Starcourt

That Stranger Things trailer was basically just a mall. Not some abstract monster dimension or a cursed house, but Starcourt—a shopping center in the 1980s with arcades and food courts and the specific gravity that malls have when you’re the right age to care about them. It was a weird choice for scale-up, but it worked immediately.

By that point I’d mostly made peace with the show. The first season had legitimately unsettling moments, but watching it try to maintain that dread while also becoming a massive Netflix property was like watching someone run in two directions at once. Bigger monsters, bigger conspiracies, everyone important getting plot armor. A mall just sitting there as a location felt like honesty.

The Duffer brothers did press somewhere and joked that they’d been too deep in Red Dead Redemption 2 to finish on time. You could never tell if they meant it or if it was just the kind of thing people say. They released episode titles that didn’t tell you much—The Sauna Test, The Bite, The Battle of Starcourt—enough fragments to know something was going to happen but not what.

None of that mattered much. The trailer had already done the work just by showing you a place. That was it.