DIY Vecna/Henry Stranger Things 4 Costume

Intro: DIY Vecna/Henry From Stranger Things Season 4 Costume

Stranger Things is an incredible Netflix series that harkens back to a more innocent time in cinema - the 1980s, and the characters therein reflect the show’s creators’ reverence for this same time in America. This DIY Instructable is an homage to practical special effects artists (like Stan Winston) and the most recent villain from Stranger Things Season 4: the Puppet Master himself -Vecna.

SPOILERS AHEAD: Without giving too much away from the most recent season, the character Henry is cast out into the Upside/Down and horrifically transformed by blood-red lightning into the vine-infected Vecna (portrayed by Jamie Bower). His transition is punctuated by both physical and emotional pain because he was vehemently rejected by his only metaphorical kin Eleven (actress Milly Bobby Brown) and because of this, my costume design weighed heavily on me for weeks prior to starting the final build. I also had to consider that Henry, much like Pennywise the Clown (from Stephen King’s IT), lay dormant in his domain until he felt it was the proper time to strike and/or to complete his journey from human to God-king of the Upside-Down. The team that created Vecna masterfully captured the final phase of his tortured transformation - trying to recreate this same build would have been foolish (financially and artistically), instead I chose to both honor the Stranger Things’ Special FX Team’s creation, as well as offer a phase of Vecna’s metamorphosis that did not make it to film. It was also more cost-efficient to create this version rather than creating a body cast of my son, hire a team of artists and then spending 10-12 hours slathering my son with latex and makeup on Halloween morning.

As mentioned in the Supplies List, “…an understanding Spouse” is a rarity, and a Hollywood-scale budget (on a public school teacher’s salary) is very difficult to justify to any rational adult. So - let’s heat up our hot glue guns, gather our favorite paintbrushes, and clear some space in our ever-shrinking garage, because we’ve got some work to do.

Vecna Mask - $20 (I actually was able to purchase this for $10 because of a survey that I completed for a Car Dealership - they gave me a $10 Amazon Gift Card.)

Creality CR-10 S 3D printer (about) $300

White roll of PLA Filament $25-32 a Kilogram

Bone Finger STL file from CULTS of 3D

Acrylic paints 48 for $30

Various brushes for $12

Ryobi Rechargeable Hot Glue Gun $30 (or a cheaper wired version for $24, but now your bound to the length of your cord(s))

3-5 Glue Sticks

Pipe insulation about $4 for a six foot length (3-4 in total)

Fixed Blade Razor Knife about $4

Hot Air Gun $30

2mm high density foam $28 a roll

10” Scissors $25

2” Blue Painter’s Tape $29 for a pack of six rolls

Stockpile Cardboard - the largest sheets possible

A VERY Understanding Spouse (get one of your own, you can’t have mine)

I am an educator by trade, and spontaneity not only makes me break out in hives, but takes two weeks to plan. All of my projects begin as sketches, and with the advent of the iPad I can now actually find all my great ideas in one cloud-based place rather than on scraps of paper. I currently use an app called Good Notes (at time of purchase: $9.99) to house all of my sketches, detailed/annotated drawings, and images of progress/thought.

Organizing prior to creating is the most cost effective way to do anything of merit, and it is also easier to justify expenditures when you can present your ideas, in graphic form, to your financiers or significant other. The rough sketches offered below are my first ideas for the Vecna costume. The prototyping stage often requires actual materials, and with planning (did I mention planning?) you can decide what you need and when.

Remember to make your costume both durable and comfortable. In our haste to make something cool we may forget this simple mantra. My son likes to wear these same creations for an entire day of school during Homecoming week; his costume must be ready to walk the crowded halls, as well as sit in an industrial quality desk chair for 50-80 minutes at a time - depending on the schedule for the day.

The fingers for Vecna's left hand took about 30 hours to print, and an additional 10 hours to assemble and detail across two or three days. I purchased the STL file from Cults3D.com for about $5 - which given the time that this creator put into his/her genius design, was absolutely worth the purchase. Recommended print specifications: no supports, standard quality, with the finger pieces standing upright. I used Dollar Store Crazy Glue Gel to hold the finger pieces together, but be warned - crazy glue doesn’t instantly bind to the PLA, and not nearly as well as it glues to your skin. I would also have some nail polish remover nearby for just such an occasion. You will have to tape the PLA printed fingers closed across their seams, and let them sit overnight to ensure that there is a strong bond; hot glue was too dense for gluing the fingers.

SCALE MODEL (not today): Given the dimensions of this costume it would have taken me more time to create a scale model than make a torso mannequin with a foam wrapped head - which is shown in the images attached.

SKETCHES/ANNOTATED IMAGES: To compensate for my lack of artistic ability I instead chose to grab screen captures of the actual Hollywood costume and then annotate the images. The two slides that I have attached here show the original Vecna (Jamie Bower), the clay model, the painted latex suit, and a morph suit that I found on Amazon.

Life lesson: A Halloween costume that you have to explain is a terrible costume.

As a Maker you have to live on the edge of your skill level, and expect to make mistakes, and possibly change course when your methods do not match your means (what you can afford). Vecna’ s key elements are: his burned skin, bare bone nose, his left hand’s disproportionate fingers, and the twisting vines that have seemingly layered over the major muscles in his neck area ( sternocleidomastoid muscles are the most pronounced in the front of his neck). If you can capture these signature features then the average viewer will forgive what your costume may lack, but be wary not to get so focused on these elements that your final product looks more like a caricature than the source material.

I realized when leaning into the second and third iterations of the head and torso builds that Vecna looks a lot like the DC character “Swamp Thing”. Since this character is more popular, and has existed in both comic books and cinema for years I now had more references for the chest and shoulders of Vecna. For copyright reasons I don’t think that I can include any images of Swamp Thing, but an instant on Google and you’ll see the uncanny similarities as well.

After failing at a number of attempts of sculpting (from scratch with moldable EVA clay and buying a Vampyre mask that I wanted to modify with my old CPAP machine hoses, I opted for an actual rubber Vecna mask. *** The only issue with any full face rubber mask is the overwhelming smell - give yourself weeks-to-months of time for it to off-gas before wearing. ***

Eventually I will learn to sew, which is a rather necessary skill for Makers, but given my work schedule, and the fact that I’m the Alfred to my son’s Batman (driving him to various practices, performances, and work) I don’t think that this will ever happen - so in the meantime, we have a pile of bandaids, burn cream, and a large box of hot glue sticks.

WARNING: Hot glue will absolutely give you nasty long-term reminders of your recent project. When working with this material, have a clean work space, uninterrupted time to work, and above all else, be patient and look where you place your glue.

THE VINES: needed to look like they organically grew from Vecna’s flesh, folding one atop the other, seeking a food source, not just like they were haphazardly glued there. This initially proved difficult to capture, even with the many photos I found of the actual costume. Necessity is the mother of invention - while removing a rather tenacious shrub in my backyard, the tangled root system caught my attention, and later found its way onto Vecna’s chest and neck area.

I primarily used hot glue in this project for creating the red veins on Vecna’s chest, binding some of the vines to the shirt, the material swatches to the holes in the pants, and adding sinew to the knuckles on the “Hand of Vecna”. Barge Cement was used to glue the EVA foam to the inside of the shirt. The 2mm foam had to be softened with a hot air gun prior to gluing it to the insides of the shirt; when the EVA is raw (unheated) it tends to pull against the forms that you create. Trust me, put the time into bending the foam under heat, let it cool, and then work with it.

I also used hot glue to bind the individual vines to the 2mm EVA foam in the torn areas of the shirt: Barge cement for EVA to shirt and hot glue for the vines to the EVA foam.

Versions 1-3:

The original designs for my Vecna/Henry costume were made from mattress foam, and wrapped around the wearer, and in truth, I could have finished this project months earlier if I didn’t dread seeing my son in the Florida heat looking more like a melting snowman than a happy teen in an elaborate costume. I so liked this version of the costume that I went back to working on my costume cooling system, but alas time was running out and All Hallow’s Eve was but weeks away.

Versions 4-6:

As I mentioned before, planning, planning, and some more planning. Even though the previous designs were a miserable failure, I still had more than enough materials for versions 3-6. The ultimate design was greatly pared-down for both overall weight, comfort, and how cool it would remain for the wearer. The cotton button up shirt was an old shirt from school, the remnants of pipe insulation were long enough to cover the chest, a small portion of the back, the neck area (the most important for the overall look of Vecna/Henry), and I had more than enough 2mm foam for the exposed parts of the shirt. There is an image above that shows how I marked off the areas of the shirt where I wanted the vines to erupt from underneath the material. I also included before-and-after images of the shirt and EVA foam with and without paint.

THE MASK: has excellent detail, but my students convincingly argued that the mask needed shading to really emphasize the wrinkles of burned flesh. I used a technique that yet another student taught me, called dry-brushing. You must first paint your base color(s), which the mask already had, then you scrape a small amount of paint across the raised areas of your object. The base coat(s) provides the crease colors, and the top coat offers whatever effect you were hoping for; honestly, each time that I have used this technique I have been pleasantly surprised. The vines use this same technique with a deeper (more purple red) was used on the vine and then a black and purple mix (1:2) was stippled onto the rounded edges leaving a faded centerline of the red exposed. This makes the vines look more pronounced against the colored flesh of the EVA beneath. Please look the video links offered above for my YouTube shorts.

Looking back at this tutorial, it seems like this project wasn’t that difficult: just buy a cool mask, get an old shirt, cut some tears into it, glue in some EVA foam, cut some pipe insulation into pointy vines and then glue them onto the shirt; dry brush some paint everywhere, and you’ve got yourself a cool homemade costume. Well yes, that’s true, and you may also be from the same camp as those who wondered, “Why didn’t Frodo and Samwise just ride the eagles to Mount Doom to destroy the ring?”

My answer is a simple one: it’s the journey that makes us a Maker.

YouTube link to videos of Vecna/Henry costume stages, my "Yard Vecna", DemoBat variant (with sounds),and other cosplay costume DIY Instructables coming soon!