Horror legend Robert Englund made a special appearance in Stranger Things 4, playing the murderous character Victor Creel. He was certainly an interesting character, but he wasn't featured for very long, leaving many questions about Victor left unanswered. Leave it to Englund to now step in to fill in some of those blanks.
In a new interview with Collider, Englund shared the story about how Victor was blinded. The Freddy Krueger actor believes Victor felt so remorseful that he couldn't save his family that he blinded himself as a result, feeling too "blind" to see the dangers posed to his family until it was too late.
“Victor’s guilt is certainly about the fact that he wasn’t able to save his family. Could be that he was in denial about Henry. It could be that he was, and this is the metaphor that I use, blind to what was going on and that’s why he blinded himself. Oedipus slept with his mother and blinded himself. Victor didn’t see the evil in his son and it cost him his family and he blinded himself. That’s an academic essay that you could turn in in film school about Stranger Things and Victor Creel. And I use a little bit of that. I use a little bit of Ben Gunn for some reason came into my head, from Treasure Island, the old blind man that tells Jim Hawkins, the boy, the backstory on Long John Silver."
It's a tragic backstory, but Englund added that he isn't sure there's any room for redemption with this character.
"I don’t know whether it’s appropriate for Victor to be redeemed. He made the terrible mistake in World War II, the baby died, a family died. He called in a shelling of an innocent farmhouse. And whether or not he sensed anything wrong with his son that he could have acted upon as a strong father and stopped and prevented with the dead animals or anything else, so it could have been some of that.”
Robert Englund Teases a Return in Season 5
Perhaps some more answers about Victor Creel will be explored in the fifth and final season of Stranger Things. Englund pointed out how the fourth season set up a way for Victor to return in season 5 to have his ultimate fate revealed, though whether that ends up happening or not remains to be seen. As Englund puts it:
“But the other thing is that I believe Vecna has a line, I don’t know [if it’s] Nancy walking in the sort of Salvador Dalí underworld Upside Down and you hear Vecna talking. I think it’s to Nancy, and he talks about me. He says, you know, ‘Oh, Victor. Old grumpy Victor. Never got back to him. Maybe I should. I’ve been so, so busy.’ So I don’t know what that means. Is he gonna kill me? Does he want to punish me more than I’ve already been punished? I don’t understand what that meant, or if they feel they need to pay that off. There’s so many loose ends that have to be resolved in Season 5.”
Stranger Things 4 is streaming on Netflix with the second batch of episodes set to premiere on July 1, 2022.