Stranger Things season 4’s latest trailer introduces a haunted house in Hawkins, and the storyline proves that there is a past — and thus, a potential future — to the show’s small-town setting. Stranger Things was a huge hit upon release in 2016 and has built a massive fanbase ever since. It is not hard to see any the show became so popular, as the sci-fi horror/dramedy mashes up disparate elements to create a surprisingly cohesive, nostalgic whole that is as much Amblin Entertainment as it is John Carpenter.
However, as proven by the show’s disjointed third season, Stranger Things can’t last forever. For one thing, the show’s primary characters were preteens when the series began and are now entering their twenties, radically altering the tone of Stranger Things. While a time jump can save Stranger Things season 4 from needing to de-age its cast, it is still clear that the appeal of the series has a limited life due to the nature of coming-of-age entertainment.
However, the kids have never been the sole draw for Stranger Things, with much of the show’s heart coming from adult actors like David Harbour and Winona Ryder while a lot of its breakout stars have been twenty-something actors like Joe Keery, Dacre Montgomery, Shannon Purser, and Maya Hawke. The world of Stranger Things is not limited to its young cast, and the haunted house story seen in the show’s most recent season 4 trailer proves that the town of Hawkins could play host to spin-off stories after their departure. By showing that the Upside Down of Stranger Things is not something unearthed by Hawkins Lab and happened upon by one small group of people in one time period, but rather a potentially far older, more long-lasting threat, season 4’s haunted house plot could let Netflix set up a spin-off that tells other stories from those unfortunate enough to cross into its murky alternate reality.
The nature of the creepy mirror world has never been clarified canonically on Stranger Things, a fact that will work in the show’s favor if the creators do opt to explore more of the Upside Down in a subsequent spin-off series. As the threat’s exact dimensions and its monsters are largely unexplained, there's no reason Stranger Things can’t pull off be an anthology spin-off series following the end of the current cast’s ongoing story. One major mistake of Stranger Things season 3 was the series attempting to add too many villains to an already-overstuffed cast and too many subplots to an ambitiously sprawling series, but a spin-off could explore these ideas in relative comfort without worrying about tying together each story strand.
For example, American Horror Stories took the established fictional world of American Horror Story, dropped the serialization, and used it as a platform to tell one-off scary stories. Anthology horror has been having something of a small-screen revival in recent years as Slasher, Creepshow, and numerous other series explore standalone stories, and the world of Stranger Things is perfectly primed for this sort of spin-off. The already violent and over-the-top environs of Hawkins mean a Tales From the Crypt-style anthology exploring the depths of the Upside Down would fit the show’s established tone and could provide Stranger Things with a future once the main story reaches its conclusion.
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