'Stranger Things' season two gets a new trailer, earlier premiere date, and a badass moving poster

Right, where do we even start with this? Netflix have dumped a bunch of Stranger Things content on our doorsteps, and there’s a lot of good stuff to get to.

Maybe a good place to begin is the revelation that we’ll actually be getting season two four days earlier than originally promised! Netflix had originally told us it’d be coming on Halloween, but the official season two release date in now 27 October.

Maybe this is Netflix’s attempt at turning Halloween from a day-long event into a week-long thrill fest? If so, then we’re here for it, as long as it doesn’t mean we get trick-or-treaters showing up at the door every night too.

We’ve also been gifted a new trailer and two new posters. The trailer is obviously where the more meaty stuff is, but I want to talk about the posters first because, well, they’re stunning.

Here’s the first one – it just looks cool, doesn’t it? It’s something you could absolutely put up on the wall of your grown-up flat and wouldn’t look out of place. The red sky, which seems to be a feature of a lot of the promo material for the new season, looks vibrant and just plain awesome, and I love how small the boys and their bikes look in comparison – you just know that whatever shows up in Hawkins this season is going to be a whole lot more terrifying than the already shit-your-pants scary demogorgon.

The second poster isn’t technically a poster – it’s actually a short video – but it feels a bit more like a moving portrait from the world of Harry Potter. The four main kids (without Eleven, who we presume hasn’t resurfaced quite yet) remain totally static, while thunder and lighting streak through the scarlet sky. 

Good, huh? Now, onto the main event – we’ve got a brand new teaser trailer, and it has everything I want from a trailer in it, i.e. it tells us absolutely nothing to ruin the plot, but still looks very, very cool and gets me excited for the show.

The clip opens with the camera panning over some yellow-painted stripes on the road, before flashing up the year ‘1984’ in the classic Stranger Things font.

We then see four sets of bike wheels zip past, before that font is back… ‘Only gets stranger’.

Our heroes cycle down a long stretch of straight road past a ‘Welcome to Hawkins’ sign as thunder and lighting rumble through the bright red sky. ‘Stranger Things 2, October 27’ pops up, and that’s it, it’s over. It’s not much, but it’s enough to get us counting down the days already.

Netflix have also provided us with a mini timeline of events, just so we all know exact what’s going on where and when:

1953, date unknown - MKUltra comes to Hawkins and begins experimentation

1979 - Police Chief Jim Hopper returns to Hawkins 

1983, November 6 - The vanishing of Will Byers

1983, November 8 - The vanishing of Barbara Holland

2016, July 15 - Part 1

2017, October 27 - Part 2

And their description for season two reads: "It’s 1984 and the citizens of Hawkins, Indiana are still reeling from the horrors of the demogorgon and the secrets of Hawkins Lab. Will Byers has been rescued from the Upside Down but a bigger, sinister entity still threatens those who survived."

“Bigger”. “More sinister”. If we remember rightly, the demogorgon was pretty fucking sinister as it was, and the Upside Down was one if the freakiest settings we’ve seen on our TVs in ages.

Season two has a lot to live up to appease Stranger Things’ now hardcore set of fans. It’s a show that could easily have just been a one season and out type job, and everyone would have been satisfied with some excellent telly, but Will’s slug vomit all but confirmed plans to take the show further.

“I think this season will be a lot more dark, a lot more horror-oriented. I think people are going to like it more than the first season,” Finn Wolhard (Mike) said in an interview back in May.

It looks like the creators are going firmly down the ‘bigger is better’ route, and from the brief clips we’ve seen, they may well pull it off. If they do, then damn, it’s going to be one hell of a show.