“Stranger Things” Season 5’s official teaser trailer is here, previewing an epic showdown between the crew in Hawkins, Indiana, and the monsters within the Upside Down, led by Vecna.
Introduced as the series’ big bad in Season 4, Vecna is a grotesque, humanoid being with psychic supernatural abilities. But how he got that point is much more complicated, as explored in the play “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” which opened on Broadway in April 2025.
In the teaser for “Stranger Things” Season 5, which dropped July 16, Winona Ryder’s Joyce and David Harbour’s Hopper lead the group of teenagers in the battle against beings like the Demogorgon. Season 4, which premiered in 2022, notably ended with a gateway being ripped opened in Hawkins, leading to the Upside Down world. The final shots of the new teaser suggests Vecna himself will come through that barrier.
“Found you,” Vecna, played by Jamie Campbell Bower, says in the chilling final seconds of the clip that teases the series’ fifth and final season, which drops its first episodes in November.
Vecna was introduced as the series’ big bad in Season 4. It’s revealed his real name is Henry Creel, and his telekinetic abilities made him the first of Dr. Brenner’s test subjects. Creel is also known as One in comparison to Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven, a number used to specify their order as test subjects.
Henry Creel is also the subject of the “Stranger Things” spinoff play, which first opened on the West End in 2023 before also moving to Broadway in 2025. The play opens with Henry as he starts his semester at Hawkins High School. There, he meets a high school age Joyce, Hopper and Bob Newby and strikes up a friendship, and eventual romance, with Bob’s sister, Patty. Meanwhile, he has recurrent experiences in another dimension known as the Black Void, where he encounters Demogorgons and the Mind Flayer.
While the play is a prequel, it was written to fit in with the established canon of the show, the play’s writer Kate Trefry tells TODAY.com.
“I was kind of given free rein from there, within the very specific confines of the material that exists already, and then what’s coming in Season 5, which is actually a pretty thin needle to thread,” she says.
Trefry was in the writers room at the same time as she was writing the play, so the stories are “really in such conversation with each other,” she says.
Ultimately, viewers can understand Season 5 without having seen the play, and people can watch the play without having seen the show, according to Trefry.
“But I’m really excited to get a chance for it all to be taken in as a whole, because it’s all connected,” she says.
“There’s so much connectivity that I can’t talk about but there’s so many Easter eggs on both sides, in the show and in the play, that are talking to each other and thematically, it’s just all part of a piece of the same story,” she adds.
One major revelation of the play is that Joyce and Hopper knew Henry Creel before he was Vecna. In fact, Hopper was on the scene of the Creel family massacre. During “The First Shadow,” Hopper and Joyce team up to try and prove that Henry’s dad, Victor Creel, was behind a series of gruesome animal murders haunting Hawkins.
In Season 4, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Steve (Joe Keery), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Robin (Maya Hawke) investigate the 1959 Creel murders and realize that it wasn’t Victor at all, but Henry, and they slowly connect the dots between him and Vecna. While this was happening though, Joyce and Hopper were in Russia.
“The sneaky thing that we had going for us with Season 4 is that anyone who knew about Henry Creel from the past … is sequestered in other plot lines,” Trefry explains.
“So we have the opportunity to say, they knew about this, and yet they were not available to the teens who have to make the discovery on their own,” she adds. “But it’s all really a Jenga tower.”
And as deep as “The First Shadow” dove into Henry’s origin story, there’s still more to mine in Season 5, Trefry says.
“It was really working the fundamental origin story of Henry and building that into its own complete story, which was the luxury of doing an origin story, of saying you don’t have to know who this person is to understand this story,” she says. “This is the beginning, and there’s more that you’ll find out in Season 5 about that beginning.”
For now, the show is only running on Broadway or the West End.
โI think one of the things that was really important to Kate (Trefry) and the Duffers (Matt and Ross Duffer) and Shawn Levy was how do we bring the same emotional and sensory experience that draws you into an episode when youโre watching it into the theater,โ says Josh Simon, vice president of consumer products at Netflix.
Simon, whoโs helped bring to life other โStranger Thingsโ experiences like the merchandising of fictional brands from the show or the global โStranger Things: The Experienceโ tour, says after establishing the “First Shadow” theatrical experience on Broadway and the West End, the question now is: โHow do we think about being able to create that same level of spectacle in a way where we can bring it all around the world?โ
Simon says the goal is for “as many people around the world to be able to experience it,” but there aren’t “imminent plans” for it.
“Right now, it’s such a unique theatergoing experience, it leaves so many people wondering how do we do some of the things that we’re doing,” he says. “And I think that’s just an element that we really want to preserve.”
