The Stranger Things season 4 trailer is here, and it’s an absolute smash. Revealing a much darker tone and tenor, raised stakes, and a terrifying new threat, the Duffer Brothers’ promise that would be the biggest, scariest season yet looks utterly confirmed. It seems the years worth of trauma is really taking its toll on our assorted heroes. What’s more, season 4 will find these friends scattered, and all of it speaks to why the Duffer Brothers couldn’t fit the entirety of season 4 into a traditional single-volume release schedule.

“Your suffering is almost at an end,” a troubling voice says at the top of the new trailer. The tone of the trailer is set not only by that clearly evil voice, but by the sight of Billy Hargrove’s grave, reminding us how the stakes have been rising, and rising, and rising in Hawkins as the troubling events of the first three seasons have wreaked havoc across all their lives.

How bad did things get in Season 3? The Byers relocated after the Battle of Starcourt, with Will (Noah Schnapp), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), and Joyce (Winona Ryder) moving far away from Hawkins to keep them out of harm’s way. Yet the problem is that a war is coming to Hawkins, and everyone the Byers care about is in the crosshairs.

“A war is coming, I’m afraid your friends of Hawkins are very much in the eye of the storm,” says Sam Owens (Paul Reiser). At first we don’t realize who he’s talking to, but then it becomes clear. He’s talking to the person with the best chance of stopping, or winning, the war. Yet there’s a problem.

“I don’t have my powers,” says Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown).

“I don’t know how to say this without just saying it—without you, we can’t win this war,” Sam replies.

Darker, deeper, more intense—the trailer makes the case that Stranger Things will be going big in its last two seasons, unleashing a scarier, more angsty horror vibe. We get a glimpse of Sheriff Jim Hopper after he was forcibly moved, via some nefarious henchmen, to an undisclosed location in Russia. We’ll revisit the sinister Creel House that was teased last season, where Victor Creel and his family were subject to some of the supernatural horrors that our main characters have been experiencing the past few years. Finally, season 4 will also move far beyond Hawkins—our crew will be spread out across Indiana, California, and, in Hopper’s case, Russia.

Check out the new trailer below. Stranger Things season four, volume one, streams on May 27: