A year ago, Netflix officially announced the Stranger Things season 4 premiere will be titled "The Hellfire Club." Now the streaming service has released two official set photos and a video featuring series regular Gaten Matarazzo that tease the eponymous new group's debut.
The third season of Stranger Things concluded with Winona Ryder's Joyce Byers choosing to move away from Hawkins, Indiana, with her two sons and Eleven after the battle of Starcourt Mall, in which David Harbour's Jim Hopper sacrificed his own life to destroy a hidden Soviet laboratory. While little information regarding the story of the fourth season has been divulged, set photos confirm the group of friends who remain in the small town has stuck together while the first teaser reaffirmed theories suggesting Hopper survived the events of season 3.
Netflix's recently revealed Stranger Things season 4 set photos and video provided more insight into The Hellfire Club through the group's official logo, which features a demon's head surrounded by a mace and flaming sword. However, the polyhedral dice indicate the group is less of a sinister organization and is more than likely related to Dungeons and Dragons, a favorite RPG game of the main characters. In the photo featuring Matarazzo, who portrays Dustin Henderson, the young actor can be seen wearing a T-shirt with the Hellfire Club logo while the video shows him running down the set carrying a flag featuring the emblem on his back. "Heard the Hellfire Club is now looking for new members," reads the caption included with one of the images, suggesting the group may have been formed to fill the void left by the Byers family.
The Hellfire Club shares the name of a society introduced in the pages of Marvel's X-Men comics. While the club appears to be an exclusive group for the wealthy to outsiders, an inner circle within the organization secretly aims to influence world events in order to move their own agenda forward, which often brings them into conflict with the X-Men. Considering the Hellfire Club was introduced in The Dark Phoenix Saga storyline of the '80s, it is possible that the group featured in Stranger Things season 4 was named after the club, though this is purely speculative at this point.
The answers regarding the purpose of the group will likely come later than fans might prefer. The premiere date for Stranger Things season 4, which has not yet been announced, was impacted by the production delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the setback, executive producer Shawn Levy recently noted that there may have been an unplanned benefit from the shutdown. According to Levy, the writers were, for the first time, now able to complete and revise the scripts for Stranger Things 4 before the season finished filming.
Stranger Things is now available on Netflix.
Source: Stranger Things/Twitter