When Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer set out to make the fifth and final season of the Netflix series into what they called a 'mega movie,' VFX supervisor Betsy Paterson says her team knew the workload ahead would be enormous. Speaking with THR, Paterson noted the show's overall budget was expanded for the final season, which required 'way more shots than are normally done on a two-hour feature.'
Despite the heavy visual effects workload, Paterson says the production leaned on practical builds first, later enhanced with VFX, to keep the show grounded for its young cast. 'No matter how crazy this stuff gets, you are really seeing it from the perspective of these kids who are in the real world,' she said. 'We're always building things for the actors to interact with.'
Two standout examples were the membrane wall inside the Upside Down and the liquefying room at the Hawkins National Lab. 'We built a big chunk of that membrane wall for Hopper [David Harbour] and Eleven [Millie Bobby Brown] to climb on,' Paterson explained, while the melting room where Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) become trapped used real goo wherever it touched the actors or set.
The Upside Down had an established visual identity from four prior seasons, but the newly introduced Abyss, also called Dimension X, had to be built from nothing. 'There was some talk about possibly filming it in the real desert,' Paterson said, but production logistics ruled that out. Instead, the team scanned locations and gathered reference photos so 'the rocks and the geography looked like a real place and not just a kind of mystery CG world.'
Vecna's (Jamie Campbell Bower) noticeably slimmer appearance in season five sparked social media jokes comparing him to someone on Ozempic, but Paterson said the change reflects the character rebuilding himself after Eleven nearly destroyed him in season four. Unlike earlier seasons, when Bower wore full practical prosthetics, the team turned more to digital effects this time. 'He is now much more monster than human, and he has caused that to happen. He created himself, really. So that's what we're seeing with all the vines and the way they move — you can see the blood going through them,' Paterson said, calling it 'an immediate signifier of how much more powerful he is now.'
Vecna's alliance with the massive Mind Flayer was fully revealed in the final battle. 'They wanted him as big as we could possibly get, but at a certain point you can't film it. And it's just so ridiculous that he would even notice the kids, much less get defeated by them,' Paterson said. After extensive motion and animation tests by Weta FX, the team settled on the creature's final scale.
Paterson said the season's toughest sequence wasn't a monster at all, but the opening scene featuring a young Will Byers, played by Noah Schnapp, who was 11 when Stranger Things premiered in 2016. 'I felt so much pressure in that scene because we all know what he looked like,' she said. Because Will is largely absent from season one after being kidnapped early on, the show lacked a deep archive of young Schnapp footage. 'Weta was able to take every bit that we could find: outtakes, every press photograph, walking on the red carpet. They used all of it to build a young Will that looked like Noah,' Paterson said. Young stand-in actor Luke Kokotek had his face digitally replaced to appear as a season-one-era Will.
The finale's destruction of the Upside Down behind Eleven, along with the demolition of Hawkins High and the Wheeler house, got special attention despite being one-time-only shots. 'Normally we try not to put too much detail into shots that are only going to be seen once, but it was worth it for that scene,' Paterson said. 'It was a lot of fun going frame by frame and spotting all the little stuff that they built just to have it be destroyed.'
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Photo: John Phelan, CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
