A 'Gross' Prop Stranger Things Used For Will's Body in Morgue Break-In Scene
Since the first ever episode Stranger Things has been keeping viewers on the edge of their seats as they follow a group of middle-school friends who become embroiled in a series of supernatural events after one of their friends, Will Byers, disappears without a trace.
Four seasons later, fans have seen their fair share of horrifying creatures, gruesome character deaths, and epic battles thanks to the show's special visual effects, which they have been nominated for awards for.
One of the creepiest scenes featured Hopper investigating Will's alleged death and performing an autopsy on his body. This moment involved no special effects, but instead, a hyper-realistic rubber dummy made to look exactly like Will that made appearances both on camera and behind the scenes.
The scene in question is dark and tense as Chief Hopper pulls out a body in the morgue and removes the white cloth draped over it to reveal Will. He may have looked like he was just sleeping, if it weren't for the fact that he was ghostly pale and looked cold and veiny.
And if the imagery of young Will lying dead on a metal table wasn't enough, Hopper then gets what appears to be a scalpel and pushes it into his detailed, real-looking skin, starting from his belly and slicing up to his chest, but no blood comes out. Instead, Hopper finds that he/it is filled with stuffing, and not a real body, confirming his suspicions about Hawkins Lab trying to cover up the truth.
When actor David Harbour who plays Hopper was asked about his experience with the dummy, he said, "It was hard to cut and felt super gross."
The rubber dummy used for the morgue scene was so realistic that the show's creators, the Duffer Brothers, used it to prank the mother of the actor who plays Will, Noah Schnapp.
They showed it to her in a dark closet, and apparently, she loved it, after she got over her initial shock.
The scene featuring Will's fake body doesn't come close to the gore and horror factors of other moments in the series like Chrissy Cunningham's Season 4 death where her arms and legs were snapped and eyes pulled into her skull, but the thought of cutting into the lifelike but lifeless rubber version of Will Byers would certainly freak anyone out as it did David Harbour.