Stranger Things season 4 is out and fans are racing. However, one plotline has already heated up some viewers.
With seven new episodes now available for viewing, Season 4 of the Netflix series premiered on Friday (May 27).
Season 3 ended with Hopper (Harbour) presumed dead after an effort to blow up the lab entrance to the Upside Down left him trapped within the chamber with the bomb. While it looked like Hopper had given his life for the cause, many people thought he was still alive.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
Hopper just leaped off the platform where the laser equipment was placed. Which allowed him to avoid the explosion. Russian forces apprehended him. Although, shown engulfed in flames and rendered unconscious before. Others pointed out that the identical explosion that Hopper survived by ducking dissolved the troops around him.
It’s understandable that Joyce wouldn’t have time to hunt for Hopper after the explosion. But, the fact that he was merely comatose on the floor in front of her has been a frustrating explanation.
Many viewers remarked that the lack of a more thorough reveal behind his character’s survival was frustrating. In the
first teasers for the new show, Hopper is alive and imprisoned in a Russian gulag.
Episode two of season four explains how Hopper survived – and many are not happy.
Even though, some speculated that Hopper may have leaped through the portal to survive or discovered a secret trapdoor, the true answer is more straightforward.
Stranger Things Season 4 has introduced a new enemy, Vecna.
Jamie Campbell Bower is the actor who plays both Henry and Vecna behind the prosthetics.
The show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, known as the Duffer brothers, are famously tight-lipped about the series’ future surprises. According to Bower, this time of knowing very little about Vecna/Henry/One lasted roughly a month. The actor didn’t understand anything about Stranger Things’ new villain until he met with the Duffers.
“I knew very, very little, but somehow managed to piece enough together to be able to formulate the reality of who this person was. So call it fate, luck, intelligence, stupidity – god knows how it happened, but it happened.”
Becoming Vecna – makeup and prosthetics
Constructed with about 90% practical effects with the assistance of makeup artist Barrie Gower, previously reported by the Duffers.
Bower had a lengthy makeup and prosthetics treatment, lasting around seven and a half hours.
Depending on the day, Gower says they’d start the procedure between 3 and 4 a.m. to begin filming around 10 a.m. They’d shoot for approximately 10 to 12 hours before spending another hour getting Bower out of the suit. It weighed roughly 40 pounds in all.
“It isn’t a lot, but after a 10-hour day, you start to feel it,” Bower laughs. Forcing him, too, to amp up his performance quite a bit more.
“On a more practical level, rather than an emotional level, I found that I had to give more. The suit moves with the face quite well, but it’s not as pliable. The idea of the eyebrows particularly, you have to make sure that I was really sort of giving it in the facial expression and not what I would maybe give facially if I was just not in a suit. But I think what was great was that underneath it all is the intention of this real hatred and this real resentment, and that was coming through.”
Why Practical effects and not CGI?
One of the reasons they chose to use practical effects for Vecna rather than computer-generated ones was to give their performers something substantial to interact with onset. And several of those performers were scared when they saw Bower in Vecna mode.
“I am pacing around often, saying some pretty vile things under my breath about whoever’s in front of me, and just vile things in general pretty much up until action when I’ve got to say the actual lines,” he says. “The poor actor playing Chrissy (Grace Van Dien), was terrified. Sadie [Sink]’s really tough. She’s a tough person, so she was kind of all right. But Millie [Bobby Brown] cried. The first time that Millie saw me, she burst into tears. It was in the rehearsal, and she literally just burst into tears.”
We’ll know if Vecna gets his vengeance when Stranger Things Season 4, Part 2 hits Netflix on July 1.
Follow us on Social Media
