An Original Stranger Things Script Reveals A Different Motivation For Henry Creel
This post contains spoilers for Stranger Things" season 4.
In "Stranger Things" season 4, Henry Creel (Jamie Campbell Bower) dons several identities over the years. Starting off as a soft-spoken aloof young boy with a fascination with death and decay, Henry goes on to become Dr. Martin Brenner's (Matthew Modine) patient zero — dubbed 001 — and this path only exacerbates his darkest desires and the need to reshape the world as per his desires. Young Henry's motivations are not rooted in trauma or circumstantial tragedy, but in an acute awareness of his abilities that supersede those of other people, as well as a deep sense of apathy for the world around him. While Henry's time with Brunner only serves to heighten his loneliness in a world unable to accommodate his desires, his eventual turn into Vecna results from greed, hubris, and the need to play God in an alien, lawless realm with monstrous entities.
What's most interesting about Henry's storyline in season 4 is the way it is recounted, where parts of memories surrounding the Creel House are strung together to create incomplete pictures that are fleshed out with added context down the line. At first, a young Henry appears innocent, especially with the allegations surrounding Victor Creel (Robert Englund), his father, who is accused of murdering his own family during the spring of 1959. As the core gang tries to piece together the past, it is soon revealed that Henry was the one who framed his father on purpose, and committed the murders simply because he wanted to. However, the original script for season 4, episode 7, "The Massacre at Hawkins Lab" (via Deadline), paints an even darker picture of Henry, where he is etched as more ruthless in his motivations to kill his family, harboring darker, more apathetic feelings towards humanity.
A chilling sense of apathy
The script proceeds to flesh out Henry as the quiet, aloof child he is introduced as in season 4, who is seen playing with black widows in an attempt to find companionship. However, these harmless hobbies are marked with ominous undertones when juxtaposed with 001's monologue, where he talks about the strong devouring the weak to establish balance in the ecosystem. Henry's kinship with the spiders is an acknowledgment of his status as the silent predator, capable of killing his prey without outright displays of strength, such as when he kills a rabbit slowly while being "fascinated by its suffering."
In the show, Henry's need to kill his mother is precipitated by her awareness of his powers, and his growing need to control the nature of reality itself. As Henry was already able to halt time, he was fascinated by the nature of his raw strength and tempted to dig in deeper. This leads to the unforgettable dinner sequence, where the Creels are traumatized after Mrs. Creel twists up in the air and dies after her limbs contort (later revealing a smirking Henry, who wipes off the blood from his nose). However, the original script does not include this motivation at all. Here, this act happens on a whim, as Henry simply intended to test his powers to see how far he could push himself, and killed his mother as dispassionately as he tortured the rabbit months earlier.
In the script, Henry regards his mother's dead body with "cold fascination," as it makes him realize that each life he takes makes him stronger. Mrs. Creel's death was originally meant to be a sudden whim of a child eager to taste godhood, but the show adds more depth to this terrifying turn of events.
Adding more layers
The lack of specific motivation behind the murder in the script adds an interesting spin to how Henry navigates his powers in relation to those closest to him. In both the original script and the show, Henry is cold and devoid of empathy, capable of covert manipulation in situations that are deliberately designed to make him appear as a victim. However, it is difficult to decide whether Henry's lack of motivation behind his killing spree makes him more unstable or not. On the one hand, the cause-fueled murder makes his hubris more macabre, and on the other, his decision to kill his mother on a whim makes him more dangerous than someone who is moved by personal motivation.
There is a sense of lawlessness in the original interpretation of the character, and the show grounds Henry to an extent by providing him with a quantifiable emotion to tether his demons. Still, the fact that Henry killed a loved one even though she was able to sense his very soul — something he claimed nobody was ever able to, which added to his sense of alienation — proves that empathy was something Henry never truly wanted. Although Brenner broke him by treating him like a guinea pig for his experiments, no amount of tender understanding could have stopped Henry from evolving into the man he eventually became. Even when nobody wronged him, Henry was filled with apathy to the brim and only got more drunk on his power as the years went by.
The end result is Vecna, a terrifying monster who kills innocents just to "balance" out the ecosystem, with plans to unleash literal hell on Hawkins just to satisfy his need to prevail. This time, the gang is up against true evil, with the world's fate at stake.