We are only four days away from the premiere of Stranger Things Season 5. Ahead of its Nov. 26 launch, creators Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer talked about their influences, creating 'therapeutic' characters.
Speaking to Variety, the Duffer brothers cited two properties as influences. One is M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (for Matt) and the other is Game of Thrones (for Ross). Matt finds interesting parallels between their career and Shyamalan's.
"Like us, he had a movie that was a total dud, and then he did The Sixth Sense, which became this massive phenomenon," Matt observes. "Yes, he continued to do some version of the twist thing, but I thought he took a lot of pretty exciting risks. He kept making original films. I don’t know if I was consciously thinking about it after Stranger Things, but he’s been such a big part of our life that I’m sure it was in there."
For Ross, the primary inspiration was Game of Thrones, with regard to the world-building of Stranger Things and going bigger scale-wise. "In terms of television, we always looked to Game of Thrones and what [showrunners] Dan [Weiss] and David [Benioff] did. They used the success to scale the show up and evolve it, and it snowballed. We would always take that example to Netflix for reasons why we should scale up the show: It’ll scale up the audience. At least, that was what we told them."
As for their own childhood experiences factoring into the writing choices pertaining to some key characters in the show, Matt says, "Yeah, high school was really, really challenging, but at the time, there wasn’t a lot of mental health awareness. It wasn’t something that anybody was talking about. Looking back on it now, do I understand what I was going through. But it’s scarier when you don’t understand what it is that’s going on with you. You just feel like there’s something wrong. The best thing that ever happens to me with this show is when young kids or teenagers come up to me, some of them are older now, and they say the show helped them through these periods. So yeah, we’re trying to channel a lot of what we went through. A lot of the writers we work with, they’re all weirdos, so they all had challenging childhoods in different ways. That’s probably why we created this fantasy of Eddie, because you don’t want the show to become too depressing."
Stranger Things Season 5 will stream in three parts: Volume 1 on Nov. 26, 2025; Volume 2 on Dec. 25, 2025; and The Finale on Dec. 31, 2025.
