'Stranger Things' wanted to make 'Vecna on steroids' for Season 5. Here's how they did it

This article contains spoilers for Season 5, Volume 1 of “Stranger Things.”

If anyone visited Jamie Campbell Bower in the days before he secured the role of Vecna in “Stranger Things,” they might have been disturbed by what they found.

Bower had spent that period “kind of going crazy,” studying the audition materials he had been given — a scene from the series (with fake character names), one from the 1996 film “Primal Fear” and one from the ‘80s horror classic “Hellraiser.” He then crafted a whodunit-style vision board, pinning printed images of iconic movie villains onto his walls. He latched onto Doug Bradley’s Pinhead and incorporated Voldemort, Nosferatu, Dracula and images from “The Shining,” “Insidious” and “The Prince of Darkness.”

Bower had essentially made a shrine to villai