The next day, Max made herself vulnerable to Vecna's influence as a part of a plan to attack Vecna, turning off her cassette player while inside the attic of the Creel house. With Lucas watching over her, she began hallucinating again, and Vecna stalked her through her mind once more.
Going into Volume 2, Max was alive, but she was still marked by Vecna. So, when the Hawkins gang decided they needed someone to act as bait, Max volunteered. At the agreed-upon time, she removed her headphones and allowed Vecna to enter her mind, where they (and Eleven) waged battle.
However, within the red smoke of Vecna's Mind Lair, it wasn't the song itself that saved her, but the memories it conjured up. What broke through to Max was the happy, loving memories of her friends, particularly Lucas and Eleven, and these were what truly allowed her to break free of Vecna's grasp and escape.
After focusing on positive memories, Max braced herself and pulled at a vine in Vecna's neck, causing him to accidentally release her from the vines' grasp. As Max dashed towards the window, a disgruntled Vecna regained his composure.
While intending to get his revenge on Eleven and Brenner, Vecna also goes after victims who have dealt with traumatizing experiences in the past (reminiscent of his childhood and his time at the Hawkins lab).
Vecna draws power from sad and angry memories and that is the main reason he targets traumatized teens. Those teens are a well of power just there to be absorbed. This is not just a theory, Vecna himself told Eleven about the power that angry and sad memories hold.
Vecna's first big credited kill was Chrissy Cunningham (Grace Van Dien). He followed that murder with canonically terrible driver Fred Benson (Logan Riley Bruner) and basketball star Patrick McKinney (Myles Truitt).
Vecna holds off Eleven long enough to brutally attack Max in his signature style—she levitates, her eyes go white and bleed, and he snaps her limbs. Eleven regains her strength and pushes Vecna off before he can complete the job, but the damage is already done.
Played by Jamie Campbell Bower, each prosthetic was glued to his skin with medical adhesive by prosthetics designer Barrie Gower and his team. For the finishing touch, Vecna was covered in "glossy slime to make him really, really glossy and wet looking," according to Gower.
Patrick was targeted due to his father's abuse of him. Finally, Vecna targets Max for her trauma from witnessing Billy's death and uses Barb's (Shannon Purser) death as a way to use Nancy.
Though they're clouded with cataracts, Vecna in Stranger Things has both of his eyes.
As Vecna, he uses these mental abilities as a way to psychologically weaken and lure in his victims – much in a way that Pennywise, Freddie Kruger, and Pinhead do. (All of which have been cited by show creators the Duffer brothers as inspirations for the villain.) But he does have a surprising weakness: music.
Once he takes control of the mind, he traumatizes them by showing the visions of their dark past. He takes them to unknown places and gives them a glimpse of himself. The pain of his victims doesn't end here. Every single one of his victims experiences nose bleeding and severe headaches as well.
Vecna's obsession with time appears to be linked to his hatred of humanity. He views time as a human imposition on the natural world; an attempt to impose order on nature.
Vecna feeds off his victims' trauma and haunts them with their own darkest thoughts.
She breaks free, momentarily incapacitates Vecna, and runs with the determination to live toward her friends, dodging debris that Vecna throws in her path. Max hurls herself through the portal, awakes from the trance, and is held by Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin).
Joe Manganiello's character Arkhan fought against Vecna with the adventuring party Vox Machina in the web series Critical Role. He then stole the Hand of Vecna and replaced his own hand with the artifact.
He reveals what looks to be a tracking device implanted in his neck. As a thanks, Eleven uses her powers to remove the chip, which leads the orderly to reveal his true identity as 001. 001 was born Henry Creel, the son of Victor Creel (played by A Nightmare on Elm Street's Robert Englund).
In episode 7, Vecna is revealed to be Henry Creel (played as a youngster by Raphael Luce), the son of Victor Creel (Robert Englund) and his wife Virginia (Tyner Rushing) shown in the 1950s flashbacks.
“Dear Billy” is a phenomenal episode and in the moment has an air of finality. Max has escaped Vecna, so she is safe from Vecna.
Tragically, Vecna succeeds in killing Max, though she's shortly resurrected by Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) — or is she? Vecna doesn't just kill, he consumes his victims, absorbing the essence of their minds and souls. Max, who lies in a coma, might have a pulse, but, as Eleven discovers, her mind is empty.
This gave Eleven time to piggyback into her mind “from a pizza dough freezer.” Unfortunately, Eleven wasn't strong enough to defeat Vecna and Max didn't escape unscathed the second time around. Vecna broke Max's limbs and blinded her before she heartbreakingly “died” in Lucas' arms.
What was Chrissy's Trauma? Chrissy's life appears to be free from flaws on the surface, but in reality, she is struggling terribly to conceal her depression and self-image stemming. She was struggling with these issues, which resulted in her developing an eating disorder due to her mother's verbally abusive comments.
Ultimately, it is revealed in Stranger Things season 4's finale that the reason why Vecna was killing Hawkins teenagers was to create a massive gate that merges the Right Side Up with the Upside Down - and he specifically needed four bodies to do so.
In simple words, Vecna needs a total of four gates to take over Hawkins and rule it. Now, you must be thinking, why is Vecna killing people if he can take over the complete Hawkins? Well, in one of the previous episodes, it was revealed that with each person Vecna kills, he creates an opening to the real world.