Henry Creel: Vecna's Transformation Journey

Henry Creel, later known in the Hawkins lab as One, was born in 1947 to father Victor Creel, mother Virginia Creel, and sister Alice Creel. The specific whereabouts of Henry's birth remain unknown, but what is known is that in 1959, when Victor was 12, the Creels bought a house and moved to the town of Hawkins, Indiana. Henry's father would later describe him as sensitive, Henry would refer to himself as different, and Henry's early teachers and doctors would say he was broken. Whatever anyone wants to call it, Henry was the first person in Hawkins to exhibit special abilities or superpowers. These are similar to the abilities that a little girl known as Eleven would exhibit almost 20 years later, thanks to a secret government program started by Dr. Martin Brenner. However, unlike Eleven, Henry would go on to use these powers for harm and destruction, and once in the hands of Dr. Brenner, Henry and his powers would prove to be the source of one of the most dangerous government experiments gone horribly wrong. To find out how Henry evolved to become the monster known as Vecna, How Vecna is actually the inverse of Eleven, the cues taken from Freddy Krueger, what you don't know about the lore Vecna is based on, and so much more. Stick around to the end of this video. Welcome to Henry History. I mean Hawkins History. I mean Horror History. Let's start over. Vecna is known as the main antagonist of Stranger Things. But Vecna is not the monster's actual name. Like many other monsters in Hawkins, such as the Demogorgon and the Mind Player, its name is given by a group of kids pulled from their Dungeons & Dragons game manual. In the game, Vecna is described as a creature with rotting skin that lives despite being previously killed, running an entire civilization through his power. In the Dungeons & Dragons user manual, Vecna started out as a wizard or spellcaster. He was already very powerful, but then Vecna became what's known as a Lich. An undead creature of great value. Within the lore of D&D, Vecna's physical body is destroyed, only leaving his left eye in left hand. When he takes on his god-like form, his eye and hand are still said to be missing. Within the D&D lore, Vecna also has a right-hand man, known as Cas, who becomes his betrayer. So, just based off of that, there are a lot of similarities to the Stranger Things version of Vecna. He tries to recruit Eleven as sort of a disciple, and she betrays him. His physical body is destroyed upon entrance to the Upside Down, and he is transformed into this divine sort of form. where we can see that his left hand turns into a huge claw, mirroring the asymmetry of the hands found on the D&D version. Like most things that happened in Hawkins, Henry lives up to the lore of the Dungeons & Dragons character associated with him, in more ways than one. To understand Henry's transformation into Vecna, we'll have to take it back to 1959, as the Creel family tried to settle in to Hawkins. On the surface, the Creels embodied the ideal nuclear family in 1959, and with that came their move to the newly developed, and at that time, substantially wealthy Indianapolis suburb of Hawkins, Indiana. We don't know where they moved from, but Victor describes how many families in the 50s were leaving cities and moving to the suburbs, which were seen as the ideal place to raise a family. The Creels had inherited a small fortune from the death of Virginia's great uncle, and they seized the opportunity to buy a big beautiful house. Alice even describes their new home as seeming like something from a fairy tale, and exclaims that she can't believe it's so big. However, Henry would recount a very different reason for their move. His teachers and doctors described him as broken, leaving his parents to hope that a change of scenery would fix his issues. It's possible that both suburban sprawl and a change of scenery for Henry were factors in the move, but Victor only cited the former in order to try and save face. The specifics of Henry's behavior problems as a child are not described in detail, only that he was different and had trouble fitting in with the other children. He was a little freak, just like the person watching this video, but the way his behavior was perceived is typical for the time period. One subtext I've analyzed in many of my Stranger Things episodes is the fear of spreading communism after World War II in what was called the Red Scare. This would be right when Henry was born. The idea of not conforming to American values or doing anything outside of what was considered normal would lead others to fear you and eventually associate you with those evil commies. Obviously, there's a metaphor here, they weren't literally accusing a little kid of being a communist. My point is that weird behavior back then was not tolerated like it is now in the age of the internet. It would make sense that the Creels would want to leave that notion behind and get a fresh start. However, Henry was the one member of the family who was less than thrilled about the move to Hawkins. He would later balk at his parents'hope that a change of scenery might cure him, stating that he was not alone. Henry describes finally feeling a connection to another living thing when he discovers a nest of black widow spiders in one of the bathroom vents in the house. He explains that while most people are afraid of spiders, he saw them as something that gave him comfort."-Like me, they are solitary creatures, deeply misunderstood."He started collecting them in jars and kept them in the attic to study, where he drew detailed drawings of them. He saw them as the ultimate predator that fed on the weak and kept the ecosystem in balance until humans came along and threw everything off. Not exactly how that happened, but whatever. To Henry, the average person was just a pest, and human civilizations and concepts of time were all things that he felt entrapped by. He describes this as a deeply unnatural structure. Where others saw... I saw a straitjacket. It was with this discovery Henry found he had special abilities. While staring at the grandfather clock in his family's house, Henry describes that he's able to move the hands around with just his mind. From there, he went on to discover even more new abilities. He could infiltrate the minds of his family members and manipulate what they were seeing, forcing them to hallucinate. As you can imagine a troubled kid would, he immediately started using his powers in the worst ways possible. What caused Henry to have these powers is never explained, but we can kind of figure it out using what we know about where Eleven's powers came from. Eleven's came from chemical experiments done on her mother under Project MK Ultra. In Henry's case, it was likely inherited from his father's time serving in World War II. Later on, other children like Henry and Eleven would have the same powers and be closely studied under a program in Hawkins Lab, which was a part of MKUltra. While MKUltra did not officially start as an actual program under the CIA until about 1953, the concept of the US government testing chemicals on people started earlier in various ways, including testing agents on soldiers serving in World War II. It's possible that Victor may have been one of the early test subjects, encountering a specific cocktail of chemicals that would later affect Henry, just as Eleven was affected by the tests done on her mother. Whatever the cause, the result was a reason for Hawkins residents to actually fear him. With these new powers, and his fascination with the Black Widow spiders, Henry started experimenting in some pretty messed up ways, including torturing a bunny and turning its insides out. He described seeing himself as a predator, much like the Black Widows, but in Henry's words, a predator for good, which seems like a stretch unless you have something against CGI bunnies. However, in Henry's logic, he likely justified this as seeing himself taking out something weak, just as a spider would, and keeping the ecosystem in balance. But rabbits and small animals weren't the only targets for Henry's torture. He began tormenting his own family by being able to infiltrate their thoughts and cause horrifying hallucinations, bringing back terrible memories, such as his father's time in the war, and taunting his mother by showing her spiders coming out of her bathtub drain. We don't know specifically what he torments his sister with, but it looks terrible. Henry's justification for doing this was that he felt his family deserved it. He could see their thoughts, so he could see what his parents'motivations were. and it reflected Henry's own issues with not being able to fit in with societal standards and what was expected of the traditional nuclear family at the time. He realized that his own parents didn't fit within this standard, and resented them for trying so hard to. Henry states, I saw my parents as they truly were to the world. They presented themselves as good like everything else in this world. It was all a lie, a terrible lie. They had done things, Eleven, such awful things. In the case of Victor Creel, the awful thing that Henry found as he explored his dad's mind was an incident that happened when Victor was serving in France during World War II. Victor had ordered the bombing of a French home where he thought German soldiers were hiding, but instead killed an innocent family. After walking into the wreckage, he witnessed a baby burning to death in its cradle. Victor would later describe carrying the guilt of this with him through his entire life, causing him to recoil at the sight of a baby carrier. Henry believed that his father was a hypocrite for trying to live the American dream when he had done something so awful, and felt justified in tormenting him. Henry became obsessed with other people's negative thoughts or things that made them feel guilty. As Henry put it himself, I showed them really worse. His sister Alice is described as being innocent by their father, but Henry likely saw her as weak, as he did with the rabbit, and felt justified in torturing her. Victor did not recognize that it was his own son causing this hellscape, but believed that they were being tormented by some unknown demon. Henry's mom, however, knew that her boy was the source of their problems, even if she couldn't prove it. She found Dr. Martin Brenner, who wanted to study Henry. According to Henry, Virginia believed that Dr. Brenner could fix him, and this sent him into a panic. The night that Henry discovered their plan, he turned on the radio with his mind and started changing the channels until he reached one with static, likely helping him do what he did next. As Victor got up to investigate the radio, Henry sent his mother into the air where he squeezed her brain, making her eyes ooze blood and broke her bones before dropping her into the dining room table. In the past, I've talked a lot about how Stranger Things is heavily inspired by Stephen King, with Eleven's powers being reminiscent of Carrie, and this is also a very similar kill to one from the Carrie novel, where she uses her telekinesis to bring her mother's heart to a stop. Henry describes that he could feel himself becoming stronger after each kill, as if he was absorbing some part of each victim. Victor, who had no idea it was Henry who just killed his wife, grabbed the two kids and ran to the front door. Before he could open it, Henry sent him into a trance and made him relive the most horrifying moment of his life, watching the baby burn to death. As Victor was locked in this horrible memory, Henry killed Alice in the same way that he had just killed his mother. But, as Henry himself would describe, he had pushed himself beyond his limit, causing himself to fall into a coma, releasing Victor. Victor was arrested for murdering his family and sentenced to Pennhurst Asylum after pleading insanity at his trial. He probably actually believed he was insane, based on what he had seen. Henry credited himself with framing his father, but stated that despite this, he was far from free. When Henry awoke from his coma, he was now in the exact prison that he feared, under the care of Dr. Martin Brenner, who would insist on being called Papa, which makes him sound less like an esteemed government scientist, and more like a twisted cult leader. One thing we can credit Dr. Brenner for is the fact that for the next 24 years, Hawkins remained relatively safe from Henry. However, because of Brenner's desire to mass produce children like him as a potential weapon against the Soviet Union, Henry's power was kept intact and he became literally and metaphorically a ticking time bomb hidden away under the town. Henry was taken into Hawkins'lab during the height of the Cold War. I've talked about the Cold War in the Horror History episode on Alexei. The Cold War was a tense rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union where the threat of nuclear attack was always looming. The Cold War led to fear of the spread of communism throughout the United States. It caused an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and one of the many occurrences during this time was the development of the MK-Ultra program. The same program in which Dr. Brenner found Henry to be a sort of superweapon. As Dr. Brenner studied Henry, he likely realized the source of his telekinetic abilities and tried to determine what chemicals were used on Victor during the war. After discovering them, he started a new program, his own little MK-Ultra. testing on volunteers who would later have children, which Dr. Brenner would keep under his care at the Hawkins lab, to study and train them to be used as super soldiers. Because Henry was the first, Dr. Brenner tattooed the numbers 001 onto his wrist to help keep track of each of them. Although there are 18 subjects that we know about, the fact that there are three digits used in the numbering system implies that Papa envisioned himself creating hundreds of these children. His choice of only referring to them with a number and tattooing that number on their forearm feels similar to the concentration camp tattoo. While the United States was on the opposite side during World War II, and Dr. Brenner would always claim that his actions were to protect the United States citizens from evil, he is essentially replicating something similar. From here on out, Dr. Brenner would refer to Henry simply as One. One was able to figure out the source of strength for his powers. By recalling a memory from the past that made him sad, but also angry, he was able to channel his telekinesis more reliably. Most of the rest of Henry's childhood is not detailed. but at some point he managed to overpower Dr. Brenner, causing the doc to resort to extreme measures to keep his number one subject contained. So he created a device called a Soteria. The Soteria was a microchip that tracked Henry's location, kind of like the GPS in your phone, but more importantly, it was designed to keep Henry from being able to access his own powers. Since Henry draws his power from his sad and angry memories, I'm guessing that Brenner scanned his brain to see which parts of the brain lit up when performing telekinesis. Then, he created the device to monitor that part of his brain and cause him pain if he tried to access those memories. Neither Henry or Dr. Brenner ever vividly explain how the Soteria works, but later, Dr. Brenner would explain that powers can be lost when the brain is treated as though it has a stroke, with the blood supply being cut off to specific parts and scrambling signals. The Soteria would have targeted these angry parts of Henry's brain and scrambled the signals by cutting off the blood supply. The term Soteria comes from the Greek goddess of safety or deliverance from harm, which is fitting considering that's what Dr. Brenner realized he would need to use to protect the town of Hawkins from Henry's wrath. But this fix could only hold for so long, until Henry would take his revenge on this small Indiana suburb. As long as Henry had the Soteria, he could not use his abilities, and this put him into even more of a prison than he was already in. With the very limited freedom he had to move around the lab, he explored all of its secrets, leading him to discover the boiler, which contained tunnels leading to the outside. However, he could not use them to escape due to the GPS capability of the Soteria. Dr. Brenner still had to keep Henry under his watch, but now, with a new generation of kids with mostly similar abilities, Brenner's use for him as a study subject was no longer needed. So instead, he chose to keep Henry close by making him sort of an orderly or employee within the Hawkins lab, hiding the fact that he was number one. We don't know Henry's exact age when the Soteria was implanted, but it can be assumed that it was within the first few years, between 1959 and 1965, prior to any of the other children being born, or at least being old enough to recognize him. This is based on the fact that all of the children in the Hawkins lab, the oldest of which appear to be in their early teens, are taught by Dr. Brenner that one never existed. Which is obviously a lie, he should have just claimed that he as their papa was number one or something, or just come up with something more believable. Dr. Brenner also kept Henry in check by teaching him that acting out would have repercussions. Due to this, Henry falls in line with what Dr. Brenner wants and works as a sort of authority figure to the children, at least for a while. Despite being hampered by the device on his brain, Henry was smarter than Papa realized, and began to formulate a plan of escape. He spent the following years watching the other children, while living under the exact rigid structure that he despised. He played by the rules for most of his young adult life until 1979, when one of the children stood out to Henry as someone he might be able to conspire with. Henry notices that a little girl labeled Number Eleven does not fit in with the other children and is often picked on and bullied, which is something he finds relatable. In a similar way to how Henry identified with the Black Widow spiders, he identifies with Eleven and sees a younger version of himself in her. Henry starts working to secretly talk to Eleven without Dr. Brenner, evading the security cameras to do so. He begins working to manipulate Eleven, which is likely something he learned directly from Dr. Brenner himself. First, he reveals that Dr. Brenner has lied to her and the other children about One's existence, claiming that he knew him. He starts planting seeds of doubt in Eleven's head by telling him that he was the one who had the power to do it. He then tells him that he was Sometimes, Papa doesn't tell the truth. He secretly gives Eleven pointers for harnessing her power against Dr. Brenner's wishes, by telling her about this time that One recalled a memory that made him both sad and angry, suggesting that she should do the same. He even suggests that she recall the memory of her mother coming to get her from Hawkins'lab and being caught and taken away. The next day, when Eleven is training with the other children, her powers outshine the others, despite her being so young and seemingly overpowered. Dr. Brenner notices this, because he's given the children specific directions not to do this."-If you allow anger or emotion to invade your thoughts, you will fail."Dr. Brenner was trying to avoid losing control of the children the way that he did with Henry. He realizes that Henry most likely talked to Eleven in secret and taught her to do exactly this, so he punishes Henry for doing so by having lab security guards shock him until he's so weak that he must be carried away. It's possible that Henry intended for Eleven to see this. because it helps him in his plan of making him look like a friend and Dr. Brenner look like an abusive enemy. But it's impossible to say for sure. Shortly after, Eleven is attacked by the other children who use their powers to beat her until she gets a concussion, while the security cameras are conveniently shut off. Dr. Brenner makes her attacker suffer for doing this, despite Eleven's unwillingness to tell on them. This leaves the others feeling resentful towards her, and Eleven can sense them plotting to attack her again. Henry seizes this opportunity, and while playing a game of chess with Eleven, he tells her that Dr. Brenner is setting her up to have the other children kill her. Which really is kind of stupid. If Dr. Brenner wanted Eleven killed, he could probably just put her down with an injection or something. It wouldn't need to be a big conspiracy. But Eleven is young and impressionable, so she believes him, and furthermore, Henry's plan works, and he convinces her that he's the only one that can help her escape the lab to stay alive. He has her secretly meet him in the boiler room, where he shows her a way out through the tunnels underneath the lab. He plays to Eleven's good nature by showing her the Soteria, explaining that he is imprisoned by Dr. Brenner, while still not revealing who he really is. He tells her that the Soteria is how Dr. Brenner keeps track of him so he can never escape. She falls right into his trap. She's influenced to use her powers to remove the device as if it were her own idea. As the two of them try to escape, they're caught by the guards. Henry seems to expect this, but he acts surprised and for the first time, uses his powers in front of Eleven to kill the same guards who had tortured him previously. He reveals to her that he is in fact one, showing her the tattoo on his wrist that matches hers. He instructs her to hide in the closet while he finds a way out, but in reality, Henry is putting the finishing touches on the plan that he had been concocting for years. Through the years of watching the other children obediently abide by Dr. Brenner's rules, Henry likely developed a deep resentment that he couldn't wait to unleash. Henry viciously and violently massacres the Hawkins lab, killing all of the children. including the very young and very innocent ones, just as he did to his own sister, his parents, and that one CGI bunny. The plan would have been carried out to a T, but he had just one tiny oversight. Eleven is not quite as easily manipulated as he believed, and leaves the closet where she is horrified by Henry's evil wrath of destruction. When she finds him, he reveals his entire past, convinced she'll understand and do exactly what he wants, join him to restructure the world and rebuild it with her help. But Eleven, despite spending her childhood in what is essentially a prison just like him, doesn't harbor the same resentment towards the world, and she refuses to take his side. Often when the bad guy asks you to join him, there is only one alternative. You will die. However, Eleven realizes that her best weapon against Henry is actually to be nothing like Henry. Instead of focusing on memories that make her sad or angry as Henry instructed, she focuses on maybe the only happy memory that she has, her mother telling her that she loves her. This makes Eleven the antithesis, or perhaps the inverse, of Henry. Where Henry wants to spread evil, Eleven does the opposite. She regains control, and like Cas from the D&D lore, she betrays him, by air-yeeting him against the wall with such telekinetic force that she temporarily opens a gate into another dimension, which would eventually be known as the Upside Down, and Henry is vaporized into it. Eleven's choice to focus on a happy memory instead of a sad or angry one is just one of many things that makes her the inverse of Henry. They are mirrored opposites of each other in every way. Where Henry takes pride in torturing small animals, Eleven is punished for refusing to kill a cat. Even their numbers, 001 and 011, are the binary inverse of one another, although this only works if you turn one of them upside down, such as when Eleven first sees his tattoo. So it's fitting that one operates primarily from the upside down, while the other from the real world. Another interesting connection they share is that they both contribute to the creation of the other. One monster creates another. Eleven sends Henry into the Upside Down, where he becomes Vecna, but without Henry's special abilities, Eleven never would have existed. As far as we know, this is the first time that a gate into the Upside Down had been opened, and likely the first time that Dr. Brenner, or anyone from the Hawkins lab, had even become aware of it. However, the gate seals itself up pretty quickly, leaving Henry locked in another dimension. As Henry is pushed into the Upside Down, his skin is ripped apart by the lightning bolts pulsing through the foreign atmosphere, and he's left deformed. But instead of dying or succumbing to the monsters that live within the Upside Down, he uses his telekinetic powers to overtake it and make it his own. I could restore balance to a broken orb. A predator for good. The way the organisms of the Upside Down operate is in a hive mind. This means that they share a collective consciousness, like honeybees who use special body motions to quickly communicate their findings to the entire hive. In the case of the creatures of the Upside Down, they are all linked with telepathy, and a network of vines that run all over the realm. So, like a swarm of insects, these creatures can act as individuals or as one big unit. When Henry, or as we can now call him Vecna, finds a series of storm clouds and takes control of them, the clouds are also tapped into everything within the Upside Down, and thus Vecna taps in and becomes a part of the so-called Hive. Perhaps due to his power, he seems to become the so-called Queen Bee and is able to take control of the other organisms. Vecna shapes these storm clouds very intentionally into the same form as the drawing of the spiders that he created as a kid. This specific life form, which Vecna is now the mind of more or less, would become known as the Mind Flayer. When Vecna explains to Eleven about how he wanted to destroy society as we know it and create a new one, he was denied that opportunity. But in the Upside Down, he could create the world that he wanted, one where everything is connected under his control. It's only fitting that Henry would defy Dr. Brenner, who wanted to use him as the ultimate weapon against the Soviet Union, and more specifically the spread of communism, that Vecna would create a world that essentially holds the same major ideals of communism. It all functions as one mind under the groupthink of one leader. As a result, if something happens to any organism in the Upside Down, from vines that run over everything to the creatures that live within it, Vecna sees, hears and feels it, and the same goes for the inhabitants. He essentially had an army of dangerous creatures at his disposal, and it would only be a matter of time before the gate between the Upside Down and the Right Side Up would be opened once more. As Vecna spends more time in the Upside Down, he starts to look less human and more like one of its native creatures. Since all of the Upside Down inhabitants are linked, when one feels pain, so do the others. This is a defense mechanism allowing them to swarm on anything that threatens them. But it may also be the reason that when Vecna is found later, he is even more deformed than when he first arrived. As different parts of the Upside Down are killed, Vecna is affected. Maybe Vecna could have lived out his days in the Upside Down without ever bothering anyone from Hawkins ever again. But as you can probably guess, that doesn't doesn't happen. Dr. Brenner has lost most of his subjects and much of his life's work, and probably wants to recoup his investment. In 1983, Dr. Brenner sends Eleven, who at this point has no memory of Henry, to use one of her unique abilities, astral projection, to search in the upside down while floating in the sensory deprivation tank. But Dr. Brenner never told her exactly who she was looking for. She would later confront him about this after realizing that she was looking for Henry, but Dr. Brenner insists that he was looking for something to use against Russia. Both are likely true. Whatever the reason, Eleven does not find Henry, but instead finds the Demogorgon, and the mutual reaction between the two of them causes enough energy to open a new pair of gates, one in the Hawkins lab, and one in the wooded area known as Mirkwood, which allows the Demogorgon to cross over into Hawkins, which again is relevant to Vecna because he's the one calling the shots via the Mind Flayer. This is the beginning of the town of Hawkins being terrorized by some... While it's unclear if Vecna was actually controlling the Demogorgon after it crosses into Hawkins, or if it's just functioning as an animal looking for food, the Demogorgon pulls two children, William Byers and Barbara Holland, also known as Brab, into the Upside Down. Barbara is killed, though not eaten, and Will is able to survive long enough to be rescued, but not unscathed. The Demogorgon implanted Will with a slug that I call the Demawog. It's basically stage one of a baby Demogorgon's metamorphosis, and it allows Vecna to access Will's thoughts and control him, as he is now part of the Hive Mind. Henry could control people's thoughts with his abilities as a kid, but while physically in the Upside Down, Vecna does not seem to have this power over those in the Right Side Up. He has to have that physical connection by implanting a Demogorgon to his victim, and even then, the telepathic connection only works as long as there is actively a gate open between the two worlds. It's likely that Vecna took this idea from Dr. Brenner, implanting him with the Soteria. While the Soteria was a mechanical control device, this slug functions as a biological one. In autumn of 1984, Vecna uses Will as a means to spy on his enemies, and eventually sends the Mind Flayer to overtake Hawkins by creating a new army in the Right Side Up. While under Vecna's control, Will can be seen drawing pictures of the MF in the same style that Henry drew as a child, which is very different from Will's usual art style. However, Will's family eventually discovers that the Mind Flayer does not like heat, and they're able to burn that MF right out of him, releasing Will from Vecna's control, for the time being. At the same time, Eleven closes the gate back at Hawkins'lab, cutting off Vecna from being able to access Hawkins, and killing the Demodogs that were stranded there. It is perhaps here that Vecna became fully deformed. Maybe the pain of the dead Demodogs caused him to further break down into the recognizable form seen in Season 4. Despite Eleven closing the gate, Vecna is given a new opportunity to enter Hawkins the following summer in June of 1985 when the Soviets infiltrate Hawkins and operate in a secret lair underneath the Starcourt Mall, where they try to access the the Upside Down using a giant drill. Remember when Dr. Brenner insisted that he was looking for something to stop the Soviets and that was why he sent Eleven to explore the Upside Down? Turns out he wasn't technically lying. The US and the Soviet Union were in a secret arms race to weaponize the creatures within the Upside Down. This time, Vecna realizes that he'll need to create a physical monster that he can control so he can have a presence in the right side up version of Hawkins despite not having the ability to astral project. Vecna starts small this time, taking over rodents and doing the same thing he did to that rabbit in the yarn. He sends them to an abandoned warehouse known as Brimborn Steelworks, where he flips them inside out and is able to manipulate that sludge left over into a physical monster. Seeing as how infecting Will was much more effective than sending upside-down monsters into the real world in the past, Vecna decides to create an army of humans this time, starting with 18-year-old lifeguard Billy Hargrove. Vecna uses the Mind Flayer to pull Billy into the depths of the Steelworks and implant something into him. just like what happened to Will. He then uses Billy to lure more victims into the warehouse, implanting them and effectively creating an entire army of people under his control. Eventually, he summons everyone he's infected back to the steelworks, where he turns their bodies inside out into a sludge monster, which I like to call the elementary school cafeteria meat form of the Mind Flayer. I really went crazy with the nicknames when making my Stranger Things content, apparently. Once again, this form, like the other, resembles a giant spider in honor of the black widows that Henry has always idolized. His overall goal hasn't changed much either. He wants Eleven, but knowing that she won't willingly work with him, he wants to kill her and absorb her power into the monster. As Dr. Brenner puts it, Dr. When one kills, he doesn't simply kill. He consumes. He takes everything from his victims, everything they are and everything they ever will be. Their memories, their abilities. That summer, Eleven Astral projects to find Billy, and she's ambushed when Vecna takes control of Billy's mind to deliver an ominous message. Dr. All this time, we've been building it. It culminates at Starcourt Mall, with a battle between Eleven and the cafeteria meat monster, which again is basically being controlled by Vecna. He doesn't manage to kill her, but he does inflict trauma by implanting her with yet another slug from the Upside Down, and he no longer needs the magnetic field to access people as long as a gate is still open. However, as he does this, Joyce Byers and Sheriff Jim Hopper close the gate, cutting off Vecna temporarily. This does not last long, however. as Vecna has absorbed some of Levin's power, and now seems to be equipped with her ability to locate people through astral projection. When the doorway between the two worlds opened back up, Vecna could use this power to target victims by reading the thoughts of various people in town, until he found someone struggling with feelings of guilt. These people would become his ideal victims. He'd torment them in the same way that he tormented his own family. Vecna would use the skill of astral projection to find people, mostly teenagers, who were tormented with guilt for one reason or another. He justified their deaths in considering himself a predator for good, as he put it, by holding up a mirror to those he felt deserved it, killing them through the torment of their own guilt. Each time he takes a victim using this method, it opens a new gate into Hawkins, which seems to be a part of the greater ritual he's performing. We've seen gates open in a similar manner, when Eleven first sent Henry to the Upside Down, or when Eleven defeated the original Demogorgon. It's all part of Henry's plan to annihilate the town, creating a massive fault line by opening four gates strategically aligned to cut through Hawkins and destroy it, starting from his old childhood home. If he succeeded, Hawkins would get swallowed up by the Upside Down. The first of his four victims is Hawkins High School cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham. His pattern of attack follows what he originally did to his family. Each victim would start suffering from severe headaches, followed by nightmares, followed by hallucinations of the things that they felt most guilt or suffering around. In Chrissy's case, her guilt and torment came from her mother's pressure for her to lose weight and remain thin. Before each victim would be haunted by their own memories, he'd show them the clock inside of his childhood home. It would chime exactly four times, one for each gate that he intended to open. Almost as a calling card, as if he wanted Eleven to know that he was behind it. If you saw Stranger Things 4, you probably remember this totally not overused sound effect. Chrissy's first Vecna-induced hallucination was a demented version of her mother in the girls'bathroom at school, berating her for not fitting into a small enough dress. The stress of the hallucinations caused her to turn to D&D master Eddie Munson to buy drugs, hoping that will help her cope, but Vecna reaches her while she's waiting in Eddie's trailer. He pulls her into a trance state, leaving her physical body paralyzed and motionless in the real world, just like he originally did to Victor Creel back in 1959. Once she's mentally trapped in his dreamscape, he torments her with demented visions of her parents and her mother yelling at her until he eventually crushes her head in this giant claw-like hand and consumes her. In the real world, her death resembles the death of Alice in Virginia. Vecna levitates her, squeezes her brain, and breaks her bones. With no physical evidence left behind in the real world, Vecna effectively set Eddie up for murder, the same way that he set his father up all those years ago. With the first of his four victims taken care of, he would make quick work of the others. That is, until he gets a rude awakening. during his confrontation with Billy Hargrove's little sister. The next victim would be Fred Benson, a nerdy student who's the editor of the high school newspaper. Fred survived a car accident in which another passenger was killed and felt tremendous guilt for it. So Vecna showed him the clock and tormented him with images of the deceased passenger and images of his family and friends blaming him for the death. Vecna, again, would consume Fred the same way as everyone else. The next target was Maxine Mayfield, who was part of Eleven's friend group, along with Will Byers and several others who had fought off creatures from the Upside Down. Max was also Billy Hargrove's stepsister, and witnessed the moment that the Mind Flayer killed her brother. Vecna attempts to use her survivor's guilt against her, just as he had with the other victims. However, Max's friends all know about the Upside Down, so they have some idea what they're up against. Nancy Wheeler and Robin Buckley manage to BS their way into the Pennhurst Asylum to get an interview with Henry's father, Victor Creel. where he recounts his own experiences, and they see the horrific image of how he carved his own eyes out to escape the torment of Vecna. He reveals that the thing that brought him back from his trance was hearing Ella Fitzgerald dream a little dream of me playing on the radio. From this, they determine that a person's favorite music can pull them out of Vecna's trance. Just as Max is trapped in Vecna's mindscape, her friends scramble to find her favorite song, Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush, and play it for her. For the second time, Vecna is unable to finish off someone he targeted, and Max gets away, for now. However surprising it may be that Max is a Kate Bush fan, it does make sense thematically that she would have to use a song that she loves to escape from Vecna. It fits right in to the difference between where Eleven and Vecna draw power from. Vecna thinks about memories of fear and anger, while Eleven goes back to memories of love. Vecna also targets kids who are troubled or depressed, so again, he's feeding off of negativity and Max is able to escape because of her friends that care about her. Vecna moves on to his next victim, high school basketball player Patrick McKinney. He was likely tormented the same way, however, we're never shown exactly what memories or thoughts were used against him. But he did see the grandfather clock, and the way he died fits the pattern for how Vecna killed. Patrick and his teammate Jason had been going after Eddie Munson and chase him out into the middle of the lake when Vecna chooses to strike, sending Patrick into the trance while he's mid-swim. Patrick is sent shooting out of the water, where he meets the same fate as those before him. This was all enough to open the third gate in the middle of the lake, moving Vecna one step closer to destroying the town. Vecna is not secretive about his plan. Nancy Wheeler is not one of Vecna's originally intended victims, but he chooses to show her his plan by putting her into a trance and sending images into her head as she tries to escape the Upside Down. This is when he shows her his entire plan, and his plan for the future, Hawkins being completely swallowed by the Upside Down, which is traumatic for Nancy. Deserved. He also gives her directions. I want you to tell her everything you've seen. Which explains why he let her live. Stranger Things was created by a pair of identical twin brothers, Matt and Ross Duffer. Their main villain, Vecna, has sort of a twin as well, and his name is Freddy Krueger. Freddy is obviously known as one of the all-time great horror villains, who attacks his victims in a dreamscape while they're asleep. It's very similar to how Vecna lulls his victims into a trance-like mindscape, where he torments them by altering what they see. After giving them a good chase, he goes for the kill with his giant claw of a hand, much like Freddy, who slashes his prey with a razor claw glove. Both characters have deformed faces as a result of the town that shunned them. Freddy was set on fire, and Vecna was electrocuted during his banishment to the Upside Down. They also both share a connection with a boiler room. The boiler room is where Freddy took his child victims in life, and Vecna manipulated a young Eleven by taking her to the boiler room, where he tricked her into setting him free. During a fight, Freddy and Vecna were both killed by a boiler room. During his kills, Vecna's targets can be seen levitating in the real world, before being twisted and contorted in painful ways. It brings to mind the death of Tina Gray, the first to go in A Nightmare on Elm Street. On top of all of that, Robert Englund, the original actor to play Freddy Krueger, also plays Victor Creel, making the idea that Vecna is descended from Freddy Krueger kind of a literal one. While Vecna is carrying out his plan in Hawkins, he needs a safe place to house his physical body in the Upside Down. As we've seen with Eleven, in order to use the Astral Projection ability, you need a place to completely disassociate. For Eleven, that may be a sensory deprivation tank or a pizza freezer. The problem is, this can leave the physical body vulnerable to attack. So Vecna creates an environment in the quiet attic of his childhood home, or at least the upside down version, where he taps into the vines, suspending him in midair, giving him easy access to the hive mind. As a result, the vines running all over the house act as an alarm system, so nothing can attack him without being attacked by all of the monsters in the Upside Down first. Nancy and Robin may not have known it yet, but Vecna's reliance on negative memories is both his strength and weakness. He uses my memories against me, but only my darkest memories. Same with Chrissy and Fred, right? Right. It's like he only sees the darkness in us. So I'll just... Run in the opposite direction. Run to the light. And maybe you won't be able to find me there. Well, he does. Their group is no match for Vecna in its abilities, but lucky for them, they know someone who is. No, no, no, it's Eleven. Despite being physically on the other side of the country, Eleven is able to astral project into Max's mind from the back of a far away pizza shop, which is a whole other side story that isn't relevant to my analysis of Vecna. Max chooses the snowball dance that she attended in 1984 to escape to, as it's one of her happiest memories. However, Vecna finds her and turns the memory into a nightmare, complete with balloons exploding with blood. It looks a lot like the prom scene in Carrie meets the library scene in IT, which is fitting, considering it wouldn't be Stranger Things without a little reference to Stephen King. Vecna goes after Max, and just as things look hopeless, Eleven arrives and throws Vecna off of her, leaving Max extremely confused."-Are you real? Did I make you?""-I'm real.""-How?""-I piggybacked from a pizza dough freezer.""-What?" Like I said, it's a whole other story. Eleven puts up a good fight against Vecna, but he's able to knock both girls unconscious. He takes them to the main lair of his mind-world place, straps Eleven against the front door of the Creel House with vines, and hangs Max against the spike, where Chrissy, Fred, and Patrick succumbed to Vecna before her, hoping to make her the fourth and final victim of his ritual. The massive assault on Vecna comes from three different directions. The first is within the minescape, where Eleven has projected herself to try to save Max. The second is in Russia, where Jim Hopper, Joyce Byers, and Murray Bauman fight some of the Demogorgons that are captive there. And the third takes place in the Upside Down, where Nancy, Robin, and Steve are en route to try to destroy Vecna's body. But this plan backfires when the vines from the hive mine catch and pin them against the wall, slowly strangling them. The Vines are quickly becoming one of the most potent villains in the series. In the Mindscape, Vecna tells Max to remain very still, and that this will all be over soon, just as he had to her stepbrother the previous year. He starts to consume and kill Max, just like his other victims, and as a result, her real body rises into the air, and her bones snap in horrible directions. But as this is happening, Eleven redoubles her effort, breaks free, and pins Vecna down as she had when she was a tiny child. Part of the reason Eleven is able to break free was because Murray Bauman attacked a horde of Demogorgons with a flamethrower just at that moment. Their storyline is mostly disconnected from Vecna to this point, but the Hivemind connects everything. Sometimes it's an advantage, but sometimes it's a disadvantage, because when they feel pain, Vecna feels pain. This reaction of the Hivemind also causes the vines holding Nancy, Steve and Robin to be released. If you're warm, they're warm. Put them outside! Now free from their trap, the young adult trio finds where Vecna is hiding in the attic and attacks him with fire as well. He attempts to run and fight back, but with Eleven pinning him down inside the Mindscape, he finds himself trapped, which allows Steve and Nancy to incinerate his physical body. The body falls out of the window, but when the group goes downstairs to confirm his death, he's gone. Just as Eddie Munson's uncle had compared Victor to Michael Myers, Vecna disappears the exact same way that the antagonist of the Halloween franchise did. Although it appears that subject number one has taken another fat L at the hands of Eleven and her friends, that's when the fourth chime is heard, confirming that Max has died and opening the fourth gate. As he had always planned, Hawkins gets ripped apart by a huge fault line opening what appears to be a giant gate into the Upside Down. Vecna probably believed that he had won, that the town would be sucked into the dystopian dimension. But once again, he underestimates the power of love. Eleven refuses to let Max die. She puts her hand on her friend's heart and channels her power to get it beating again, bringing Max back from death where she's suspended in a coma. It's almost the reverse of the way that Vecna kills. He uses telekinesis to squeeze his victim's organs, and Eleven uses hers as a telekinetic defibrillator of sorts. This seems to prevent Hawkins from completely falling into the Upside Down as Vecna had shown Nancy, but significant damage has been done. At this point, we can clearly see that the moral of the story is not to move to the suburbs. But this story doesn't end here. At the time of upload, we're less than a year away from the final showdown in Stranger Things 5. For now, feel free to check out the playlist on the left for all of my other Stranger Things character analysis videos, and I'll be sure to complete my analysis of Vecna's story once we have its final chapter. Make sure you don't miss it by subscribing to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ringing the deathbell for all notifications, and I'll see you in the next one. Assuming we both survive.

Whatever anyone wants to call it, Henry was the first person in Hawkins to exhibit special abilities or superpowers. These are similar to the abilities that a little girl known as Eleven would exhibit almost 20 years later, thanks to a secret government program started by Dr. Martin Brenner. However, unlike Eleven, Henry would go on to use these powers for harm and destruction, and once in the hands of Dr. Brenner, Henry and his powers would prove to be the source of one of the most dangerous government experiments gone horribly wrong.

To find out how Henry evolved to become the monster known as Vecna, How Vecna is actually the inverse of Eleven, the cues taken from Freddy Krueger, what you don't know about the lore Vecna is based on, and so much more. Stick around to the end of this video. Welcome to Henry History. I mean Hawkins History.

I mean Horror History. Let's start over. Vecna is known as the main antagonist of Stranger Things. But Vecna is not the monster's actual name.

Like many other monsters in Hawkins, such as the Demogorgon and the Mind Player, its name is given by a group of kids pulled from their Dungeons & Dragons game manual. In the game, Vecna is described as a creature with rotting skin that lives despite being previously killed, running an entire civilization through his power. In the Dungeons & Dragons user manual, Vecna started out as a wizard or spellcaster. He was already very powerful, but then Vecna became what's known as a Lich.

An undead creature of great value. Within the lore of D&D, Vecna's physical body is destroyed, only leaving his left eye in left hand. When he takes on his god-like form, his eye and hand are still said to be missing. Within the D&D lore, Vecna also has a right-hand man, known as Cas, who becomes his betrayer.

So, just based off of that, there are a lot of similarities to the Stranger Things version of Vecna. He tries to recruit Eleven as sort of a disciple, and she betrays him. His physical body is destroyed upon entrance to the Upside Down, and he is transformed into this divine sort of form.

where we can see that his left hand turns into a huge claw, mirroring the asymmetry of the hands found on the D&D version. Like most things that happened in Hawkins, Henry lives up to the lore of the Dungeons & Dragons character associated with him, in more ways than one. To understand Henry's transformation into Vecna, we'll have to take it back to 1959, as the Creel family tried to settle in to Hawkins.

On the surface, the Creels embodied the ideal nuclear family in 1959, and with that came their move to the newly developed, and at that time, substantially wealthy Indianapolis suburb of Hawkins, Indiana. We don't know where they moved from, but Victor describes how many families in the 50s were leaving cities and moving to the suburbs, which were seen as the ideal place to raise a family. The Creels had inherited a small fortune from the death of Virginia's great uncle, and they seized the opportunity to buy a big beautiful house. Alice even describes their new home as seeming like something from a fairy tale, and exclaims that she can't believe it's so big. However, Henry would recount a very different reason for their move.

His teachers and doctors described him as broken, leaving his parents to hope that a change of scenery would fix his issues. It's possible that both suburban sprawl and a change of scenery for Henry were factors in the move, but Victor only cited the former in order to try and save face. The specifics of Henry's behavior problems as a child are not described in detail, only that he was different and had trouble fitting in with the other children.

He was a little freak, just like the person watching this video, but the way his behavior was perceived is typical for the time period. One subtext I've analyzed in many of my Stranger Things episodes is the fear of spreading communism after World War II in what was called the Red Scare. This would be right when Henry was born.

The idea of not conforming to American values or doing anything outside of what was considered normal would lead others to fear you and eventually associate you with those evil commies. Obviously, there's a metaphor here, they weren't literally accusing a little kid of being a communist. My point is that weird behavior back then was not tolerated like it is now in the age of the internet. It would make sense that the Creels would want to leave that notion behind and get a fresh start. However, Henry was the one member of the family who was less than thrilled about the move to Hawkins.

He would later balk at his parents'hope that a change of scenery might cure him, stating that he was not alone. Henry describes finally feeling a connection to another living thing when he discovers a nest of black widow spiders in one of the bathroom vents in the house. He explains that while most people are afraid of spiders, he saw them as something that gave him comfort."-Like me, they are solitary creatures, deeply misunderstood."He started collecting them in jars and kept them in the attic to study, where he drew detailed drawings of them. He saw them as the ultimate predator that fed on the weak and kept the ecosystem in balance until humans came along and threw everything off. Not exactly how that happened, but whatever.

To Henry, the average person was just a pest, and human civilizations and concepts of time were all things that he felt entrapped by. He describes this as a deeply unnatural structure. Where others saw...

I saw a straitjacket. It was with this discovery Henry found he had special abilities. While staring at the grandfather clock in his family's house, Henry describes that he's able to move the hands around with just his mind. From there, he went on to discover even more new abilities. He could infiltrate the minds of his family members and manipulate what they were seeing, forcing them to hallucinate.

As you can imagine a troubled kid would, he immediately started using his powers in the worst ways possible. What caused Henry to have these powers is never explained, but we can kind of figure it out using what we know about where Eleven's powers came from. Eleven's came from chemical experiments done on her mother under Project MK Ultra. In Henry's case, it was likely inherited from his father's time serving in World War II.

Later on, other children like Henry and Eleven would have the same powers and be closely studied under a program in Hawkins Lab, which was a part of MKUltra. While MKUltra did not officially start as an actual program under the CIA until about 1953, the concept of the US government testing chemicals on people started earlier in various ways, including testing agents on soldiers serving in World War II. It's possible that Victor may have been one of the early test subjects, encountering a specific cocktail of chemicals that would later affect Henry, just as Eleven was affected by the tests done on her mother. Whatever the cause, the result was a reason for Hawkins residents to actually fear him.

With these new powers, and his fascination with the Black Widow spiders, Henry started experimenting in some pretty messed up ways, including torturing a bunny and turning its insides out. He described seeing himself as a predator, much like the Black Widows, but in Henry's words, a predator for good, which seems like a stretch unless you have something against CGI bunnies. However, in Henry's logic, he likely justified this as seeing himself taking out something weak, just as a spider would, and keeping the ecosystem in balance.

But rabbits and small animals weren't the only targets for Henry's torture. He began tormenting his own family by being able to infiltrate their thoughts and cause horrifying hallucinations, bringing back terrible memories, such as his father's time in the war, and taunting his mother by showing her spiders coming out of her bathtub drain. We don't know specifically what he torments his sister with, but it looks terrible.

Henry's justification for doing this was that he felt his family deserved it. He could see their thoughts, so he could see what his parents'motivations were. and it reflected Henry's own issues with not being able to fit in with societal standards and what was expected of the traditional nuclear family at the time.

He realized that his own parents didn't fit within this standard, and resented them for trying so hard to. Henry states, I saw my parents as they truly were to the world. They presented themselves as good like everything else in this world. It was all a lie, a terrible lie. They had done things, Eleven, such awful things.

In the case of Victor Creel, the awful thing that Henry found as he explored his dad's mind was an incident that happened when Victor was serving in France during World War II. Victor had ordered the bombing of a French home where he thought German soldiers were hiding, but instead killed an innocent family. After walking into the wreckage, he witnessed a baby burning to death in its cradle.

Victor would later describe carrying the guilt of this with him through his entire life, causing him to recoil at the sight of a baby carrier. Henry believed that his father was a hypocrite for trying to live the American dream when he had done something so awful, and felt justified in tormenting him. Henry became obsessed with other people's negative thoughts or things that made them feel guilty.

As Henry put it himself, I showed them really worse. His sister Alice is described as being innocent by their father, but Henry likely saw her as weak, as he did with the rabbit, and felt justified in torturing her. Victor did not recognize that it was his own son causing this hellscape, but believed that they were being tormented by some unknown demon.

Henry's mom, however, knew that her boy was the source of their problems, even if she couldn't prove it. She found Dr. Martin Brenner, who wanted to study Henry. According to Henry, Virginia believed that Dr. Brenner could fix him, and this sent him into a panic. The night that Henry discovered their plan, he turned on the radio with his mind and started changing the channels until he reached one with static, likely helping him do what he did next. As Victor got up to investigate the radio, Henry sent his mother into the air where he squeezed her brain, making her eyes ooze blood and broke her bones before dropping her into the dining room table.

In the past, I've talked a lot about how Stranger Things is heavily inspired by Stephen King, with Eleven's powers being reminiscent of Carrie, and this is also a very similar kill to one from the Carrie novel, where she uses her telekinesis to bring her mother's heart to a stop. Henry describes that he could feel himself becoming stronger after each kill, as if he was absorbing some part of each victim. Victor, who had no idea it was Henry who just killed his wife, grabbed the two kids and ran to the front door.

Before he could open it, Henry sent him into a trance and made him relive the most horrifying moment of his life, watching the baby burn to death. As Victor was locked in this horrible memory, Henry killed Alice in the same way that he had just killed his mother. But, as Henry himself would describe, he had pushed himself beyond his limit, causing himself to fall into a coma, releasing Victor.

Victor was arrested for murdering his family and sentenced to Pennhurst Asylum after pleading insanity at his trial. He probably actually believed he was insane, based on what he had seen. Henry credited himself with framing his father, but stated that despite this, he was far from free.

When Henry awoke from his coma, he was now in the exact prison that he feared, under the care of Dr. Martin Brenner, who would insist on being called Papa, which makes him sound less like an esteemed government scientist, and more like a twisted cult leader. One thing we can credit Dr. Brenner for is the fact that for the next 24 years, Hawkins remained relatively safe from Henry. However, because of Brenner's desire to mass produce children like him as a potential weapon against the Soviet Union, Henry's power was kept intact and he became literally and metaphorically a ticking time bomb hidden away under the town.

Henry was taken into Hawkins'lab during the height of the Cold War. I've talked about the Cold War in the Horror History episode on Alexei. The Cold War was a tense rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union where the threat of nuclear attack was always looming.

The Cold War led to fear of the spread of communism throughout the United States. It caused an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and one of the many occurrences during this time was the development of the MK-Ultra program. The same program in which Dr. Brenner found Henry to be a sort of superweapon.

As Dr. Brenner studied Henry, he likely realized the source of his telekinetic abilities and tried to determine what chemicals were used on Victor during the war. After discovering them, he started a new program, his own little MK-Ultra. testing on volunteers who would later have children, which Dr. Brenner would keep under his care at the Hawkins lab, to study and train them to be used as super soldiers. Because Henry was the first, Dr. Brenner tattooed the numbers 001 onto his wrist to help keep track of each of them. Although there are 18 subjects that we know about, the fact that there are three digits used in the numbering system implies that Papa envisioned himself creating hundreds of these children.

His choice of only referring to them with a number and tattooing that number on their forearm feels similar to the concentration camp tattoo. While the United States was on the opposite side during World War II, and Dr. Brenner would always claim that his actions were to protect the United States citizens from evil, he is essentially replicating something similar. From here on out, Dr. Brenner would refer to Henry simply as One.

One was able to figure out the source of strength for his powers. By recalling a memory from the past that made him sad, but also angry, he was able to channel his telekinesis more reliably. Most of the rest of Henry's childhood is not detailed.

but at some point he managed to overpower Dr. Brenner, causing the doc to resort to extreme measures to keep his number one subject contained. So he created a device called a Soteria. The Soteria was a microchip that tracked Henry's location, kind of like the GPS in your phone, but more importantly, it was designed to keep Henry from being able to access his own powers. Since Henry draws his power from his sad and angry memories, I'm guessing that Brenner scanned his brain to see which parts of the brain lit up when performing telekinesis. Then, he created the device to monitor that part of his brain and cause him pain if he tried to access those memories.

Neither Henry or Dr. Brenner ever vividly explain how the Soteria works, but later, Dr. Brenner would explain that powers can be lost when the brain is treated as though it has a stroke, with the blood supply being cut off to specific parts and scrambling signals. The Soteria would have targeted these angry parts of Henry's brain and scrambled the signals by cutting off the blood supply. The term Soteria comes from the Greek goddess of safety or deliverance from harm, which is fitting considering that's what Dr. Brenner realized he would need to use to protect the town of Hawkins from Henry's wrath. But this fix could only hold for so long, until Henry would take his revenge on this small Indiana suburb.

As long as Henry had the Soteria, he could not use his abilities, and this put him into even more of a prison than he was already in. With the very limited freedom he had to move around the lab, he explored all of its secrets, leading him to discover the boiler, which contained tunnels leading to the outside. However, he could not use them to escape due to the GPS capability of the Soteria. Dr. Brenner still had to keep Henry under his watch, but now, with a new generation of kids with mostly similar abilities, Brenner's use for him as a study subject was no longer needed. So instead, he chose to keep Henry close by making him sort of an orderly or employee within the Hawkins lab, hiding the fact that he was number one.

We don't know Henry's exact age when the Soteria was implanted, but it can be assumed that it was within the first few years, between 1959 and 1965, prior to any of the other children being born, or at least being old enough to recognize him. This is based on the fact that all of the children in the Hawkins lab, the oldest of which appear to be in their early teens, are taught by Dr. Brenner that one never existed. Which is obviously a lie, he should have just claimed that he as their papa was number one or something, or just come up with something more believable. Dr. Brenner also kept Henry in check by teaching him that acting out would have repercussions.

Due to this, Henry falls in line with what Dr. Brenner wants and works as a sort of authority figure to the children, at least for a while. Despite being hampered by the device on his brain, Henry was smarter than Papa realized, and began to formulate a plan of escape. He spent the following years watching the other children, while living under the exact rigid structure that he despised.

He played by the rules for most of his young adult life until 1979, when one of the children stood out to Henry as someone he might be able to conspire with. Henry notices that a little girl labeled Number Eleven does not fit in with the other children and is often picked on and bullied, which is something he finds relatable. In a similar way to how Henry identified with the Black Widow spiders, he identifies with Eleven and sees a younger version of himself in her. Henry starts working to secretly talk to Eleven without Dr. Brenner, evading the security cameras to do so. He begins working to manipulate Eleven, which is likely something he learned directly from Dr. Brenner himself.

First, he reveals that Dr. Brenner has lied to her and the other children about One's existence, claiming that he knew him. He starts planting seeds of doubt in Eleven's head by telling him that he was the one who had the power to do it. He then tells him that he was Sometimes, Papa doesn't tell the truth.

He secretly gives Eleven pointers for harnessing her power against Dr. Brenner's wishes, by telling her about this time that One recalled a memory that made him both sad and angry, suggesting that she should do the same. He even suggests that she recall the memory of her mother coming to get her from Hawkins'lab and being caught and taken away. The next day, when Eleven is training with the other children, her powers outshine the others, despite her being so young and seemingly overpowered.

Dr. Brenner notices this, because he's given the children specific directions not to do this."-If you allow anger or emotion to invade your thoughts, you will fail."Dr. Brenner was trying to avoid losing control of the children the way that he did with Henry. He realizes that Henry most likely talked to Eleven in secret and taught her to do exactly this, so he punishes Henry for doing so by having lab security guards shock him until he's so weak that he must be carried away.

It's possible that Henry intended for Eleven to see this. because it helps him in his plan of making him look like a friend and Dr. Brenner look like an abusive enemy. But it's impossible to say for sure.

Shortly after, Eleven is attacked by the other children who use their powers to beat her until she gets a concussion, while the security cameras are conveniently shut off. Dr. Brenner makes her attacker suffer for doing this, despite Eleven's unwillingness to tell on them. This leaves the others feeling resentful towards her, and Eleven can sense them plotting to attack her again.

Henry seizes this opportunity, and while playing a game of chess with Eleven, he tells her that Dr. Brenner is setting her up to have the other children kill her. Which really is kind of stupid. If Dr. Brenner wanted Eleven killed, he could probably just put her down with an injection or something.

It wouldn't need to be a big conspiracy. But Eleven is young and impressionable, so she believes him, and furthermore, Henry's plan works, and he convinces her that he's the only one that can help her escape the lab to stay alive. He has her secretly meet him in the boiler room, where he shows her a way out through the tunnels underneath the lab. He plays to Eleven's good nature by showing her the Soteria, explaining that he is imprisoned by Dr. Brenner, while still not revealing who he really is.

He tells her that the Soteria is how Dr. Brenner keeps track of him so he can never escape. She falls right into his trap. She's influenced to use her powers to remove the device as if it were her own idea.

As the two of them try to escape, they're caught by the guards. Henry seems to expect this, but he acts surprised and for the first time, uses his powers in front of Eleven to kill the same guards who had tortured him previously. He reveals to her that he is in fact one, showing her the tattoo on his wrist that matches hers.

He instructs her to hide in the closet while he finds a way out, but in reality, Henry is putting the finishing touches on the plan that he had been concocting for years. Through the years of watching the other children obediently abide by Dr. Brenner's rules, Henry likely developed a deep resentment that he couldn't wait to unleash. Henry viciously and violently massacres the Hawkins lab, killing all of the children.

including the very young and very innocent ones, just as he did to his own sister, his parents, and that one CGI bunny. The plan would have been carried out to a T, but he had just one tiny oversight. Eleven is not quite as easily manipulated as he believed, and leaves the closet where she is horrified by Henry's evil wrath of destruction.

When she finds him, he reveals his entire past, convinced she'll understand and do exactly what he wants, join him to restructure the world and rebuild it with her help. But Eleven, despite spending her childhood in what is essentially a prison just like him, doesn't harbor the same resentment towards the world, and she refuses to take his side. Often when the bad guy asks you to join him, there is only one alternative. You will die.

However, Eleven realizes that her best weapon against Henry is actually to be nothing like Henry. Instead of focusing on memories that make her sad or angry as Henry instructed, she focuses on maybe the only happy memory that she has, her mother telling her that she loves her. This makes Eleven the antithesis, or perhaps the inverse, of Henry.

Where Henry wants to spread evil, Eleven does the opposite. She regains control, and like Cas from the D&D lore, she betrays him, by air-yeeting him against the wall with such telekinetic force that she temporarily opens a gate into another dimension, which would eventually be known as the Upside Down, and Henry is vaporized into it. Eleven's choice to focus on a happy memory instead of a sad or angry one is just one of many things that makes her the inverse of Henry. They are mirrored opposites of each other in every way. Where Henry takes pride in torturing small animals, Eleven is punished for refusing to kill a cat.

Even their numbers, 001 and 011, are the binary inverse of one another, although this only works if you turn one of them upside down, such as when Eleven first sees his tattoo. So it's fitting that one operates primarily from the upside down, while the other from the real world. Another interesting connection they share is that they both contribute to the creation of the other.

One monster creates another. Eleven sends Henry into the Upside Down, where he becomes Vecna, but without Henry's special abilities, Eleven never would have existed. As far as we know, this is the first time that a gate into the Upside Down had been opened, and likely the first time that Dr. Brenner, or anyone from the Hawkins lab, had even become aware of it. However, the gate seals itself up pretty quickly, leaving Henry locked in another dimension. As Henry is pushed into the Upside Down, his skin is ripped apart by the lightning bolts pulsing through the foreign atmosphere, and he's left deformed.

But instead of dying or succumbing to the monsters that live within the Upside Down, he uses his telekinetic powers to overtake it and make it his own. I could restore balance to a broken orb. A predator for good. The way the organisms of the Upside Down operate is in a hive mind. This means that they share a collective consciousness, like honeybees who use special body motions to quickly communicate their findings to the entire hive.

In the case of the creatures of the Upside Down, they are all linked with telepathy, and a network of vines that run all over the realm. So, like a swarm of insects, these creatures can act as individuals or as one big unit. When Henry, or as we can now call him Vecna, finds a series of storm clouds and takes control of them, the clouds are also tapped into everything within the Upside Down, and thus Vecna taps in and becomes a part of the so-called Hive. Perhaps due to his power, he seems to become the so-called Queen Bee and is able to take control of the other organisms. Vecna shapes these storm clouds very intentionally into the same form as the drawing of the spiders that he created as a kid.

This specific life form, which Vecna is now the mind of more or less, would become known as the Mind Flayer. When Vecna explains to Eleven about how he wanted to destroy society as we know it and create a new one, he was denied that opportunity. But in the Upside Down, he could create the world that he wanted, one where everything is connected under his control.

It's only fitting that Henry would defy Dr. Brenner, who wanted to use him as the ultimate weapon against the Soviet Union, and more specifically the spread of communism, that Vecna would create a world that essentially holds the same major ideals of communism. It all functions as one mind under the groupthink of one leader. As a result, if something happens to any organism in the Upside Down, from vines that run over everything to the creatures that live within it, Vecna sees, hears and feels it, and the same goes for the inhabitants.

He essentially had an army of dangerous creatures at his disposal, and it would only be a matter of time before the gate between the Upside Down and the Right Side Up would be opened once more. As Vecna spends more time in the Upside Down, he starts to look less human and more like one of its native creatures. Since all of the Upside Down inhabitants are linked, when one feels pain, so do the others.

This is a defense mechanism allowing them to swarm on anything that threatens them. But it may also be the reason that when Vecna is found later, he is even more deformed than when he first arrived. As different parts of the Upside Down are killed, Vecna is affected. Maybe Vecna could have lived out his days in the Upside Down without ever bothering anyone from Hawkins ever again.

But as you can probably guess, that doesn't doesn't happen. Dr. Brenner has lost most of his subjects and much of his life's work, and probably wants to recoup his investment. In 1983, Dr. Brenner sends Eleven, who at this point has no memory of Henry, to use one of her unique abilities, astral projection, to search in the upside down while floating in the sensory deprivation tank.

But Dr. Brenner never told her exactly who she was looking for. She would later confront him about this after realizing that she was looking for Henry, but Dr. Brenner insists that he was looking for something to use against Russia. Both are likely true. Whatever the reason, Eleven does not find Henry, but instead finds the Demogorgon, and the mutual reaction between the two of them causes enough energy to open a new pair of gates, one in the Hawkins lab, and one in the wooded area known as Mirkwood, which allows the Demogorgon to cross over into Hawkins, which again is relevant to Vecna because he's the one calling the shots via the Mind Flayer.

This is the beginning of the town of Hawkins being terrorized by some... While it's unclear if Vecna was actually controlling the Demogorgon after it crosses into Hawkins, or if it's just functioning as an animal looking for food, the Demogorgon pulls two children, William Byers and Barbara Holland, also known as Brab, into the Upside Down. Barbara is killed, though not eaten, and Will is able to survive long enough to be rescued, but not unscathed. The Demogorgon implanted Will with a slug that I call the Demawog. It's basically stage one of a baby Demogorgon's metamorphosis, and it allows Vecna to access Will's thoughts and control him, as he is now part of the Hive Mind.

Henry could control people's thoughts with his abilities as a kid, but while physically in the Upside Down, Vecna does not seem to have this power over those in the Right Side Up. He has to have that physical connection by implanting a Demogorgon to his victim, and even then, the telepathic connection only works as long as there is actively a gate open between the two worlds. It's likely that Vecna took this idea from Dr. Brenner, implanting him with the Soteria. While the Soteria was a mechanical control device, this slug functions as a biological one. In autumn of 1984, Vecna uses Will as a means to spy on his enemies, and eventually sends the Mind Flayer to overtake Hawkins by creating a new army in the Right Side Up.

While under Vecna's control, Will can be seen drawing pictures of the MF in the same style that Henry drew as a child, which is very different from Will's usual art style. However, Will's family eventually discovers that the Mind Flayer does not like heat, and they're able to burn that MF right out of him, releasing Will from Vecna's control, for the time being. At the same time, Eleven closes the gate back at Hawkins'lab, cutting off Vecna from being able to access Hawkins, and killing the Demodogs that were stranded there. It is perhaps here that Vecna became fully deformed. Maybe the pain of the dead Demodogs caused him to further break down into the recognizable form seen in Season 4. Despite Eleven closing the gate, Vecna is given a new opportunity to enter Hawkins the following summer in June of 1985 when the Soviets infiltrate Hawkins and operate in a secret lair underneath the Starcourt Mall, where they try to access the the Upside Down using a giant drill.

Remember when Dr. Brenner insisted that he was looking for something to stop the Soviets and that was why he sent Eleven to explore the Upside Down? Turns out he wasn't technically lying. The US and the Soviet Union were in a secret arms race to weaponize the creatures within the Upside Down. This time, Vecna realizes that he'll need to create a physical monster that he can control so he can have a presence in the right side up version of Hawkins despite not having the ability to astral project.

Vecna starts small this time, taking over rodents and doing the same thing he did to that rabbit in the yarn. He sends them to an abandoned warehouse known as Brimborn Steelworks, where he flips them inside out and is able to manipulate that sludge left over into a physical monster. Seeing as how infecting Will was much more effective than sending upside-down monsters into the real world in the past, Vecna decides to create an army of humans this time, starting with 18-year-old lifeguard Billy Hargrove.

Vecna uses the Mind Flayer to pull Billy into the depths of the Steelworks and implant something into him. just like what happened to Will. He then uses Billy to lure more victims into the warehouse, implanting them and effectively creating an entire army of people under his control.

Eventually, he summons everyone he's infected back to the steelworks, where he turns their bodies inside out into a sludge monster, which I like to call the elementary school cafeteria meat form of the Mind Flayer. I really went crazy with the nicknames when making my Stranger Things content, apparently. Once again, this form, like the other, resembles a giant spider in honor of the black widows that Henry has always idolized. His overall goal hasn't changed much either.

He wants Eleven, but knowing that she won't willingly work with him, he wants to kill her and absorb her power into the monster. As Dr. Brenner puts it, Dr. When one kills, he doesn't simply kill. He consumes.

He takes everything from his victims, everything they are and everything they ever will be. Their memories, their abilities. That summer, Eleven Astral projects to find Billy, and she's ambushed when Vecna takes control of Billy's mind to deliver an ominous message. Dr. All this time, we've been building it. It culminates at Starcourt Mall, with a battle between Eleven and the cafeteria meat monster, which again is basically being controlled by Vecna.

He doesn't manage to kill her, but he does inflict trauma by implanting her with yet another slug from the Upside Down, and he no longer needs the magnetic field to access people as long as a gate is still open. However, as he does this, Joyce Byers and Sheriff Jim Hopper close the gate, cutting off Vecna temporarily. This does not last long, however.

as Vecna has absorbed some of Levin's power, and now seems to be equipped with her ability to locate people through astral projection. When the doorway between the two worlds opened back up, Vecna could use this power to target victims by reading the thoughts of various people in town, until he found someone struggling with feelings of guilt. These people would become his ideal victims.

He'd torment them in the same way that he tormented his own family. Vecna would use the skill of astral projection to find people, mostly teenagers, who were tormented with guilt for one reason or another. He justified their deaths in considering himself a predator for good, as he put it, by holding up a mirror to those he felt deserved it, killing them through the torment of their own guilt.

Each time he takes a victim using this method, it opens a new gate into Hawkins, which seems to be a part of the greater ritual he's performing. We've seen gates open in a similar manner, when Eleven first sent Henry to the Upside Down, or when Eleven defeated the original Demogorgon. It's all part of Henry's plan to annihilate the town, creating a massive fault line by opening four gates strategically aligned to cut through Hawkins and destroy it, starting from his old childhood home.

If he succeeded, Hawkins would get swallowed up by the Upside Down. The first of his four victims is Hawkins High School cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham. His pattern of attack follows what he originally did to his family. Each victim would start suffering from severe headaches, followed by nightmares, followed by hallucinations of the things that they felt most guilt or suffering around. In Chrissy's case, her guilt and torment came from her mother's pressure for her to lose weight and remain thin.

Before each victim would be haunted by their own memories, he'd show them the clock inside of his childhood home. It would chime exactly four times, one for each gate that he intended to open. Almost as a calling card, as if he wanted Eleven to know that he was behind it.

If you saw Stranger Things 4, you probably remember this totally not overused sound effect. Chrissy's first Vecna-induced hallucination was a demented version of her mother in the girls'bathroom at school, berating her for not fitting into a small enough dress. The stress of the hallucinations caused her to turn to D&D master Eddie Munson to buy drugs, hoping that will help her cope, but Vecna reaches her while she's waiting in Eddie's trailer. He pulls her into a trance state, leaving her physical body paralyzed and motionless in the real world, just like he originally did to Victor Creel back in 1959. Once she's mentally trapped in his dreamscape, he torments her with demented visions of her parents and her mother yelling at her until he eventually crushes her head in this giant claw-like hand and consumes her. In the real world, her death resembles the death of Alice in Virginia.

Vecna levitates her, squeezes her brain, and breaks her bones. With no physical evidence left behind in the real world, Vecna effectively set Eddie up for murder, the same way that he set his father up all those years ago. With the first of his four victims taken care of, he would make quick work of the others.

That is, until he gets a rude awakening. during his confrontation with Billy Hargrove's little sister. The next victim would be Fred Benson, a nerdy student who's the editor of the high school newspaper. Fred survived a car accident in which another passenger was killed and felt tremendous guilt for it. So Vecna showed him the clock and tormented him with images of the deceased passenger and images of his family and friends blaming him for the death.

Vecna, again, would consume Fred the same way as everyone else. The next target was Maxine Mayfield, who was part of Eleven's friend group, along with Will Byers and several others who had fought off creatures from the Upside Down. Max was also Billy Hargrove's stepsister, and witnessed the moment that the Mind Flayer killed her brother. Vecna attempts to use her survivor's guilt against her, just as he had with the other victims. However, Max's friends all know about the Upside Down, so they have some idea what they're up against.

Nancy Wheeler and Robin Buckley manage to BS their way into the Pennhurst Asylum to get an interview with Henry's father, Victor Creel. where he recounts his own experiences, and they see the horrific image of how he carved his own eyes out to escape the torment of Vecna. He reveals that the thing that brought him back from his trance was hearing Ella Fitzgerald dream a little dream of me playing on the radio. From this, they determine that a person's favorite music can pull them out of Vecna's trance.

Just as Max is trapped in Vecna's mindscape, her friends scramble to find her favorite song, Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush, and play it for her. For the second time, Vecna is unable to finish off someone he targeted, and Max gets away, for now. However surprising it may be that Max is a Kate Bush fan, it does make sense thematically that she would have to use a song that she loves to escape from Vecna. It fits right in to the difference between where Eleven and Vecna draw power from.

Vecna thinks about memories of fear and anger, while Eleven goes back to memories of love. Vecna also targets kids who are troubled or depressed, so again, he's feeding off of negativity and Max is able to escape because of her friends that care about her. Vecna moves on to his next victim, high school basketball player Patrick McKinney.

He was likely tormented the same way, however, we're never shown exactly what memories or thoughts were used against him. But he did see the grandfather clock, and the way he died fits the pattern for how Vecna killed. Patrick and his teammate Jason had been going after Eddie Munson and chase him out into the middle of the lake when Vecna chooses to strike, sending Patrick into the trance while he's mid-swim. Patrick is sent shooting out of the water, where he meets the same fate as those before him.

This was all enough to open the third gate in the middle of the lake, moving Vecna one step closer to destroying the town. Vecna is not secretive about his plan. Nancy Wheeler is not one of Vecna's originally intended victims, but he chooses to show her his plan by putting her into a trance and sending images into her head as she tries to escape the Upside Down.

This is when he shows her his entire plan, and his plan for the future, Hawkins being completely swallowed by the Upside Down, which is traumatic for Nancy. Deserved. He also gives her directions.

I want you to tell her everything you've seen. Which explains why he let her live. Stranger Things was created by a pair of identical twin brothers, Matt and Ross Duffer.

Their main villain, Vecna, has sort of a twin as well, and his name is Freddy Krueger. Freddy is obviously known as one of the all-time great horror villains, who attacks his victims in a dreamscape while they're asleep. It's very similar to how Vecna lulls his victims into a trance-like mindscape, where he torments them by altering what they see.

After giving them a good chase, he goes for the kill with his giant claw of a hand, much like Freddy, who slashes his prey with a razor claw glove. Both characters have deformed faces as a result of the town that shunned them. Freddy was set on fire, and Vecna was electrocuted during his banishment to the Upside Down.

They also both share a connection with a boiler room. The boiler room is where Freddy took his child victims in life, and Vecna manipulated a young Eleven by taking her to the boiler room, where he tricked her into setting him free. During a fight, Freddy and Vecna were both killed by a boiler room.

During his kills, Vecna's targets can be seen levitating in the real world, before being twisted and contorted in painful ways. It brings to mind the death of Tina Gray, the first to go in A Nightmare on Elm Street. On top of all of that, Robert Englund, the original actor to play Freddy Krueger, also plays Victor Creel, making the idea that Vecna is descended from Freddy Krueger kind of a literal one. While Vecna is carrying out his plan in Hawkins, he needs a safe place to house his physical body in the Upside Down.

As we've seen with Eleven, in order to use the Astral Projection ability, you need a place to completely disassociate. For Eleven, that may be a sensory deprivation tank or a pizza freezer. The problem is, this can leave the physical body vulnerable to attack.

So Vecna creates an environment in the quiet attic of his childhood home, or at least the upside down version, where he taps into the vines, suspending him in midair, giving him easy access to the hive mind. As a result, the vines running all over the house act as an alarm system, so nothing can attack him without being attacked by all of the monsters in the Upside Down first. Nancy and Robin may not have known it yet, but Vecna's reliance on negative memories is both his strength and weakness. He uses my memories against me, but only my darkest memories. Same with Chrissy and Fred, right?

Right. It's like he only sees the darkness in us. So I'll just...

Run in the opposite direction. Run to the light. And maybe you won't be able to find me there.

Well, he does. Their group is no match for Vecna in its abilities, but lucky for them, they know someone who is. No, no, no, it's Eleven. Despite being physically on the other side of the country, Eleven is able to astral project into Max's mind from the back of a far away pizza shop, which is a whole other side story that isn't relevant to my analysis of Vecna.

Max chooses the snowball dance that she attended in 1984 to escape to, as it's one of her happiest memories. However, Vecna finds her and turns the memory into a nightmare, complete with balloons exploding with blood. It looks a lot like the prom scene in Carrie meets the library scene in IT, which is fitting, considering it wouldn't be Stranger Things without a little reference to Stephen King.

Vecna goes after Max, and just as things look hopeless, Eleven arrives and throws Vecna off of her, leaving Max extremely confused."-Are you real? Did I make you?""-I'm real.""-How?""-I piggybacked from a pizza dough freezer.""-What?" Like I said, it's a whole other story. Eleven puts up a good fight against Vecna, but he's able to knock both girls unconscious. He takes them to the main lair of his mind-world place, straps Eleven against the front door of the Creel House with vines, and hangs Max against the spike, where Chrissy, Fred, and Patrick succumbed to Vecna before her, hoping to make her the fourth and final victim of his ritual.

The massive assault on Vecna comes from three different directions. The first is within the minescape, where Eleven has projected herself to try to save Max. The second is in Russia, where Jim Hopper, Joyce Byers, and Murray Bauman fight some of the Demogorgons that are captive there.

And the third takes place in the Upside Down, where Nancy, Robin, and Steve are en route to try to destroy Vecna's body. But this plan backfires when the vines from the hive mine catch and pin them against the wall, slowly strangling them. The Vines are quickly becoming one of the most potent villains in the series. In the Mindscape, Vecna tells Max to remain very still, and that this will all be over soon, just as he had to her stepbrother the previous year.

He starts to consume and kill Max, just like his other victims, and as a result, her real body rises into the air, and her bones snap in horrible directions. But as this is happening, Eleven redoubles her effort, breaks free, and pins Vecna down as she had when she was a tiny child. Part of the reason Eleven is able to break free was because Murray Bauman attacked a horde of Demogorgons with a flamethrower just at that moment. Their storyline is mostly disconnected from Vecna to this point, but the Hivemind connects everything.

Sometimes it's an advantage, but sometimes it's a disadvantage, because when they feel pain, Vecna feels pain. This reaction of the Hivemind also causes the vines holding Nancy, Steve and Robin to be released. If you're warm, they're warm.

Put them outside! Now free from their trap, the young adult trio finds where Vecna is hiding in the attic and attacks him with fire as well. He attempts to run and fight back, but with Eleven pinning him down inside the Mindscape, he finds himself trapped, which allows Steve and Nancy to incinerate his physical body. The body falls out of the window, but when the group goes downstairs to confirm his death, he's gone.

Just as Eddie Munson's uncle had compared Victor to Michael Myers, Vecna disappears the exact same way that the antagonist of the Halloween franchise did. Although it appears that subject number one has taken another fat L at the hands of Eleven and her friends, that's when the fourth chime is heard, confirming that Max has died and opening the fourth gate. As he had always planned, Hawkins gets ripped apart by a huge fault line opening what appears to be a giant gate into the Upside Down. Vecna probably believed that he had won, that the town would be sucked into the dystopian dimension. But once again, he underestimates the power of love.

Eleven refuses to let Max die. She puts her hand on her friend's heart and channels her power to get it beating again, bringing Max back from death where she's suspended in a coma. It's almost the reverse of the way that Vecna kills. He uses telekinesis to squeeze his victim's organs, and Eleven uses hers as a telekinetic defibrillator of sorts. This seems to prevent Hawkins from completely falling into the Upside Down as Vecna had shown Nancy, but significant damage has been done.

At this point, we can clearly see that the moral of the story is not to move to the suburbs. But this story doesn't end here. At the time of upload, we're less than a year away from the final showdown in Stranger Things 5. For now, feel free to check out the playlist on the left for all of my other Stranger Things character analysis videos, and I'll be sure to complete my analysis of Vecna's story once we have its final chapter.

Make sure you don't miss it by subscribing to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ringing the deathbell for all notifications, and I'll see you in the next one. Assuming we both survive.

Transcript for:Henry Creel: Vecna's Transformation Journey

Transcript for:
Henry Creel: Vecna's Transformation Journey