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’
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
