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.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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