Why Netflix's Stranger Things Created By Duffer Brothers Was Originally Called Montauk

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Netflix series Montauk just doesn't have the same ring to it. Back when they were just starting out, Matt and Ross Duffer wanted to name their first TV project Montauk. It was the working title for Stranger Things, and the twin brothers were inspired by the goings-on at the Montauk Project, which holds some wild conspiracy theories of what the government was up to in a small town in New York State. While the Duffers changed their story to become more fictional and moved it to the made-up Hawkins in Indiana, there are remnants of the original story within the larger framework of Stranger Things. Find out more below.

What is the Montauk Project?

The real location is in New York at a place called Camp Hero, an air force station in Montauk where US government projects were carried out. In the 1940s, the military base was repurposed as a fake fishing village to hide it from the Nazis. Many buildings had fake facades hiding what's actually inside. Bunkers and underground tunnels of Camp Hero have been sealed shut. Many conspiracy theories allege that in the 1980s, the government used children as subjects at the station for tests involving psychic research and time travel. The station, which is now renamed Camp Hero State Park, was an early influence on the Duffer Brothers' story and a big inspiration for the Hawkins lab and its heavy military involvement. It may have closed down now, but stories about the experiments on children persist, as do the unverified rumours that it is haunted. All that remains is a abandoned military base, which would give anyone the creeps if they trepass beyond the 'do not enter this building' sign.

Similarities to Stranger Things

Originally, Stranger Things was set in Montauk, Long Island, overlooking the ocean. But then the Duffers decided to move away from the real-life aspects to the fictional setting of Hawkins in the Midwest. But some elements of the Montauk Project made it through to the Netflix series.The experimented children were said to be kidnapped or runaways in the Montauk Project. Stranger Things' main heroine, Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, is taken away from her mother, Terry Ives, and raised in the Hawkins Lab. The young girl is subjected to numerous tests in the isolation tank. That's not all. Many of children are also held and experimented on against their will.

Preston B. Nichols’s novel Experiments in Time was reportedly useful to the filmmakers while they were researching the alleged 1943 Philadelphia Experiment for a school documentary. Another conspiracy from the 1950s that does not die down is that these experiments opened up a wormhole and caused an entire battleship to disappear. This bit of lore shows up in the Broadway and West End play Stranger Things: First Shadow as part of Dr Brenner's past. His father, a Navy captain, travels to another dimension through his ship, which viewers would later know as the Upside Down. Brenner becomes obsessed with finding it again.

Montauk Project inspiration could pop up again in final episodes

In July 2025, Ross Duffer also shared their original sizzle reel that they pitched to studio executives and networks to get their show made. He wrote on Instagram, "We’ve never shown this before—this is the original sizzle reel Matt and I made to help sell the show. Putting synth over classic Spielbergian imagery got us so excited about what the show could be. Most importantly, this is how we discovered our composers Kyle and Michael—we used their music for the final montage and immediately thought, ‘This is cool.’"

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The video unmistakably shows the influences from Camp Hero, the radar, the Cold War hangover, secret experimentation, and regular life existing just outside of the military base. Until a child disappears, exposing the horror that exists just outside their homes. The Duffers changed a lot of it to what the show is now, beginning with the vanishing of young Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) that sets off the story in an epic direction. But evident throughout the world that the Duffers have created is also this eerie story of the Montauk Project, which did exist in the real world. Of course, the show was renamed to Stranger Things after Stephen King's Needful Things, and the rest, as they say, is history.