‘Stranger Things 4’ DP Caleb Heymann On Freddy Krueger’s Nightmarish Influence, ‘Dizzying’ Vol. 2 Finale

Most professionals in Hollywood would probably agree to fight the bloodthirsty Demogorgon in a no holds barred cage match if it meant a chance to work on Netflix’s nostalgia-fueled television hit, Stranger Things.

Cinematographer Caleb Heymann proved his worthiness to play in the show’s ‘80s-inspired sandbox through a different trial by fire: an intense, 106-day shoot for director Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street trilogy. Released by Netflix over a three-week period last summer, the trio of horror films adapted the series of YA novels penned by Goosebumps mastermind, R.L. Stine. “Fear Street was a pretty big project,” Heymann tells me over Zoom. “It had a range of tones to it and it was really dark.”

His work on the straight-to-streaming movies — all of which take place in previous time periods — ultimately caught the attention of Janiak’s husband, Ross Duffer, who co-created Stranger Things with his brother, Matt. Indeed, Fear Street was very much a family affair, with a good chunk of the production crew (from the art director to cast members Sadie Sink and Maya Hawke) having worked on the beloved TV series.

Even Heymann was no stranger to the world of Hawkins, Indiana after handling a slew of second unit work for the last two episodes of Season 3. As such, it was a no-brainer for the Duffer Brothers to recruit him for the long-awaited fourth season.

“They told me it was pure Nightmare on Elm Street vibes and the biggest season yet, but also the most psychologically complex as the characters are growing up and dealing with trauma and more adult problems,” recalls the director of photography. “I didn’t have to think about it too hard. I took it right away.”

The Duffers weren’t blowing smoke — every episode of Season 4 is over an hour in length and some are just as long, if not longer, than theatrically-released films.

***WARNING! The following contains major plot spoilers for the first volume of Stranger Things 4! Proceed at your own risk!***

Originally hired to shoot four out of the nine installments, Heymann ended up tackling seven of them, including the final two episodes that make up Vol. 2.

“Right off the bat, the Duffer Brothers and I were talking about it being darker,” explains the DP, citing the Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser franchises as the main creative influences on Season 4, which introduces a humanoid villain (given the D&D monicker of “Vecna”) who murders teenagers by weaponizing their own fears and nightmares against them in Freddy Krueger-meets-Pennywise fashion.

“We didn’t need to beat it over the head by repeating visual motifs from those films or completely copying the style,” Heymann explains. “When you get into somebody’s nightmares and a hallucinatory, subjective world, there’s definitely license to not have to motivate lights and to do whatever you like with them and to be a little bit more theatrical.”

In Episode 1, for example, Vecna torments and kills his first victim — a popular Hawkins High cheerleader named Chrissy (Grace Van Dien) — paving the way for Heymann to doff his cap to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors with “these over-the-top shafts of blue light coming in through windows that gives you these very graphic frames and allows you to silhouette the bad guy in front of it … It also worked really well to not see our monster right away.”

In terms of story, the new season aims for a larger narrative scope hitherto unseen in previous outings of the show. Following the “Battle of Starcourt,” the characters are now scattered across several different locations.

Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder); her two sons, Will (Noah Schnapp) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton); and a powerless Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) have relocated to California, depicted via “warmer, sunnier, pastels,” Heymann says.

After a number of grisly murders start to rock the Hawkins community, Eleven reunites with Dr. Sam Owens (Paul Reiser) and Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) in an effort to restore her psychic abilities and stop Vecna’s rampage, which has been blamed on local bad boy, Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn). If she wants any chance of regaining her powers, Eleven must revisit a number of repressed memories from her time spent as a guinea pig at the Hawkins Laboratory — a place characterized by a “more neutral cyan look motivated by the overhead fluorescents.”

Hawkins Police Chief and Eleven’s adoptive father, Jim Hopper (David Harbour), miraculously survived the explosion beneath the mall, only to find himself trapped deep behind the Iron Curtain, the reluctant prisoner of a Soviet labor camp.

“The Russia storyline was gonna be very cool, stark, more monochromatic,” the cinematographer reveals. “Very low-lit, and using pockets of warmth with dirty old practical lights, but also really gnarly, greenish-hued fluorescents, and what low-lit daylight would come in would be almost like a twilight feeling. Like a deep blue.”

Everyone else — Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin), Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink), Erica Sinclair (Priah Ferguson), Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer), Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), and Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke) — stayed back in that epicenter of bizarre occurrences, Hawkins, whose overall look “would meet in the middle, color-wise.”

Heymann continues: “The great thing about these episodes is we go through such a range of tones. Not just a range of locations, but a huge range of tones of what’s happening with our characters emotionally. It really gives you the opportunity to cover this broad spectrum of a visual language.”

Such a large production would have been incredibly difficult to pull off under the best of circumstances, but fate had other plans. Just as principal photography was starting to ramp up in the early spring of 2020, something more terrifying than a monster from the fictional Upside Down reared its ugly head: the COVID-19 virus.

Like every other live-action project at the time, Stranger Things 4 was put on hold for close to half a year. The onset of the pandemic proved to be a double-edged sword for Heymann. On the one hand, the extended break gave him more time to prepare storyboards and shot lists. On the other hand, trying to schedule and shoot an ambitious season of television under strict health safety protocols was like trying to solve a “giant Rubik’s Cube.”

Large group scenes were pushed to the end of the schedule (the hope being that the pandemic would abate somewhat in the face of mass vaccination) while other moments were constantly shuffled around as actors tested positive for or reported exposures to the virus. “This whole concept of shooting in distinctive blocks of two episodes at a time pretty much went out the window with COVID,” Heymann admits. “And suddenly, any of the 800 pages of material that makes up this crazy 14-hour season was fair game and you had to be ready to tackle any of it on any given day of shooting.”

Adding to all the stress and anxiety was the fact that the young cast was growing at an alarming rate. Most of the lead actors were coming up on their late teens and early twenties when they were supposed to be playing high school freshmen. “It’s a big jump, so there was a concern around that and how long everything was taking,” Heymann says. “But the Duffer Brothers just took a huge swing with each episode, they were very ambitious and [the episodes] kept getting longer and longer.”

Even without the logistical headaches of a post-COVID world, there were still plenty of filmmaking hurdles to overcome. One of the scenes that was particularly difficult to crack arrives in Episode 7 when Nancy, Steve, Robin, and Eddie escape the Upside Down by climbing through a rift that has opened up in the ceiling of Eddie’s trailer home.

“It was finally our last week in Atlanta after 11-and-a-half months of non-stop mayhem,” the director of photography remembers. “Suddenly, we’re seeing both the Upside Down and the Right Side Up at the same time.”

The mind-bending visual looks incredibly seamless in the finished product, of course, but was a complete nightmare to figure out in practice. “We were just absolutely banging our heads against the wall, trying to figure out when left is right and right is left and where eye-lines should go and where furniture should go.”

In the end, the team “had to just physically build a little shoe box diorama and move these little figurines around and these miniature cubes of furniture around to figure out what things would actually look like because just trying to wrap our heads around it was never gonna happen. We spent plenty of time just rotating this little shoebox diorama with our iPhones and you’ve got Matt and Ross Duffer and [A Cam/Steadicam operator] Nick Mueller and Joe Keery and half the cast. Everybody’s just trying to work it out when your brain is so fried.”

The fourth season of Stranger Things will close out with the premiere of its final two chapters (“Papa” and “The Piggyback”) on Friday, July 1. While Vol. 2’s episode count is significantly leaner, the runtime — a whopping four hours of small screen content — is anything but. Case in point: the finale alone clocks in at two-and-a-half hours.

Given the big Vecna reveal at the end of Episode 7, it’s probably safe to assume that an epic rematch between the latest Upside Down antagonist and Eleven is about to go down. Before we gere there, however, a good chunk of our heroes still need to reunite in Hawkins — presumably in Episode 8 — which serves as “a bit of a breather and a build-up,” Heymann teases. He goes on to describe the finale as “really spectacular” and “monstrous…a proper movie unto itself.”

The cinematographer concludes: “[Episode 9 has] this multi-climatic showdown where all these different worlds start to collide at the same time. I think it’s gonna be kind of dizzying to watch because there were 300 scenes often involving a lot of visual effects, but it’s really gonna pay off in a big way … Episode 9 is probably gonna be [beyond] anything that we’ve ever seen before in a single episode of a TV show as far as the sheer level of ambition and some really big action sequences, but is also full of heart and great performances.”

Vol. 1 of Stranger Things 4 is now streaming on Netflix
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