Stranger Things’ New Big Bad Is Named After Classic Dungeons & Dragons Villain

Stranger Things is introducing a new big bad for Eleven and her friends to face, and he’ll share a name with another classic Dungeons & Dragons villain. Earlier today, Netflix dropped a brand new trailer for the upcoming fourth season of Stranger Things. While this series will feature plenty of mystery and horror, one of the biggest surprises came with the reveal of a new enemy, a humanoid creature with glistening pale skin and an empty nasal cavity. The new creature warns someone that “your suffering is almost at an end” in the trailer and seems to be a new entity tied to the Upside Down. 

Both the Mind Flayer and the Demogorgon were named after classic Dungeons & Dragons monsters, and this new entity also draws its name from D&D lore. IGN notes that the new enemy is named Vecna. Vecna is a famous lich and one of the most iconic Dungeons & Dragons villains, with roots in the earliest parts of the game. The iconic Eye and Hand of Vecna were legendary artifacts that first appeared in Eldritch Wizardry, an early supplement to Dungeons & Dragons. While the artifacts appeared in several early D&D rulebooks, Vecna himself didn’t appear until 1990 in the famous adventure Vecna Lives! At the conclusion of that adventure, Vecna is banished to Ravenloft, but made appearances in multiple other adventures. More recently, Vecna appeared in the finale of Critical Role and has appeared in the animated The Legend of Vox Machina as The Whispered One, an undead deity trying to cross over into the Material Plane. 

While both the Demogorgon and the Mind Flayer were depicted via CGI, the Duffer Brothers note that Vecna is mostly practical effects and was inspired by the likes of Freddie Kruger and Pinhead. “Something else we really wanted to go back to Seaseon 1 and actually do a monster that we could do mostly practically,” Ross Duffer said in his interview with IGN. “What you’re seeing here is 90% practical [effects]. And Vecna, throughout the season, is 90% practical. We wanted a presence on the set that our actors could react to, whereas in Season 3, they were reacting to a beach ball. We wanted something there that we could actually film, and I just think that that makes this villain scarier and more real and tangible and we’re just really excited for people to see him this season.” 

Stranger Things Season 4: Part 1 debuts on Netflix on May 27th. Part 2 will debut on July 1st.