Stranger Things Season 3 Will Be Heavily Influenced By John Carpenter

Almost like Harry Potter before it, Netflix’s Stranger Things has been mapped out in such a way that each new chapter takes place one year after the last. So while season 2 was set in Hawkins in the year 1984, the third season of the spooky drama is poised to jump ahead to 1985, and it’ll seemingly be even darker than previous installments.

Obviously, that’s music to our ears and perhaps unsurprisingly, we’re now learning that the great John Carpenter’s influence will be felt throughout the new run. That’s according to producer Shawn Levy, who spoke with Bad TV recently and apparently stressed that season 3 is the most ambitious one yet.

“I can not go into the specifics, but as you saw the second season has become more cinematic, much more based on the characters than the first and this evolution will continue with the third. It will be a season with more action than ever before. There will also be very much the ghost of John Carpenter and other ’80s horror directors here.”

That last bit isn’t too surprising to hear given what we’ve seen from the show so far, but again, it’s certainly welcome and we can’t wait to pick up on all the nods and references to Carpenter and other great horror filmmakers of the ’80s.

As far as plot details go, they’ve been kept mostly under wraps, but a few set photos have leaked out in recent weeks which give us at least some idea of where the characters will be when they return. Not to mention they’ve also showed us Millie Bobby Brown’s new look as Eleven. Our biggest hope here though is that the producers can rectify the mistakes they made last year.

Don’t get us wrong, season 2 was a solid run and mostly enjoyable, but the thrill of the show was watching the whole gang bounce off of one another and it took a wrong turn when it split up the group for the sake of world-building. Thankfully, then, we’ve heard that season 3 will be more focused on challenging the gang as a unit, which hopefully means they’ll be able to recapture that same magic we saw during the first run of Stranger Things.