Stranger things have happened
But popular Netflix show’s creators deny stealing premise from 2012 short film, Montauk
Filmmaker Charlie Kessler has accused Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer of stealing the premise of the hit Netflix series from his 2012 short film, Montauk. Kessler filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court recently and is seeking damages for “breach of implied contract.”
Kessler debuted his short at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2012 and later expanded upon it to write a feature film script called The Montauk Project. He claims he met the Duffer brothers in 2014 at a Tribeca Film Festival party, where the trio allegedly discussed the “script, ideas, story and film.” The lawsuit states that, in creating Stranger Things, the Duffer brothers defied a “well-established” industry standard of not using someone else’s idea without permission or compensation.
Alex Kohner, lawyer for the Duffer brothers, says in a statement: “Mr. Kessler’s claim is completely meritless. He had no connection to the creation or development of Stranger Things. The Duffer brothers have neither seen Mr. Kessler’s short film nor discussed any project with him. This is just an attempt to profit from other people’s creativity and hard work.”
(The Post has also reached out to Netflix representatives for comment.)
So how similar are the projects?
Kessler’s story centres on a boy named Michael who wakes up in a trance and walks to Camp Hero, an abandoned military base in Montauk, N.Y., and suddenly disappears. A “cop with a haunted past” vows to find the boy and discovers that the government is experimenting on children at Camp Hero, endeavouring to create “psychic weapons” and “portals to the alien world.” The cop does find Michael, but the boy seems to have been altered by the experiments. He opens a portal above the base, “disrupting the space-time continuum.”
In the 1980s-set Stranger Things, which premièred in 2016, Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) is abducted by a creature called the Demogorgon and taken into an alternate dimension called the Upside Down. The government runs secret experiments on abducted children in Hawkins, Ind., hoping to better understand the otherworldly force. One of the children, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), escapes.
While both have missing kids, monsters and secret experimentation, “cop with a haunted past,” for instance, could refer to dozens of TV characters other than the Netflix series’ Jim Hopper (David Harbour). Variety noted that a 1992 book called The Montauk Project : Experiments in Time predates both projects and “tells of repressed memories of secret government experiments at Montauk’s Camp Hero.”
The Netflix series was still called Montauk when the platform announced in 2015 that it had ordered eight episodes.
The entertainment industry has had many conflicts like this one in recent years. In February, director Guillermo del Toro was sued by playwright Paul Zindel’s estate, according to Deadline, for “appropriating plot elements from Let Me Hear You Whisper” into del Toro’s film The Shape of Water. The 1969 play is also about a female custodian who tries to free a sea creature from a laboratory.