It explains his deep connection to key Season 5 locations and the pivotal date of November 6. (Image: Netflix)
Hawkins’ battle isn’t over yet, and the answer to stopping Vecna may be hidden in the past, not the future. The Broadway and West End play Stranger Things: The First Shadow serves as a major prequel, connecting Henry Creel’s backstory to Season 5. Created by writer Kate Trefry, it reveals frightening details about how Vecna got his powers and what he fears most.
The First Shadow definitively answers a long-standing question: Henry Creel was not born with his abilitiesxc. The play shows that when Henry was a child, he vanished for twelve hours into the Upside Down. After returning, he was completely different—now holding dangerous psychokinetic powers. This trauma warped him, causing him to hurt animals and later kill his mother, Virginia, and his sister, Alice. Before dying, his mother handed him over to a young Dr. Brenner, paving the way for the horrors of Hawkins Lab.
In Season 5, Volume 1, Max discovers that Henry is deeply afraid of a specific cave. The First Shadow provides the chilling reason: this cave is the very spot where the young Henry first vanished into the Upside Down and was taken over by the Mind Flayer. The play indicates that the cave contains stolen technology from the Philadelphia Experiment, a project that Brenner’s own father was involved with. This connection suggests that the Mind Flayer may have been manipulating Henry from the very beginning, making the cave a ground zero for the evil that infected Hawkins.
One of the play’s most explosive revelations involves the source of the test subjects' powers. According to The First Shadow, Henry Creel’s blood was given to Hawkins Lab children through transfusions. So Eleven, Eight (Kali), and several others might carry Vecna’s blood within them. This creates a powerful twist, implying their abilities are tied to his, and their last showdown will force them to confront a piece of their own identity.
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Fans know November 6 as the day Will Byers disappeared, but The First Shadow shows its importance decades earlier. SThe story unfolds in 1959 during a chaotic school staging of Oklahoma on November 6, the night Henry loses Patty and is sent back to Hawkins Lab. This date becomes a key point of doom, suggesting that Henry’s attacks on Will and others decades later were driven by revenge linked to his past. The Duffer Brothers have said Season 5 will reveal “why Will was chosen,” and the play gives the main clues.
