STRANGER THINGS Creators Share New Details About This Season's Big Bad: Vecna
Stranger Things is returning for a fourth season next month, and we have seen a couple of trailers that outline the story we are getting ready to watch, the first of which takes us back to the 1950s in a house in which a dark story is about to unfold. We have also gotten to see the kids, half of them in their new town and school, and the others back home in Hawkins, but feeling further apart than ever. We have also seen a glimpse of the newest monster they will have to face, called Vecna, and it looks terrifying.
In the context of the gang’s favorite pasttime, Dungeons & Dragons, Vecna, also known as the Whispered One or the Undying King, was a powerful lich. In Layman’s terms, that is essentially an undead wizard.
Barrie Gower, the show's production designer, explained more about Vecna during a virtual press presentation, saying:
"What's happened is he's been subjected to all the environments and all the surroundings of the Upside Down basically for 20 odd years. So, the look for Vecna is, he's humanoid but we are basically integrating lots of shapes and textures and form from the Upside Down. There's a lot of roots and vines and very organic shapes and fibrous muscle tissue and what have you."
Entertainment Weekly explains:
To understand Vecna, you must understand the Creel House and what happened decades earlier in the 1950s with a man named Victor Creel. Take it as a sign that Robert Englund, the horror legend behind invader of dreams Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street, is portraying Victor. Victor seemed like your typical suburban family man when he moved to a new home in Hawkins with his wife and two kids, until strange things started to happen. The lights would flicker, animals would show up dead in their yard. Then one night, the man seemingly killed his family in gruesome fashion and has been in a psychiatric hospital ever since.
Stranger Things co-creator Ross Duffer explained:
"What occurs in that house is pivotal to understanding what has been happening in Hawkins all of these years. Vecna is the boogeyman that resides in the Creel House attic. Part of the drive and tension of this season is that we have this big new evil emerge in Hawkins and for the first time ever, Eleven [Millie Bobby Brown] is not there. And not only is she separated by distance, but at the end of season 3, she's lost her powers, so even when she learns about what has happened in Hawkins, she is unable to help them in the same way she has before."
To bring this evil to life, Gower began with a life cast of the actor to ensure all the prosthetic work would be skin tight. He and his team then spent the next several weeks using fiberglass and epoxy resin molds to craft warped shapes around the form. Gower said:
"It's still very much a human beneath it, and we still have panels of flesh which are very pale, almost anemic looking. And the idea really is that the exposed flesh that is pale is human skin that hasn't seen sunlight for the last 20 years."
Vecna also comes with his own flying monkeys, of sorts, what the Duffer Brothers call demo-bats.
Co-creator Matt Duffer explained:
"We always like to introduce a new demo-creature, as you will, and so we were excited about introducing demo-bats. Maybe one of them alone is not very dangerous, but when there's hundreds and hundreds of them coming to you at the same time, they're very, very deadly, and they also have the ability to act as spies, so you may not even see one in the tree, and it spies you, and then suddenly because everything is a hive mind in the Upside Down, every monster in there knows that you're there."
It’s so exciting that we are so close to season four after what has been such an extremely long hiatus. Stranger Things will drop the first part of Season 4 on May 27th, followed by Volume 2 on July 1st.