Interviews
“Stranger Things” Special Makeup Effects Designer Barrie Gower on Bringing Villain Vecna to Life [Interview]
Spoiler Warning: This article contains spoilers for “Stranger Things” Season 4’s villain.
The Duffer Brothers sought to create their own Freddy Krueger for season four of “Stranger Things.” Enter Vecna, the most sophisticated and dangerous foe from the Upside Down yet. The humanoid latches onto teens harboring repressed trauma and pain, feeding on it and then murdering them to create new gates between Hawkins and the Upside Down.
The end of “Stranger Things 4: Volume I” reveals that Vecna is humanoid because he was once human.
Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown) realizes through her unblocked memories that orderly Peter Ballard (Jamie Campbell Bower) is One, the very first gifted child that Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) tried to control. Peter came into Brenner’s care as a child after murdering his entire family, save for dad Victor Creel (played by Robert Englund in the present). A supernatural battle between Eleven and One opened a rift and sent One careening into the Upside Down, where he began his transformation into the powerful Vecna.
The Duffer Brothers wanted brand new “Stranger Things” big bad Vecna to be almost entirely practical from the outset. They turned to the Emmy award winner behind Game of Thrones’ Night King, special makeup effects artist Barrie Gower.
In a chat with Bloody Disgusting, Gower explained how he got involved with the series. “My wife, Sarah, and I run our company, BGFX, which has been going since about 2010. We’ve been really lucky to be part of many big franchises, but our ten-year-old daughter Lottie is a massive Stranger Things fan. Then to get the call from the Duffers, just regarding season four. I think they were fans of our work on Chernobyl, with all the radiation burns, but they were huge fans of our work on Game of Thrones, the Night King.
“I think going into season four; they were looking to create a villain, an iconic villain, which I think they were like, ‘Well, we kind of want our own Night King.’ So I think they were saying, ‘Well, who better to contact but the guys who created the Night King?’ When we got the call, we were overwhelmed. I think our daughter Lottie was more excited than us, to be honest, but we were over the moon to get the call actually to come and join the Stranger Things family.”
On Vecna’s design…
Production on season four was underway when Gower came on board. That meant Vecna’s design was also already in place. Gower states, “Well, it was interesting because all the scripts were written, and a lot of production design had already been done on the show. When they approached us, they already had concept art done by Mike Maher, who was also the VFX producer on the show. He did this incredible concept work for Vecna. We had a few slightly different iterations of it, but we knew he was going to be humanoid in form. Initially, the idea from the get-go, from the Duffers and Mike, was saying, ‘We want this character to be practical, pretty much practical.’ He would have an on-set presence every day, and he would be able to interact with the cast. They also made it clear that we would be working very closely with the VFX department.
“There would be a little bit of VFX augmentation in post, but it’d be things we couldn’t necessarily achieve practically, like giving a subtle movement to Vecna’s vines on his body. They would be removing the nose of the actor and his pupils as well, even though he wore contact lenses. We knew there would be quite a nice collaboration with VFX, but it was interesting to join the show, and they already had this blueprint of how they wanted Vecna to look.”
While Gower and his team created Vecna from Maher’s design, they also looked to nature to enhance his look and ground it more in reality. “Obviously, we had the original concept art, but we always use sources of real reference from the real world. We used a lot of photos of sea life, all kinds of different kinds of fish, lots, lots of things to do with trauma reference, like bruising to the skin, anemic skin tones, and looking at vines and all kinds of things. Just literally, the texture and the quality of the surfaces, his skin was very pitted and very smooth in areas. We used all kinds of references from the real world, as well as fantasy. But I think what aided us from the get-go was the initial concept art by Michael Maher.”
On Vecna’s makeup application…
Not only is this season’s villain almost completely practical, but it’s actor Jamie Campbell Bower beneath the extensive Vecna prosthetics throughout “Stranger Things 4.”
Gower details the painstaking process of bringing Vecna to life: “We life cast Jamie. We started modeling him in modeling clay back in London at our studio. There were a few little nuances and compromises we had to make here and there to make sure it fits over the human form correctly. But on the whole, it stayed pretty true to those original pieces of concept art by Michael.
When asked if there were stages for Vecna considering his transition from human to monster, Gower answered, “There is a transition. Yeah. There is a transition in between. At the end of the first volume, you’ll see a transition from Jamie turning into his Vecna form. Then the transition obviously will go further. From a different stages point of view, I mean, from the build point of view, it was a huge build for us because it was a full-body prosthetic makeup.
“We decided not to go down the route of having a guy in a monster suit, a guy in a rubber suit because we knew there would be an awful lot of interaction with him and the cast, a lot of dialogue, quite a lot of strenuous work. He did all of his stunt work, his own stunt work. There was not a stunt Vecna on Stranger Things. When you do a character like this, you would usually have a stunt guy of a similar frame who would also be put in the makeup. Jamie did all his own stunts for this show.“
That detail is important in highlighting Bower’s stunt work as Vecna and hinting that Vecna will take a more active role in his bid for control in “Stranger Things 4: Volume II.”
STRANGER THINGS. Vecna Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
Gower breaks down the lengthy makeup process, “We went from the sculpture over his lifecast. We had to separate the sculpture up into many parts, making molds. Then we just injected a couple of different materials into the molds. His makeup consists of silicone appliances and foam latex appliances. The foam latex pieces are the larger, heavier pieces on the body, which foam is naturally a lighter material; it was about 24 to 25 prosthetic appliances in total of his makeup. We could only use them once. At the end of each day, we would remove the makeup, and they would be trashed because we’d be using mineral oil to remove the appliances, and they would destroy all the edges.
“We’d have duplicate appliances for every single shoot day, and we shot for maybe 20 days with Jamie in total, including two makeup tests. We made something like about 25 sets of appliances for him, but we made those all back at our studio in the UK. They are painted to the nth degree because it’s full-body coverage and all these pieces overlap. They’re glued with a medical adhesive directly onto his skin. You need all the artwork done as near as dammit to get the application time down. That still didn’t change. The first time we glued him into the makeup was about eight and a half hours for the test.“
Gower recently shared Vecna’s makeup test look on Instagram:
“It used to be like a marathon, and it was like this well-orchestrated pattern of four of us in the team. It’d be myself, Duncan Jarman, Mike Mekash, Eric Garcia, and then Nix Herrera joined us towards the end of the shoot. But we’d have this very orchestrated sort of dance we’d do around Jamie. He would start sitting down, and we’d stand him up. Then we’d lie him down on his front, on a massage table, flip him over onto his back, stick his front pieces on, stand him up, put his legs on, put his right arm on, and put his left arm on. The quickest that we got the application time down to six hours, 21 minutes. We would spend the best part of five hours just purely gluing the appliances onto his skin. Then we’d have an hour and a half of airbrushing and joining all the dots together with the paintwork and airbrushing veins and blending everything.
“Once he was finished in his makeup, we’d take him down to set. He had a tent just adjacent to the set. The four of us would use, essentially, a lube to cover his entire body, to give him this glossy, shiny finish. Then he would then step onto the set and play for the rest of the day. The derig at the end of the day would take about an hour and 30 minutes to get him out of makeup. You have to bear in mind that we had an incredibly patient actor who was the fifth member of our team basically, and everybody got on incredibly well. We were super lucky to work with Jamie Campbell Bower. He had the patience of a saint, and he had an incredible sense of humor. We just got on so well, and it just became like a well-oiled machine in the end.”
Expect to see much more of Vecna when “Stranger Things 4” Volume II releases on Netflix on July 1.
Of all the places to find a coven of witches, the attic above a Christian youth camp is probably the last place you’d think to look. But that’s just what we find in Camp, a surrealist nightmare of feminist empowerment from Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is still reckoning with her involvement in a horrific tragedy when she accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison). Unable to move on, the traumatized teen takes a job at a rural summer camp, hoping to forget her own sorrows by looking after at-risk kids. She quickly connects with a counselor named Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and finds comfort in her close-knit group of female friends. But a mysterious whisper from deep in the woods warns that they may be leading her down a darker path.
Fast burst onto the scene in 2022 with Honeycomb, a psychological horror film that follows a burgeoning matriarchy. Known for their focus on “Girl Horror” stories, the talented young filmmaker tackles similar themes in Camp as Emily leaves the modern world behind to embrace a dark vision of self-discovery through magic.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release on June 26, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Fast to chat about the nebulous nature of good vs. evil and the intoxicating power of female-driven horror.
Bloody Disgusting: What inspired this unique story? Did you go to religious summer camps when you were young?
Avalon Fast: I did. I went to lots of different summer camps, but all of them were primarily Bible camps. The memory I have of camp is kind of strange. I was very homesick as a kid, and I didn’t necessarily enjoy all my time there. I definitely remember meeting some interesting girls at camp and having that presence of religion hovering around the whole experience.
BD: I really love the film’s gorgeous natural setting. Camp is the kind of surrealist nightmare that you don’t just watch. You feel it too. How did you approach creating this world?
AF: Well, a huge part of it was working with my cinematographer Eily Sprungman, who’s a very close friend. We spent years prepping, shot listing, storyboarding, and mood boarding. She’d had a similar experience to mine. We grew up around the same place, and so we understood each other’s visions from the get-go. But there are so many other pieces that came together. The costuming, the art, and the animated sequences were done by Sofiya Iurkevych. One of our producers, Taylor Nodrick, was obsessed with shooting on Super 8 film. I’ve always wanted to as well, so all the memory sequences were shot on Super 8. It was just a lot of people with an understanding and a vision for what this project was. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
To the extent that you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your relationship to witchcraft, and what does Camp have to say about modern witches?
Well, that’s the question of Camp. It’s not that I don’t resonate with any of these things, but I specifically wanted Camp to be a little bit ambiguous around what witchcraft looks like. Is this witchcraft? Are these girls witches? Emily explicitly asks if that’s what’s happening here, and the answer isn’t yes. The film isn’t going to answer that question for you. My relationship to magic and witchcraft? It’s tough. I feel like there’s so much magic, connection, and spirituality that comes from these friendships, the closeness of these women, and what’s happening around them. A lot of what Camp is trying to say or show is just that magic can come out of friendship.
I loved watching these female friendships develop. And you’re right. No one ever says the word “coven,” but you can feel that connection, and you can see a change in Emily as those relationships grow. I’m also really fascinated with the way Camp plays with the idea of good and evil. At one point, Clara says, “Maybe God drew us to the devil,” which stopped me in my tracks. How do you view witchcraft or the magic these girls are experiencing in regard to good and evil?
That was such a huge part of the script’s construction. The story is really trying to keep a balance between those two things. I like asking people if they think these girls are good or bad, because I feel like a lot of people come out of the film thinking one or the other. They’ll say things like “thank God Emily found her people” or “God, I really wish she’d gone home.” I just don’t think there’s ever an answer. I wanted to explore the idea of going down the wrong path, especially coming out of grief. What makes you a bad person, and does healing mean you’re looking to become a better person? I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like that’s a huge part of what Camp is asking. What is good? What is bad? Why did God bring me to the devil?
Yes, because this is all happening at “God camp” in Emily’s words. So how can both of those things exist at the same time? Along those lines, I’m also fascinated by the voice Emily hears in the woods. Without spoiling too much, what is this voice asking, and what is required in return?
Emily comes to camp with a shout into the void, asking can anyone hear me? Does anyone want to? And it’s answered so clearly by these girls, specifically responding only with love, care, support, and trust. It’s like her prayers were answered. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be alright, but Emily is looking for peace. She’s looking for a moment where she feels pure good. And I think, even at its surface level, she does get that experience.
Personally, I don’t really think people are good or bad. I think we all exist somewhere in the middle. Camp centers traditionally villainized characters, but that’s where Emily seems to find her peace, however you choose to define it.
I also wanted to show the experience of having decided that you are a bad person, you’ve made mistakes, and you feel cursed. Then when you meet other people who have done things that you would consider worse, you can actually feel good in their presence. You feel like less of a bad person. I think that’s a huge part of the story as well. Emily’s finding her version of other fucked up people, and she feels less fucked up around them. I’ve found that in my own life. It’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s bad.
I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s finding your home, your people. We meet Emily in the aftermath of unthinkable trauma. Is this a story about mental health and healing?
Witnessing it myself. witnessing other people experience tragedy and then move through grief, you hear a lot of talk about healing or coming out the other side. There’s so much conversation around what that looks like, with self-care and showing up for yourself. I always felt really averse to it. It annoyed me. I think the beginning of the film speaks to that. The therapeutic version of what getting help looks like is obviously very different from what Camp is showing. And again, I don’t have an answer for what you’re supposed to do. But I think that’s another question I was asking: how do you heal? Do you heal at all? Is that the end goal, or are we just trying to get better? It’s something I experienced in my own grief. And the answer, for me, at least now, is just that I’m not looking to get better. So I felt like I hadn’t. I found it hard to find people to have those conversations with. And I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to make a film about.
I love that unanswered question. In my own experience, I’ve had to reframe what healing actually looks like. There’s not really an endpoint. It’s just finding a way to keep going. There’s also an element of sacrifice in this story, particularly regarding another counselor named Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith). What role does she play in Emily’s journey?
For me, Jo is this human embodiment of Charlie, Emily’s friend. As Jo, she had a life at this camp before meeting Emily, and then was kind of taken over by Charlie’s spirit. I think a lot of people view Emily’s final choice as horrendous and tragic. In a way it is, but for me, if Jo becomes her angel, it’s almost like a self-sacrifice. Jo knows that by sacrificing herself, she’ll be giving Emily power to move forward. In the original script, the girls were supposed to bring out another counselor, JB (Aidan Laudersmith), and burn his body. But I just thought, there’s no way sacrificing this guy could give the girls enough power. There’s just no way, right? Logically, that just didn’t line up for me.
I’m glad you mentioned JB, because he has his own tragic arc. How do men factor into the world of Camp?
The way men factor into my world is so bizarre. I have such little respect for them in my films, which is something I’ve been called on. I think I have to challenge myself in the future to make a movie about a boy because, these boys … It’s not that the men in my films aren’t redeemable, but there’s no depth to these characters. They’re just treated with such disrespect. I don’t know why I do that, actually. That’s something for me to look into. It was the same with Honeycomb. They’re just such peripheral characters. I’ve had people ask about Kayne (Henri Gillespi), the scary guy at the fire, what happens to him? I just think, I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point of the story.
Well, I can say after a lifetime of watching women on the periphery of the story, the course correction feels nice. In a similar vein, I’m in love with your homepage, avalonfast.com. There’s an image of girls on a film set and then a still from Honeycomb in which a blood-covered girl is screaming at the sky. And in the middle, it just says Girl Horror. It’s a really powerful statement that gives me chills. How do you define Girl Horror, and what draws you to these types of stories?
I was obsessed with the term when I started making my movies. It was something I’d come up with to kind of brand myself and describe what I was doing. Then I went through a period where I felt like it was a bit gender exclusive and didn’t interest me as much. But now I’ve come full circle on the term. I think it’s a bit of a commentary on youth and the horror of growing up female. But I think everybody can relate to that experience. I don’t want it to feel like this exclusive thing, that I make movies exclusively for girls, because I don’t think I do. I’m interested in exploring what Girl Horror means. Originally, it was just a title, something I came up with, and now it’s become something that resonates with people. You said it gave you chills. That’s cool for me to hear because there’s obviously some depth there.
Are you working on anything new?
Yes. I am actually making a movie about a boy. That’s the next thing.
That’s exciting! The more I think about feminism, the more I end up coming back to men and boys, because they have a place in the world of Girl Horror too.
Absolutely. It’s all just part of being human.
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