What Is The Song In Stranger Things' Creel House Teaser?
"Stranger Things" fans received an exciting little gem of a teaser when the Netflix fan event, "Tudum," shared another glimpse into the series' highly-anticipated Season 4. In the teaser, fan favorites Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Steve (Joe Keery) lead the ragtag team of daring but wary tweens into the Creel House — an abandoned and foreboding mansion of a home once occupied by Victor Creel (Robert Englund, aka Freddy Krueger). As described by Deadline, Creel is "a disturbed and intimidating man who is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s."
Directly preceding the crew's "light B & E" is a flashback to the original homeowner and his family joyfully moving into the house, who immediately begin to experience the characteristic "strange(r) things" that occur all over the small town of Hawkins, Indiana. If the flashback reminds fans of some of the early scenes in "American Horror Story: Murder House," there's a good reason for that.
Like "AHS: Murder House" and its repeated use of 1956's "Tonight You Belong to Me," the teaser employs a once creepy and serene well-known golden oldie. Whether it's thanks to that dissonant scratch of the gramophone or the fact that the happy-go-lucky mood of these early-to-mid-century melodies creates tension, the juxtaposition is unnerving and highly effective. But the particular song used in the "Stranger Things" teaser not only adds an extra layer of uneasiness to the scene at hand but also makes sense both contextually and thematically speaking.
Dream a Little Dream of Me is the perfect song for the Creel House
The song in the "Stranger Things" Tudum teaser is capable of instantly transporting audiences to a time of Tupperware parties, Stepford wives, and what modern listeners associate with the eery veneer of a blissfully ignorant post-war optimism. The tune is none other than "Dream a Little Dream of Me."
Though countless musicians and performers have recorded the song over the years (e.g., Doris Day, The Mamas and the Papas, and Nat "King" Cole), the version employed by the "Stranger Things" teaser is that of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. The duo recorded the song separately and as a duet in the 1950s and '60s (via Discogs). Although it adds an air of ominous tension to the Creel House teaser, it was initially intended to help teenagers communicate sincere emotion, per NPR.
While it's been established that the music for the song was composed by Fabian Andre and Wilber Schwandt, an air of mystery surrounds the song's birth story. Andre and Schwandt toured the Midwest throughout the 1930s, but while the latter initially said the duo "wrote the piece during a 10-minute break at a gig in Paw Paw, Michigan," he later changed the location to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Regardless of the actual geographical location, it's hard to deny (in that now-creepy melody) the facade of innocence and ease so encapsulated by mid-century middle America. It's that gap between the superficial and the subtextual that makes "Dream a Little Dream of Me" ideal for the "Stranger Things" teaser since the impact of the narrative is intricately tied to the fact that it takes place in the (seemingly) quiet, suburban, Midwest town of Hawkins, Indiana.