How Game of Thrones ‘inspired’ the biggest villain yet in Stranger Things  

Stranger Things showrunners Duffer Brothers gave the main characters of the supernatural series a full-fledged horror experience in Season 4.

Due to its length, the penultimate season comes in two volumes, with the first half quickly streaming its way to the top of the most-watched TV shows on Netflix Philippines. The second installment premieres on July 1.

In the new season, the heroine Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a girl with telekinetic powers, and her gang of friends from the midwestern town of Hawkins, are now young adults.

Their growth, as Matt and Ross Duffer previously told the press during a virtual set visit last year, deserved a step-up in their adventures and misadventures, including the monsters they have to deal with yet again from the alternate universe called The Upside Down.

“There still will be some fun to be had throughout the adventures this year, but overall, I would say that the tone is certainly darker than it’s been,” Matt said.

Their goal for the show is to always try something different every year and to ensure it is ever-evolving. “That comes naturally in a lot of ways because our kids are growing up,” Ross noted.

For one, Season 4 is the first time audiences are seeing the kids entering high school, although they are pulled into different directions.

“It’s funny, I can’t even actually call them kids, they are like full-blown young adults now. So, we thought that this was a good year to put them in a full-fledged Nightmare on Elm Street–esque horror film,” Ross added.

True enough, a “big new evil” emerges in Hawkins, driving the tension and terror this season. It’s called Vecna, the show’s most terrifying villain yet that lives in the Creel House in The Upside Down.

Portraying Vecna as both the monster and the human version, Henry Creel, is English actor Jamie Campbell Bower.

“Hawkins, which is kind of the center for our horror story, has the Creel House which is a major new sort of haunted house location,” Ross said. “What occurs in that house is pivotal to understanding what has been happening in Hawkins all of these years. The main villain of the season, Vecna, resides in the attic of the Creel House in The Upside Down.”

Talking more about the concept behind Vecna was Barrie Gower, the prosthetics designer on Stranger Things 4. He said that Vecna is a one-time human being that mutated.

“Vecna is a human being basically, but 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,” he said during the virtual set visit.

“He has become more overtaken by The Upside Down world and become pretty much possessed and mutated. We took lots of photos and got them over to Matt and Ross just for their feedback and it’s been a really enjoyable collaborative experience so far.”

To achieve Vecna’s look, they basically integrated a human form with shapes and textures from The Upside Down. “So there’s a lot of kinds of roots and vines and very organic sort of shapes and fibrous sort of muscle tissue and what have you,” he said. “So, 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.”

Going further into the intricacies of making a monster, he revealed, “We started off with his life cast and to make sure everything was going to be super skin tight, we reduced the life cast by a certain percentage all over. So once we had a plaster form of his entire body, our guys here started modeling the body in all shapes and forms in the plasticine, which took several weeks to do that, and from that we split the body up into various sections, sort of chest, back, head.”

“I think it was about 18 pieces in total, and they all went on to their own respective formers made out of either fiberglass or epoxy resin. And then we made molds of all the separate plasticine pieces and then once we had these molds, we were able to create prosthetic appliances, and we’ve done them in a mixture of materials,” he further detailed.

In a separate story in the US entertainment news outlet Variety, it was revealed that Vecna was specifically inspired by the Night King in Game of Thrones.

According to the feature, before Gower joined Stranger Things, he received three Emmy awards for his work in Game of Thrones. It was his company that created the prosthetics for the Night King, the “baddest villain” in Westeros and the leader of the White Walkers said to be once human.

Gower was quoted as telling Variety that he was enlisted to join Stranger Things in 2019 because the Duffer Brothers were fans of his work and wanted him to come up with a “similar” and “big, iconic” antagonist for the new season. And that’s how Vecna was born.

Meanwhile, apart from Vecna, Matt said they were excited to introduce another creature in Season 4 called the 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,” he said.

One thing is for sure, Season 4 explores the root of all the evil and horror that’s been haunting Hawkins.

Matt said during the virtual event, “We learn more this season than we ever have about our mythology. We’ve learned a lot about The Upside Down and what this evil that has been threatening Hawkins all these years really wants. It’s exciting for us in that way, there’s a lot of story being uncovered here.”

Ross added, “And I think probably the fact that we are as spread out as we are this year, defines the season more than anything. All these storylines, though disparate as they are, they do end up eventually, inevitably coming together but it is a very unique season.”