Stranger Things’ 3rd Season Is Heavily Influenced By A Chevy Chase Comedy

Stranger Things’ 3rd Season Is Heavily Influenced By A Chevy Chase Comedy

Stranger Things has always owed much of its tone and style to the 1980s. But when we started looking forward to the third season, this isn’t really the ’80s movie we were expecting.

In a new talk with Variety, Stranger Things star David Harbour (the dadbod-acious Chief Jim Hopper) explains that one of the big cinematic influences on next year’s season of Stranger Things is a bit distant from the Spielberg thrillers and sci-fi coming-of-age stories that characterised the first two seasons.

“The Duffers are so specific each year with the movies. And Fletch is one movie we get to play around and have some fun with this season, which you wouldn’t expect from Stranger Things and you wouldn’t expect from the Spielberg universe and you certainly wouldn’t expect from a darker season”, Harbour said.

Fletch, for those like me who were born in the 1990s, is a 1985 comedy starring Chevy Chase. In it, he plays an investigative reporter who gets caught up in a wild caper involving drugs, murder and a lot of money.

An unexpected direction, for sure, but as Variety points out, it might very well be related to the casting of Jake Busey (yep, Gary’s son) as Bruce, described as a Hawkins Post reporter with “questionable morals and a sick sense of humour”.

Perhaps he’ll get embroiled in a runaway investigation into the supernatural occurrences that plague Hawkins and the experiments that shaped Eleven into who she is.

Variety‘s talk with Harbour also touches on a number of other topics relating to the upcoming season, including Harbour’s speculations about Hopper’s backstory and teasing of the puberty part of the coming-of-age story, with Harbour saying “[Eleven and Hawkins’s] relationship is going to get far more complex, because, you know, things happen to girls and boys when they’re 13 and 14 … A lot of changes go on in the body and in your social life and I don’t think he’s going to handle watching her become a woman in front of his eyes very well. That’s a horrifying thing for him — maybe even more so than fighting inter-dimensional monsters”.

Check out the whole interview and look for Stranger Things sometime next winter.


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