Warning: Spoilers for the final episode of season four of “Stranger Things” are below.
The last two episodes of the fourth season of “Stranger Things” on Netflix were so popular that last week, fans crashed the Netflix server as they all logged on en masse to watch it at midnight on Friday, July 1.
Though series creators Matt and Ross Duffer say they will only put out one more season of the beloved science fiction-horror series, the pair have announced that the next project they intend to work on after the show is over is a TV series adaptation of Stephen King and Peter Straub’s 1984 novel, “The Talisman.”
Those who have already watched the jam-packed, 2½-hour final episode of the latest “Stranger Things” season may have noticed that the book one character is reading to another as they lie in their hospital bed is none other than “The Talisman” — a shoutout not only to the Duffers’ next project, but also to the major impact King’s works have had on “Stranger Things.”
“The Talisman” tells the story of a young man who moves between New Hampshire and an alternate world known as the Territories, where he must obtain an artifact that will help save his mother’s life. The themes and conflicts at the center of the story bear a great deal of similarity to those at the center of “Stranger Things.” The adaptation will be co-produced with Stephen Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment.
“It’s much more fantasy,” Matt Duffer said in an interview with Deadline. “It has sci-fi, it has horror elements, it has a lot of heart, it has everything that we love, and it’s got the best werewolf character I think, ever.”
“The Talisman” will be one of the last 1980s novels by King to be adapted for TV or film. Only “The Eyes of the Dragon” has yet to be adapted out of the 16 novels he published during that decade.