USA: Nostalgic horror sensation “Stranger Things” unveiled a new trailer set to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” on Saturday as it built buzz for season two at the San Diego Comic-Con fan convention.
The Netflix series — about a gang of 1980s children looking for their missing friend — became a break-out hit last year, winning critical acclaim and fame for its cast of young stars, led by Millie Bobby Brown.
The trailer starts with the boys — played Gaten Matarazzo, Finn Wolfhard, Caleb McLaughlin and Noah Schnapp — crowded around 1980s video game “Dragon’s Lair.”
Suddenly Will experiences a vision of the arcade they are in as part of the show’s dark alternative world, the “Upside Down.”
“I saw something... I felt it everywhere,” a crying Will later reveals to his worried mother Joyce, played by Winona Ryder
Next the four friends are seen creeping about in “Ghostbusters” costumes, apparently looking for evil spirits, as Vincent Price’s ghoulish voiceover for “Thriller” plays in the background.
The three-minute trailer ends with Brown’s character, the telekinetic Eleven, trying to find her way out of the Upside Down.
The footage was shown as part of a Q&A moderated by Patton Oswald with executive producers Shawn Levy, and Matt and Ross Duffer, as well as much of the cast.
The Duffers said they had always intended the show to be similar to “Spielberg directing a big, fat Stephen King book.”
Brown told the 6,000 fans filling San Diego Convention Center’s Hall H that playing the enigmatic Eleven was tough because she had so few lines to work with.
“I had to express everything with my face which is very hard. But it gets easier when you feel more comfortable with your character,” the Emmy nominee said.
“The first two episodes — I immediately fell in love with Eleven and Eleven was me. The only thing that was hard was crying. I feel like I’m a happy person in real life so that when I’m crying I would need five minutes to get in the zone.”
“Stranger Things,” which premiered in July last year has picked up 18 nominations ahead of September’s ceremony in recognition of its eight-episode first season.
Season two, comprised of nine episodes, drops on October 27.
’Stranger Things’ Season 2 trailer is a real ‘Thriller’
’Stranger Things’ Season 2 trailer is a real ‘Thriller’
Parrots rescued as landslide-hit Sicilian town saves pets
- Residents queued up at a fire service command point just outside the high-risk, evacuated “red zone” to be accompanied inside to rescue pets
- Some locals feed their animals but leave them where they are, because they have no place to take them
NISCEMI, Italy: Pino Terzo Di Dio was in tears as firefighters carried his beloved parrots out of his home, which has been cordoned off as his town teeters on a cliff edge.
They were the latest pets to be saved by firefighters from hundreds of homes that were evacuated in the Sicilian town of Niscemi after a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) long stretch of hillside collapsed.
“They are scared,” Di Dio told AFP, his voice breaking as the emergency workers carried the parrots — four cockatiels and a parakeet — out of his house in two cages, buffeted by the wind.
The town, built on unstable terrain, was battered by a powerful storm which hit southern Italy last week.
There were no deaths or injuries from Sunday’s landslide, but experts say the gulf could extend when it rains again.
- ‘Lost everything’ -
Residents queued up at a fire service command point just outside the high-risk, evacuated “red zone” to be accompanied inside to rescue pets or gather belongings from important documents to clean underwear.
Some locals feed their animals but leave them where they are, because they have no place to take them.
Di Dio said his bird feeders were full but one of the parrots “tends to knock the water onto the floor,” and feared they may have been without water for days.
The 53-year-old said he had been moving between friends’ houses since the disaster.
“It’s been four days that I’ve barely washed. I smell like a goat, but that’s fine,” he said.
All his attention was on the yellow and grey birds, aged between seven and 13, and where they will go now.
“Let’s hope that someone with a kind heart will take care of them. The important thing is that they treat them well,” he said.
“I don’t have a home, I’ve lost everything.”
- ‘Help us’ -
Firefighter Franco Turco said emergency workers had rescued “quite a few dogs, cats — and now parrots.”
The team was working out how to rescue horses in fields below the baroque town, where deep fissures caused by the landslide were complicating access.
In the meantime, some 24 firefighters have carried out 80 missions to recover belongings in the red zone, which extends 150 meters from the cliff face.
But not even they enter the 50 meters buffer zone before the edge.
Some residents “have cried, have hugged us,” he said.
In the same building as Di Dio’s parrots, a woman who did not want to be named pulled a shopping trolley and black plastic bags full of belongings out of the house and onto the street.
In her arms she carried a ceramic statue of the Madonna, which had once stood at the foot of her stairs.
“May the Madonna help us,” she said.
