Historically, the town of Jackson, Ga. stood in for Hawkins, Ind.—or at least its quaint Main Street. But after the villainous Vecna opened up gates to a treacherous parallel universe called the Upside Down in Stranger Things’ fourth season, Hawkins was left in ruins. For the fifth and final season, the production team needed to build a decimated version of Hawkins. And, to make it even more complicated, they need to keep it that way for all eight episodes. So they rebuilt the street on a set in Atlanta.
The day that I visit the set for a TIME cover story on the final season of Stranger Things, which reportedly cost almost half a billion dollars, that street is in shambles. The showrunners, Matt and Ross Duffer, are filming a major battle scene. Hawkins is under military quarantine. Extras in fatigues cluster around the town’s library, which now serves as an entryway to the Upside Down via a multi-story red hole. Actors in gray suits with orange ping pong balls on their heads stand in for the CGI Demogorgons that will battle these military men and wreak havoc in the town.
Photograph by Michal Pudelka for TIME
With the characters able to move between the Upside Down and the Rightside Up, every street, house, and store in Hawkins must serve double duty. Each must transform into its Upside Down version—and back again—fairly quickly. That involves adding the inky tentacles made from painted black pool noodles with wire running through them to each set. Production designer Chris Trujillo tells me that if you were to line up all these vines back to back they would stretch 52 miles.
I explore several other sets, including the radio station that will serve as home base for the gang this season, a cave where Holly Wheeler will get a good scare, and a laboratory located in the Upside Down. Security spots three drones on set in the time that I am there, likely piloted by intruders trying to suss out spoilers for the final season.
Though I see several scenes being filmed, I am given little context. At one point between takes, Finn Wolfhard walks over to the Duffers’ monitors where rough renderings of Demogorgons pummel soldiers so the directors and actors can get a sense of what the scene will look like after the CGI artists work their magic. Wolfhard starts laughing at my puzzled face. “You’re like, ‘What the f-ck is happening in this scene?’” he says, sympathetically.
But I will share what I did see—and as much as I understand. For the rest, we’ll just have to wait for the first batch of episodes to drop on Netflix Nov. 26.
A mysterious scene involving Holly Wheeler
Nell Fisher as Holly Wheeler in Stranger Things Netflix
One scene unfolds in a labyrinth of spray-painted orange rocks. It appears to be a hallucination sequence featuring 10-year-old Holly Wheeler—Nancy and Mike’s baby sister, a character who was an actual toddler in Season 1 and is now played by Nell Fisher—wandering through the rock formation in a ’50s-era blue A-line dress, a red handkerchief tied around her neck, pigtails in her hair, and blood smeared across her forehead. The entire look evokes Alice in Wonderland. One anachronistic touch is a multicolor friendship bracelet, the kind a kid might have made at camp in the 1980s.
Holly turns a corner and freezes. She sees something. The Duffers push in quickly and dramatically on a tight shot of her face, in a style that evokes horror movie scream queens. “Go! Go! Go!” Matt yells, encouraging her to turn and run.
After the Duffers call “Cut,” Fisher holds up her hands to her dad, laughing. “Like my fake tan?” she asks, showing off palms covered in orange dust that looks like Cheeto powder, acquired from the rocks. Fisher’s dad says the 13-year-old actor has grown four inches since she was cast; the costume department has already refitted her dress three times.
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Hilary Leavitt, president of the Duffers’ Upside Down Pictures, begins to explain how the scene connects to Stranger Things: The First Shadow. Matt half-jokingly asks her not to spoil the whole season.
He explains, in the most vague terms, how they’ve written four different scenes that would connect to the play and wound up deleting them all. “Stephen Daldry was going to kill us because we kept changing the story,” he says, referencing the Tony award-winning director of The First Shadow, which premiered in the West End before transferring to Broadway earlier this year. “But I think this scene will hold.”
Alice Creel’s creepy room
Henry Creel became telekinetic and developed his disturbing affinity for spiders after he was exposed to the Upside Down as a young child, according to The First Shadow. Eventually, Henry killed his mother and sister and framed his father for their deaths. He wound up in the hands of Dr. Brenner, a scientist studying the Upside Down who made Henry his first subject and branded him with the tattoo “001.” Years later, when Henry rebelled against Dr. Brenner, another one of Brenner’s patients, Eleven, banished Henry to the Upside Down. There, Henry took a monstrous turn and became Venca.
Henry’s house is already an iconic Stranger Things set. Abandoned since he lived there as a child, it is the creepy setting where the gang had a showdown with Vecna last season and where Max fell into a coma. During my set visit, I walk into the bedroom of Alice Creel, Henry’s sister. The space is filled with the sweet details of a midcentury children’s room, like a floral pillow and a play kitchen. But unsettling touches creep in: a Raggedy Anne doll with a missing eye on the shelf and a demonic-looking stuffed bunny on a chair. An Alice in Wonderland poster hangs on the wall.
An Epic Battle Between Soldiers and Creatures from the Upside Down
Winona Ryder, Finn Wolfhard, and Jake Connelly in Stranger Things Netflix
When we visit Hawkins’ library—where the four massive tears Vecna made in the ground converged at the end of last season, creating a gaping red hole—it is swarming with extras in fatigues and stunt performers. Some are strapped to wires, waiting to be thrown into the air by various creatures. It is part of a massive action sequence, the biggest the Duffers have attempted yet. The brothers tell me they are preparing an even more ambitious set piece for the series finale.
But in this scene, Demogorgons emerge from the Upside Down to attack the soldiers stationed in Hawkins. Several of the original gang, including Mike, Will (Noah Schnapp), and Joyce (Winona Ryder), are on hand to fight—or at least flee. At one point, Mike leads a group of children to safety.
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They have been rehearsing the scene for two weeks. Each sequence has been given a different codename: “Hilltop,” “Crossing,” and “Massacre.” They will be stitched together into what is known as a “oner,” an industry term for a single continuous shot or a series of shots that are made to look like a single continuous shot. Shawn Levy, the director of Deadpool & Wolverine and an executive producer on Stranger Things, shot a true oner in Season 4 involving a shootout between government agents and a handful of the cast. But this scene is much bigger in scope with over 100 people involved.
The Duffers have been waiting years for this moment. For four seasons, they held back from demolishing Hawkins because its residents would never remain in a place overrun by Demogorgons, Demodogs, Demobats, and whatever other creatures might emerge from the Upside Down. But now that the show is coming to an end, they can unleash every monster they’ve ever dreamed up. “By the end of this scene,” visual-effects supervisor Michael Maher tells me, “just about everyone you see standing up is going to be dead except the kids.” He scrolls through his phone to show me 528 storyboard images of the sequence.
When the Duffers call, “Action!” The flood lights that have been set up around the quarantined Hawkins begin to flicker, a tell-tale sign that creatures from the Upside Down are about to emerge from their parallel dimension. They yell cut. Matt complains that one of the soldiers looks “too chill” in the background of a shot.
The Duffers’ monitors are set up inside a dilapidated Radio Shack, presumably the same one that Bob (Sean Astin) worked at in Season 2. It’s now filled with “Inventory Clearance Sale” signs, and ceiling tiles are dislodged. Hours into shooting this scene, the constantly flickering lights become somewhat nauseating.
The twin showrunners are experimenting with something they’re calling “demo-vision”—shooting from the perspective of the Demogorgons attacking people using a drone that can imitate a galloping motion. The VFX team has grown exponentially since the beginning of the show: The Duffers now work with industry giants like ILM and WETA who are responsible for the effects in movies like the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings franchises.
The show has evolved from a diverting homage to ‘80s grandmasters like Steven Spielberg and Stephen King into an outright blockbuster with some of the most eye-popping action scenes on TV. The Duffers maintain an unofficial bucket list of the types of scenes they’d like to shoot before Stranger Things ends. For example, they wrote a Jaws-inspired town hall scene into every season—and cut it every time—until Season 4. In Season 5, they will tick “setting someone on fire” off their list.
The Upside Down lab
In addition to taking over Hawkins’ downtown, the military has apparently set up a lab inside the Upside Down to study the creatures from the parallel universe. We walk through a series of tunnels, reminiscent of the ones featured in Season 2, in order to reach it.
Four flashing red lights greet us as we enter. Monsters from the parallel universe, one of which looks like an octopus, float inside glass cases. Inside another glass case sits a black Demogorgon egg—apparently the same one featured in Season 1—measuring about three feet tall.
Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven and Matthew Modine as Dr. Martin Brenner in ‘Stranger Things’ Tina Rowden—Netflix
For the first time on the show, we will get a look inside Dr. Brenner’s office. Located next to the Rainbow Room where Eleven honed her telekinetic skills—and banished Henry to the Upside Down—the office is filled with notebooks. Each contains dozens of pages of handwritten notes, hand-drawn equations, and sketches of organisms from the Upside Down, just in case the camera catches a character flipping through.
The Radio Station
Each season of Stranger Things introduces a new ’80s-inspired locale: the arcade, the mall, the video rental store. Season 5 is no exception. The gang’s headquarters for this season of Stranger Things isn’t the Wheeler basement but WSQK “The Squawk” 94.5 FM. The radio station will serve as their homebase while they hide out from government soldiers and hunt for Vecna in the Upside Down. They meet in secret beneath the station to debrief and strategize.
The building itself draws on a real-life radio station in the Duffers’ hometown of Durham, N.C. Golden arches flank the grand Art Deco-inspired front desk, but beige paint peels throughout, and the windows are covered in dingy green blinds. No prop has been overlooked: The break room fridge boasts a magnet from Six Flags St. Louis and an Indiana Pacers jersey. Inside the all-glass DJ booth in the center of the room sits a rubber chicken for Steve (Joe Keery) to slap as a sound effect while Robin (Maya Hawke) spins records. Other sound effect tapes are labeled “UFO,” “glass shatter,” and “crying baby”—let’s see if they get any use this season.
Since Season 4 revealed that the Upside Down is frozen in time in 1983 and Season 5 takes place in 1987, Trujillo and his team also had to consider what might have been added to the station in the intervening years, from newer records to posters, every time they render an Upside Down version of the space.
The Costume Hanger
Costume designer Amy Parris, who’s been with the show since Season 3, has rotated through so many looks that she’s filled a hanger with polos, Dungeons & Dragons T-shirts, and tube socks. Her team had to make trips to Alabama in search of vintage ‘80s clothing and fabric because they cleared out what they could find in all of Georgia. Now, they need a crane to reach the clothes at the top of the hangar. Every costume from past seasons is stored away just in case the Duffers decide to write a flashback scene.
Parris hangs mood boards in her office labeled with the superlatives various background characters might earn in a high school yearbook: Weirdo, Jock, Nerd. For inspiration, she keeps a stash of era-appropriate Midwestern yearbooks within reach.
This season is set in the fall of 1987 which, in theory, should be full of iconic ‘80s fashion with bright colors and shoulder pads. But Hawkins, Parris explains, is a bit behind the times because the small town’s mall was destroyed in Season 3, and the military-imposed quarantine means no new leggings shipments to the remaining stores. Instead, much of the costuming involves olive fatigues.
But not all uniforms are the same. “We’ve got our topside military, the military in Hawkins in classic woodland green,” explains Parris. “We’ve got our Upside Down military, and we delineate that with olive drab green, a solid color,” she says. “And then there’s this sort of mercenary regime, they’re called the Wolfpack, and they’re specific to Dr. Kay’s men who are meant to be finding Eleven.” Dr. Kay will be played by Linda Hamilton.
One of the stranger parts of the tour is a “hot box” that the costume department has rigged up to dry a layer of white goo onto a pair of jeans. Who knows what supernatural event could have occurred there to render it gooey.
