‘Stranger Things’ Artist Unveils Early Vecna Designs That Were Even More Ghastly
Video screenshot via Stranger Things
Stranger Things 4’s Big Bad was markedly different from the monsters of before. Without spoiling too much for you, Vecna’s background made it much easier to unlock access to his victims’ psyches and manipulate them through their most profound troubles.
Some viewers swear that they’d already stitched together Vecna’s origin story early on. However, had he looked different, those clues might not have been as glaring. Stranger Things concept artist Michael Maher Jr. has shared some initial designs of the dark wizard, and they too are terrifying—perhaps too terrifying for a character whose beginnings were pretty indescript.
@michael_maher_jr #strangerthings4 #vecna #millybobbybrown
♬ running up that hill - <3
Vecna was previously envisioned to be taller in some earlier iterations, and he even still had some hair in a handful of alternate designs.
Early concept designs of Vecna for #StrangerThings
— Culture Crave 🿠(@CultureCrave) July 10, 2022
🎨 Michael Maher Jr. pic.twitter.com/UJwKuqxx9e
A few versions ran with the premise of how a creature’s skin would decay in the radioactive Upside Down. Other forms were too rigid and didn’t allow room for facial expression. After all, Vecna was—spoiler alert if you’ve made it this far but haven’t binged the season yet—once human and, hence, would continue to communicate as such in the alternate world.
Eventually, designers settled on a more humanlike, albeit still haunting, variation with vines/tentacles. It’s a good thing they went with this so-called simpler interpretation, instead of, say, one with spiky scales. It took Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays the villain, more than seven hours each day just to get into his makeup and suit, which contained about 25 overlapping prosthetics.
As seen in this video, Bower’s non-human appearance wasn’t so much a work of CGI—what his “victims” saw was what they got. The actor said his costume was so convincing, it made Millie Bobby Brown cry. With Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser as the moodboards for Vecna’s design, can you blame her?
The artist shared one other tidbit about a different species in the show, revealing that the Demobats were modeled after the bat-like parasitic Mynocks in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. The pop-culture web just keeps unraveling.
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[via ComingSoon and Slash Film, images via various sources]
