Vecna (Stranger Things)

Make-up artist Barrie Gower provided the look for Vecna and other Upside Down creatures.[5] Bower had to wear a prosthetic suit for over 7–10 hours every filming session. The suit was designed with "anemic" skin hose integration with the toxic environment of the Upside Down was apparent through the inclusion of "lot of roots and vines and very organic shapes and fibrous muscle tissue." To achieve this look using mostly practical effects, Gower disclosed that he and his team took a full body cast of Bower, to later sculpt to meet their design needs:[6]

"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. From that, we split the body up into various sections... 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."[7]

Henry Creel was born in 1947 to Victor, a World War I veteran, and Virginia Creel and had an older sister Alice. The family moved to Hawkins, Indiana in 1959 after Virginia's great-uncle passed away, leaving a small fortune enough for them to move to a new house, in spite of Henry's pessimism. Throughout his childhood, Henry was treated as an outcast and the majority of his superiors considered him "broken" beyond repair. As he explored his new home, he found comfort in black widows living underneath his bathroom and considered them the "most important of the predators" for their role in providing structure for the weak. Henry also began to despise the daily routine of humanity of eating, sleeping, working, reproducing, and dying, saying it was only just a "mindless play" he wanted no part of. One day, Henry tapped into mysterious forces and managed to manipulate the hands of his home's grandfather clock, which became the first sign of Psychokinesis. He began practicing this ability by mutilating animals in his backyard which started to give Victor paranoia, unbeknownst to him it was Henry. He later developed the ability to see through people's past and haunt them their past actions as this ability was conducted on his father, who experienced a memory of the war in which he inadvertently set fire to a building with a crying baby in a cradle. This suspected Victor that a demon was living in their home but Virginia suspected it was all Henry's doing and was intent in sending him to an institution, which Henry deemed ridiculous due to his belief that he wasn't "the one who was broken." One night, Henry used his powers to kill his mother and sister and framed his father for their murder, who was sent to Pennhurst Mental Hospital, where he was driven insane and attempted suicide. Victor was told Henry was in a coma and died a week later as a cover up by Dr. Martin Brenner.

Virginia had contacted Brenner prior to her death and gained full custody of Henry. In Hawkins National Lab, Henry became Brenner's first test subject and given the subject name of Subject 001. After numerous failures to keep Henry under control, Brenner ultimately removed him from the group, placed a chip on his neck that suppressed his powers, and replicated his abilities in other children in order to fight back against the Soviet forces.

Overtime, Henry became an orderly in the Lab and oversaw the activities and progress of seventeen children who shared his abilities. He took a liking into and befriended Subject 011 "Eleven". After witnessing Eleven being bullied by the other subjects, Henry believed they were alike and the sense that the world cannot understand them. Henry helped Eleven with her powers and later offering her a chance to escape the lab. Henry gave Eleven a key card and told her to meet him in the basement of the lab. There, Eleven removed the Soteria from Henry's neck after he explains he cannot leave because of it and learns Henry is Subject 001. Upon being caught by guards, Henry dispatches them and tells her to wait for him in a closet. Henry would then murder everyone in the facility with the exception of Brenner. After explaining his origins and crimes to a horrified young Eleven, she rejected his offer to join forces with him in order to wipe out humanity and thanks to the loving memory of her mother, she ultimately overpowered One and banished him into another dimension, later nicknamed the Upside Down. In the Upside Down, Henry began to transform into a mutilated and burned creature, later nicknamed "Vecna." For seven years, Vecna put the lifeforms of the dimension under his thrall by combining them all to a shared hive mind, in part thanks to his bond to a creature later known as the Mind Flayer, whose appearance he shaped into a gargantuan spider and who eventually became his vessel to act on Earth.