1. Nell popping out from the backseat of the car was written into the script, but showrunner Mike Flanagan had her scare Theo and Shirley a half page of dialogue before she was supposed to so that they could get a genuine reaction.
2. For those of you who noticed the statues' heads looking in different directions after a character walks by, there were people on set who would quickly swap out the statues during the filming of a scene.
3. The show is inspired by the book of the same name, written by Shirley Jackson. (Yes, Shirley was named after Shirley.)
4. The exterior shots of the house are of a real house in the middle of nowhere in Georgia...
5. ...but the interior of the house — which is a fully functional, two-story set — was built on a soundstage in Atlanta.
6. Oh, and they had to build that beautiful staircase!
7. You know those amazing long shots in Episode 6? Well, the entire episode was actually five long shots that were filmed one a day, for five days.
8. The longest scene was 17 minutes, and, yes, if they messed up, they would have to start all over from the beginning.
9. The steadicam operator for the Episode 6 long-shots had to literally physically train so that he could hold the camera for that long.
10. OK, seriously, it's so cool how they filmed that episode. In that scene where older Hugh is looking at his young children and then the camera circles around so that he sees them as adults, the actors literally had to run to swap places!
11. Just in case you haven't realized it yet, the actor who plays young Hugh (Henry Thomas) is the same actor who played Elliott in E.T.
12. The show's writers' room was filled with whiteboards that looked like a conspiracy theory had thrown-up on them.
13. You might have noticed all of the Crains waking up at exactly 3:03 a.m. According to Flanagan, that was used because it's known in urban legends as "the witching hour."
14. Flanagan wanted it to feel like the house was always looking at you, so they made sure to fill it with wallpaper that had different facial patterns on it, as well as design the interior so that the placement of windows and a fireplace made it look like a face with two eyes and an open mouth.
15. The ending was originally going to be MUCH darker: You know one of the final scenes where we see all of the adult Crains celebrating Luke's two-year sobriety together? Well, Flanagan toyed with the idea of putting the Red Room's vertical window behind them...
16. The set for the Red Room was actually used for all of the other "Red Rooms": the toy room, the reading room, the game room, the family room, and the dance studio. They just repainted and redressed it each time to represent each character.
17. Filming the final episode's Red Room scene was "hell for everyone," so they ended up making T-shirts that say, "We survived the Red Room."
18. And finally, if there's a Season 2, it won't be about the Crains.
