“It’s a great house,” says Matt. “We’ve got a ping-pong table…”

“… a pool, yeah. Total Google vibe,” says Ross.

And if one was to get carried away, the other would rein him in, the way that only a twin can. “Who better than your twin to say, ‘Hey dude, you’re acting like a douchebag,” Ross says.

“And we’re both on Google Docs all day, sitting across from each other on headphones, working on the same document,” says Matt.

At the same time?

“At the same time,” they say in unison.

When asked about creative disputes, they have to think for a minute, because they’re that rare.

“Remember we grew up watching the same movies and TV,” says Matt.

“… living more or less the same life,” says Ross.

The Duffers were always this way. Growing up in the suburbs of Durham, NC, they were “secret language” twins who went to speech therapy for years. Their mother and father – a part-time realtor and a government researcher, respectively – understood, “but no one else,” Matt says. Soon afterwards, they were making films together on a Hi8 video camera, like their take on The Godfather featuring stuffed animals and mops.

“We called it The Stuffedfather,” says Ross. “Parts one, two and three. And, yeah, three didn’t live up to one and two.”

Born in 1984, they were a few years too late for films like ET, Poltergeist, Gremlins and Nightmare On Elm Street (the latter two made the same year) – all the films that would inspire Stranger Things. But that didn’t stop them. They watched them on VHS, gorging on 1980s movies in the 1990s. The Goonies had a big effect, as did Stand By Me, for the way they portrayed kids. “It just blew our minds,” says Ross. “So many people write this Disney version of kids, but those films didn’t condescend. The way they communicated, there’s so much back and forth and overlapping dialogue… it’s messy.”

They went to a little hippy private school where they called their teachers by their first names, but were soon plunged into a big public high school. It was terrifying for the nerdy twins who didn’t play sports. But filmmaking was their ticket to popularity even then. “We’d make videos for class projects and get As, so the cool kids were like ‘Make a video for me’,” Matt laughs. “And they totally took advantage – I had no life at weekends because I was making videos for cool kids to get an A.”