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

While veggie chips, barbecue chicken, and economy-sized jugs of K-Y Jelly may sound like a shopping list for a very specific adult picnic, these items are 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 special 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,” the character’s decidedly crispier and less solid current form, having been set on fire and, oh, blasted out of our dimension in the season 4 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 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 things from the animal kingdom. 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 and effects on the show, is a hybrid creation of Bower’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 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.”