The Stranger Things kids have their hands full in the official trailer for the upcoming fourth season — and not just because of the ever-present threat of the much older cast Dear Evan Hansen-ing their way through high school.
The first half of the Netflix show’s penultimate season arrives on May 27, nearly three years after the last batch of episodes, with Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and the gang all grown up and going to war with a terrifying new monster from the Upside Down.
The first trailer, released on Tuesday, opens with an ominous warning from a heavily scaled and zombified baddie: “You’ve broken everything. Your suffering is almost at an end.”
Next, we see the group reeling from the tragic events of the Season 3 finale, in which Eleven lost her powers after defeating the Mind Flayer in the Battle of Starcourt. In the six months since, she has left behind the mayhem of Hawkins in favour of a new life in California with Joyce (Winona Ryder) and the rest of the Byers family.
But a new evil seemingly brings together her friends, including cast members Noah Schnapp, Finn Wolfhard, Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo and Sadie Sink, for another bizarre adventure.
“A war is coming. Your friends in Hawkins are very much in the eye of a storm,” a man warns Eleven in the trailer. “I don’t know how to say this other than just to say it — without you, we can’t win this war.”
The clip also gives a brief glimpse of the very much alive Hopper (David Harbour), who is looking for a new purpose while locked up in a demogorgon-infested Russian prison.
Fan favorites Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Maya Hawke, Paul Reiser and Joe Keery are also back this season, and Robert Englund — who is best known for starring as Freddy Krueger in the A Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, which served as an early inspiration for the series — is joining the series.
“They’re not kids anymore — they really are full-blown teenagers,” series co-creator Matt Duffer recently told Netflix’s Queue magazine. “That’s why this season we leaned more into horror. We figured they should be in their own [version] of A Nightmare on Elm Street, basically.”
The super-sized fourth season will contain nine episodes, with each instalment running nearly twice the length of those in any previous season. All together, the new season — the back half of which premieres on 1 July — has over 800 pages of episode scripts and thousands of visual-effects shots.
It’s all setting up the conclusion of Stranger Things as The Duffer Brothers announced in February that the series will end after its fifth season.