The Stranger Things Makeup and Effects Wizards’ Secrets to Creating Vecna Will Put You Off Your Lunch

While veggie chips, barbecue chicken, and economy-size jugs of K-Y Jelly may sound like a shopping list for a very specific adult picnic, these things were also essential ingredients for creating Vecna, the big baddie at the center of Stranger Things, the hit Netflix show lurching eerily through its fifth and final season.

Barrie Gower, the makeup-effects department head for the show’s fourth and fifth seasons, was largely responsible for developing and executing Vecna’s look—both last season’s initial styling, which required Jamie Campbell Bower to don 25 overlapping pieces of full-body prosthetics in a seven-ish-hour process, and what Gower and the team call “Vecna 2.0,” his decidedly crispier and less solid current form, with the character having been set on fire and, oh, blasted out of our dimension in the season four finale.

If Vecna’s tentacle-like vines, which occasionally spew viscous black goo in service of their master, aren’t enough to put you off your lunch, Gower’s comparisons just might.

“Vecna’s color tone, in a way, is made up of vegetable chips,” he tells Vanity Fair. “I can see, Oh, there’s parsnip, there’s the beetroot, there’s the so-and-so. We looked at so many beautiful, different natural-world things. We just reference real life.”

That grounding in organic materials and the real world is especially helpful because Vecna, like many of the ghoulish characters on the show, is a hybrid creation realized by an actor’s performance, practical costuming and prosthetics, and CGI. Gower’s team collaborated closely with the visual-effects department, led by Betsy Paterson, to synthesize real and fantasy elements in order to create the horrific world of Stranger Things.

“There’s a lot of back-and-forth with Barrie,” Paterson says. “We send them concept art, he sends back sculpts, and it just goes back and forth. And we try to figure out the best way that he can build things that will allow Jamie’s performance to come through, but also give us a really good base to add all the kind of moving detail on top of.”

Duncan Jarman adds the final touch—a coat of lube—to Jamie Campbell Bower's Vecna. As Gower recalls, “He would tend to leave a little trail. It would be great seeing execs come on set and go up to Jamie and go to hug him and see him smile, thinking, they're going to regret that.”Niko Tavernise/Netflix.

Paterson, who joined the show’s crew just this season, has an answer ready for every one of my queries about the nightmarish creatures plaguing Hawkins, Indiana, and the Upside Down, includes those about whether Demogorgons have a gender (no, though she and her team customarily refer to all of them with he/him pronouns); whether they’re smart (also negative, as “they’re a hive mind”); what Vecna’s vine-tacles would feel like (“a bit slimy” to the touch, but tough and with structure, “maybe like an intestine with muscle inside it”); and more. She agrees that, if chewed, Vecna’s remaining flesh would likely be tough and taste gamey.

It’s her job to think her creations through, from the inside out: “We always do that with CG creatures,” she says. “We build them up from the skeleton that we put a muscle structure on, and skin and fat and the whole everything, so that they move and feel like real, organic beings.”

After all, you can’t know what it would look like for a Demogorgon’s limbs to twist and break, as they do in the final scenes of episode four, without first having an intimate understanding of how those limbs fit together. Likewise, Paterson had to learn about Vecna in all of his forms: first as the human Henry Creel, later known as One, then as the sinewy humanoid Vecna, and finally as what both Paterson and Gower refer to as Vecna 2.0, or “Vecna on steroids,” as Gower says—bigger, badder, and even more bent on revenge than before.

Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair filming Stranger Things Season 5. “There were a lot of red lights. And then we replace all of that with glowing red goo for all the rifts,” Paterson says.Clay Enos/Netflix.

Associate visual effects supervisor Sean Ames carries a cardboard Demogorgon cutout on the set of Stranger Things. “He was really only built for one scene, and that was when the BMW hits him outside the barn,” Paterson says, to give the stunt driver something to aim for. And, no, the cutout didn't end up as anyone's souvenir: “He got pretty smashed up.”Andrew Cooper/Netflix.

Instead of season four’s jigsaw puzzle of prosthetics, Bower was fitted with detailed physical apparatuses on his head, neck, shoulders, and hands this season, a process that took three artists about three and a half hours on each day he filmed as Vecna. Complete with dentures, this allowed Ross and Matt Duffer, the show’s creators, to capture Bower’s performance in close-ups, with minimal postproduction intervention. Because Vecna’s body this season is increasingly comprised of his writhing vine-tacles, “there’s an awful lot of movement in there, which we wouldn’t be able to recreate practically,” Gowers says—not to mention that “there are a lot of cavities and negative space, so you can actually see through Vecna in so many areas.”

To avoid the distracting on-set silliness of a traditional bright green motion capture suit, Gower created a skintight catsuit for Bower in a print that Paterson fondly calls “Vecna camo,” a blend of those veggie-chip purples and greens and yellows and reds that would both help his figure stay consistent for lighting and help Bower maintain his character’s menacing air. To help him achieve the broad-shouldered stance of Vecna 2.0, padding was also added around Bower’s chest, forcing him to hold his arms slightly aloft to make room for those CG vines and their hell goo.

And that’s where Paterson’s digital contribution to the Vecna potluck comes in.

“Well, for Vecna, we did quite a bit of research into barbecued meat,” she says. “Underneath it all he has bits of human left that were set on fire at the end of season four. So we thought, Okay, whatever little bits of skin and human flesh that are left will be barbecued.”

Specifically, she looked the most at blackened chicken for inspiration. “Like a really heavily charred piece of barbecue chicken.”

Order up.

Director/writer/producer Matt Duffer and actor Linda Hamilton behind the scenes of Stranger Things Season 5. Paterson says that pustules like this were filled with “paint or something like that, but we end up replacing it all” in post-production. “But if the actors have something that's as close as possible to react to and interact with, it has the best chance of feeling real.”Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix.

Finn Wolfhard (as Mike Wheeler) prepares to film with (part of) a Demogorgon on the set of Stranger Things Season 5. “We do a lot of character and aging makeups, which are completely practical, and big, beautiful, completely digital characters as well,” Gower says. “But more and more often, I'd say in the last 10 or 15, years, I think the best results are a hybrid and blend both.”Niko Tavernise/Netflix.

“One thing that was discussed early on is that Matt and Ross were very super keen to keep Jamie's performance,” Gower says. “So everything, his dialogue, his facial movements—everything, they wanted it to be Jamie. So down to the base of the neck and the collarbone and the head was all practical [makeup], and his right arm.”Niko Tavernise/Netflix.

And then there was the lube, of which Gower says the team used “gallons,” buying up both K-Y Jelly and UltraWet in bulk to slather Bower and achieve Vecna’s signature sheen. For the final step of Bower’s makeup, “we get our rubber gloves on and we cover him in lube, all glossy and slimy.”

“We would lube him up first thing in the morning,” he says, noting that they occasionally spritzed Bower with water or reapplied lube in spots due to hot lights drying up the goo. “You have to be quite careful as well, because depending on the environment we’re filming in—if you’re in a quite dusty environment, that kind of gravitates to the lube and sticks to it, or if Vecna has to roll or do something and he falls on the floor, it’s like a magnet to dirt and the environment around him.” As Gower recalls fondly, “Sometimes we wouldn’t necessarily lube him up quite as much, but he would tend to leave a little trail.”

The makeup and effects teams worked together closely, also coordinating with stunts, lighting, set design, and more, to contribute to the final products, not just for Vecna, but for the Demogorgons; the living, oozing wall that some characters find themselves trapped behind in the Upside Down; the brutal gore, like what the Wheeler family faces after a showdown; flashbacks to young Will, which necessitated facial mapping; and the ideal trickle of blood seeping from the nose of older Will (Noah Schnapp) when he first manifests his own telekinetic powers.

“It was trying to find the blend of what can be visual effects that aids them rather than inhibits them,” Gower says of the process. For Schnapp, that involved eerie white contact lenses with small holes in them for seeing purposes, which he wore in the final scenes of episode four, with the pupils later filled in by the effects team; for Bower, it involved that custom catsuit and other modifications. “It was just a joy. The perfect balance of practical and visual effects.”