Robert Englund’s Victor Creel is coming for you — tomorrow — in a cryptic tease for Stranger Things 4. Ahead of Netflix’s TUDUM, the three-hour online global fan event revealing a “special Stranger Things surprise” on September 25, the streamer scares up hints about the Nightmare on Elm Street actor’s “disturbed and intimidating” character in Season 4. The Netflix original series announced Englund and seven new cast members last year, describing Creel as a man “imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s.” Watch the new teaser below.
Microfiche images of a newspaper from 1959 shows flashes of “the murder that shocked a small community,” reporting claims that a “vengeful demon” killed a family of four. Like the psychokinetic-powered Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), the number “003” suggests Creel is among the first test subjects of Project MKUltra, which began experimentation in Hawkins, Indiana, in 1953.
003. Tudum. Tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/XstukcMPld
— Stranger Things (@Stranger_Things) September 24, 2021
After actor Gaten Matarazzo called Stranger Things 4 “the scariest [season] out of the previous three,” Finn Wolfhard described the new season as “the darkest” yet.
“Every season it gets darker. Really, I will say with Season 3 I was like, this is the darkest season that there’ll ever be, like the exploding rats and everything. But really, Season 4 so far, it’s the darkest season there’s ever been,” Wolfhard previously said on CBC Listen. “Every year, it gets amped up. Every year it gets funnier and darker and sadder, and everything. Every year, they amp it up.”
Production on the new season shut down last year due to COVID-19. Filming was on hold for several months before resuming in September 2020, finally wrapping earlier this month. Netflix has yet to reveal a release date for Season 4 but is likely to announce the return of Stranger Things during TUDUM on Saturday.
“I’ll just say that we are long-delayed, and [creators] the Duffers and I want to share season four with the world as badly as the world wants it,” series director-producer Shawn Levy recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “Part of what’s taking time is long before Covid and the pandemic existed, season four was built to be by far the most ambitious, cinematic, sprawling and epic season that we’ve ever done. By not just a little — by a lot.”
Levy added, “So the complexity of season four, even before we had the obstacles, hurdles and challenges of a pandemic, is taking a lot of time because it is super worth the wait.”
David Harbour, Winona Ryder, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Priah Ferguson, and Matthew Modine star. Previously cast Season 4 newcomers include Amybeth McNulty, Myles Truitt, Regina Ting Chen, Grace Van Dien, and Robert Englund.
