The Duffer Brothers have admitted that they went the extra mile to make Steve’s fake-out death in the Stranger Things finale more impactful. Five months after the finale aired, the creators of the series revealed their intentions to toy with the audience. They confessed this during an interview with Josh Horowitz on Happy, Sad, Confused.
Matt and Ross Duffer have been open about the efforts they put into the final episode, which premiered in December, and how they manipulated fans’ expectations. They explained that the final episode had a moment where Steve (Joe Keery) fell from a great height, but it was not initially as dramatic as they wanted. They decided to reshoot this scene, adding a half day of filming dedicated to enhancing the impact of Steve’s near-death experience.
“We did a half day of reshoots, which we’ve actually never done on Stranger Things before,” Ross Duffer explained. “It was just little, tiny, miscellaneous things that we wanted to do, but the main reason we wanted to go back is because Steve’s near-death just wasn’t… It wasn’t shot like that in a slow-motion way. It all happened really fast. In the edit, it’s so dark that the moment wasn’t going back. Then we went back with Joe Keery, and we just built a tiny, like, 3-foot slab of the tower because we didn’t have money to rebuild it, and we just did that moment where he just dropped. Then we just milked it even more in the edit.”
The finished version of the finale featured Steve falling in slow motion, only to be rescued by Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) after a dramatic cut to black. Matt Duffer clarified that this level of dramatic fake-out was not typical for the series, but given that it was the final season, they saw it as an opportunity they couldn’t miss.
“I don’t know that we normally would have done him almost falling off the tower. That was us f**king with the audience, for sure,” he said. “For sure. Which, we don’t normally do, but I was like, ‘This is a golden opportunity that we can’t pass up.'”
The finale, which aired on 31 December 2025, left fans on the edge of their seats with Steve’s dramatic near-death. In the same interview, the Duffer Brothers also addressed rumours surrounding the infamous Season 2 episode and promised to reveal more about Eleven’s fate in 20 years.
