It's been more than two years since Stranger Things Season 3 wrapped up most of the show's storylines pretty neatly. The residents of Hawkins defeated the Mind Flayer and closed the gate to the Upside Down. The Byers family, including Eleven, moved out of town. The only remaining business had to do with Hopper, who appeared to have perished in an explosion, but a post-credits scene hinted that he survived and was taken prisoner by the Russians. With so many of its mysteries resolved, and with its characters now geographically separated, fans wondered what Stranger Things Season 4 could be about. From what audiences know so far, the show seems like it's going back to what it does best: massive conspiratorial coverups. This time, the conspiracy will involve a haunted house where an infamous murder took place.
Over the past year, Netflix has released a few teasers and trailers for Stranger Things Season 4, including a new one for their virtual TUDUM event called "Creel House." In the latest clip, a vintage car pulls up to a stately Victorian home with a moving van in the driveway as the song "Dream a Little Dream" plays. A well-dressed, happy family of four makes themselves at home, doing school work and eating dinner. But things get creepy only moments later; fans will immediately understand the implications of the flickering lights and dead animals strewn about the property. The family goes from picture-perfect to lifeless on the floor, with only the father left standing in front of a stained glass window.
The second half of the trailer shows the Hawkins kids breaking into the Creel House, now dark and dilapidated. Steve asks what kind of clues they're supposed to be looking for, and Dustin quotes Sherlock Holmes, saying, "the world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes." Clocks figure prominently into this trailer and previous teasers, which is a clue in and of itself that the mystery of Stranger Things Season 4 will take place between at least two times: the past, in which whatever happened at Creel House took place, and the show's present day, in which the kids are trying to figure out the truth.
Even more clues were revealed in a 12-second teaser posted to the series' Twitter account. The same song plays as microfiche clippings of a newspaper from 1959 spell out more of the story: first "[Redacted] Claims Vengeful Demon Killed Family" and "The Murder that Shocked a Small Community," then "[Redacted]: killer or tragic victim of a vengeful spirit?". It seems like the father survived but was accused and convicted of killing his wife and children. Quotes from the paper give the impression that Mr. Creel thinks someone or something else is to blame. Perhaps he believes he was possessed by a demon, or perhaps the familiar, malevolent forces from either the Upside Down or the Hawkins National Laboratory were involved.
That the clippings were redacted at the very least suggests that someone spun the story of the Creels' deaths in a direction that suited them. What really happened, who covered up that story and why will likely be the driving questions behind Season 4. Signs point to some entity being in cahoots with the local psychiatric hospital. Eager fans may already know about a new character named Victor Creel from official casting news, also courtesy of Twitter. He'll be portrayed by Robert Englund, and the new character is described as "a disturbed and intimidating man who is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s."
An earlier teaser indicates that Stranger Things Season 4 will delve deeper into Eleven's counterparts at the laboratory. Whether Victor was part of the secretive experiments after his family's demise, years earlier as a child, or at all is unclear. What does seem obvious, as Sherlock Holmes would put it, is that Hawkins has been afflicted by supernatural phenomena for quite some time -- decades longer than previously thought -- and that the Creel Family may have been among the first to get caught up in the mayhem. How all the pieces fit together may not be clear just yet, but as Season 4 gets closer, more and more of them are on the board. As is always the case in Hawkins, even unthinkably terrible tragedies aren't what they seem.
Stranger Things Season 4 does not have an official release date but the Netflix original is expected to debut in 2022.