – from the fictional suburb of Hawkins, Indiana, Stranger Things begins on a small scale. There’s a missing boy named Will, a telekinetic girl named Eleven and an alternate dimension (or so they think) called the Upside Down. By Season 4, the world of Stranger Things has expanded into California and the Soviet Union (it’s 1986 at that point),
and in Season 5 it travels, Back to the Future -style, 30 years into the past while present-day (1987) Hawkins is under government-sanctioned quarantine. Joining the show on Season 3 as a second-unit DOP, Caleb Heymann returned for Seasons 4 and 5 as lead cinematographer. “They were, by far, the biggest two seasons of the show,” he states – the runtimes and budgets alone can back up this claim. “They took extra time to film because in Season 4 we had the pandemic and in Season 5 we had the strikes. I don’t necessarily wish there was a Season 6,” he admits. “It feels like that chapter came to its proper close. We’ve done Stranger Things to the fullest.” IT’S VECNA’S WORLD (AND WE’RE JUST LIVING IN IT) There’s an evil in Hawkins and, each season, it goes by a different Dungeons
& Dragons -inspired name. First, it’s the Demogorgon, then the Shadow Monster (aka the Mind Flayer) and, finally, Vecna. Also known as Henry Creel, Vecna was the first of a series of lab rats (Eleven being – you guessed it – the eleventh) to undergo telekinetic training. Season 5 transports us into his past, back to the Creel house introduced in Season 4 and inside his very own mindscape. “We wanted Henry’s world to feel inviting,” begins Heymann. “It’s an amalgamation of his memories, and we were leaning into a saturated, almost Technicolor look. We didn’t want the Creel house to look like it did in Season 4, where it’s dark, the lights are out and the windows are boarded up. We wanted it to feel different from the rest.” The mood in Hawkins, meanwhile, is grim. “Hawkins has been taken over by the military,” Heymann explains. “The season opens with this melancholic
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