Stranger Things is going even more retro, to way before the 1980s.

Netflix introduced a new trailer for the fourth season of its hit series Stranger Things at its “Tudum” online fan event the Saturday, and this one introduced a new family and a new mystery.

The short video clip introduces us to a picturesque 1950s setting, the Creel House, which is going to be important in the upcoming season. We see a family of four survey their new home as Ella Fitzgerald’s “Dream A Little Dream of Me” plays. After they move in, everything seems to go to hell, possibly literally. Lights start flickering, the kids find dead animals and there are images of what appears to be a terrible murder.

Fast forward a few decades and the teaser then shows Dustin, Steve, Max and Lucas, in a Kid ‘n Play flat top fade, breaking into and investigating that same house, now covered in cobwebs, and looking for clues as to what happened all those years ago. The clip ends with the year “2022” in the Stranger Things font: the year the show returns with new episodes.

One scene in the trailer is especially horrific: the father in the trailer standing motionless, the bodies of his two children nearby. The husband – Victor Creel – will be an important figure in Stranger Things season 4, with an older version of the character played by Robert Englund.

Stranger Things image courtesy Netflix.

The show’s creators the Duffer Brothers describe the house as a “super important” location in season 4. And back in 2020, Netflix took to Twitter, saying that Victor Creel “is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s.” This suggests he is being confined there for the deaths of his children, and perhaps his wife as well. Whether he’s really to blame or just possessed by the demonic Mind-Flayer that tortured the residents of Hawkins in the 1980s is anyone’s guess.

Stranger Things is possibly Netflix’s most successful franchises, but it is in its fourth year, so of course it needs to add new characters and new mystery to boost excitement and anticipation as its new season premiere date, as yet undisclosed, approaches.