WASHINGTON — So, uh, what's with the clock?
The long-awaited trailer for the new season of Stranger Things arrived on Tuesday. Fans had been anxiously watching a 24-hour livestream of a tall grandfather clock in the middle of the street in Santa Monica during pre-dawn hours, attended to by people in lab coats. Scientists, maybe?
Meanwhile, there were some downright spooky howls coming from somewhere off-screen.
Despite the creepy look, it wasn't a paranormal livestream like the Willard Library Ghost Cams. Well, actually, it might be. We still don't know yet. Honestly, it raised more questions than it answered.
When the countdown finally hit 00:00 (along with fans in the live comments spamming their own countdown in the final minutes) a brief teaser began.
It started with the letters "HNL," which stand for the Hawkins National Laboratory, a fictional branch of the U.S. Department of Energy tasked with researching all of the anomalous activity around the show's setting. With a VHS static effect, the screen then cut to some kind of destroyed machine, then the clock again (this time in some kind of dark room) and finally to a blink and you miss it shot of a blue-eyed monster opening its eyes.
When the full 3-minute trailer dropped a few minutes later, those scenes were the first shown. Throughout the quick cuts and ominous narration, the clock from the countdown shows up again, as well as the demigorgon monster from the first season, and a mysterious tentacle-wrapped figure who likely isn't going to be a friendly face for Eleven and her friends.
It fits right in with the general themes of Stranger Things, the sci-fi horror show from Netflix set in a small midwest town in the 1980s. The fourth season is set to drop on the streaming platform in two parts: the first on May 27 and the second on July 1.
Millie Bobby Brown, Winona Ryder and the rest of the main cast will make their return to Hawkins, Indiana for this season as well.
And the season is expected to be massive. Each of the nine episodes will run more than an hour as the characters deal with the deadly perils of both the alternate Upside Down dimension and the equally deadly perils of high school.
According to Deadline, co-creator Matt Duffer has promised the biggest season yet, one that expands on the show's so-far hidden mythology — why monsters from the Upside Down keep coming to Earth in the first place.
“We kind of jokingly call it our Game of Thrones season because it’s so spread out, so I think that’s what’s unique or most unique about the season,” Duffer said during a panel hosted by Deadline.
And if you want to pore over it for any hidden secrets, you can watch the livestream of the spooky clock here: