Here's How They Filmed The Most Gruesome Death Scene In "Stranger Things 2"

You know the scene I’m talking about.

WARNING: There are lots of Stranger Things 2 spoilers ahead, so turn back now if you haven't finished it.

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OK, so you know that Bob Newby (Sean Astin) is the best new character of Season 2.

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And that he saved the day in Episode 8...

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...only to be tackled and eaten by Demodogs in what was easily the most gruesome Stranger Things death yet.

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HE DESERVED BETTER. But regardless, we chatted with Christina and Paul Graff, who headed up visual effects this season, about how they filmed Bob's big death scene.

"First of all, we were shocked. We were as shocked as you when we read it," Paul Graff told BuzzFeed News. "But the Duffers were very firm about this storyline."

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"When you do a creature, basically everything is [computer graphics]," Paul Graff explained. "It’s one thing if you put a creature in a shot somewhere, but it’s a whole different ball game when you have a creature that’s heavily interacting with the actors."

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Since the Demodogs, ya know, attack and then eat Bob, they needed some sort of stand-in for the scene that they could erase later and sub in with the Demodog computer graphics.

"You have to shoot and there’s no creature there, so you have to figure out," Graff explained. "We want all the interactivity, but we want to have the least amount of body in the frame. We’d like to have an invisible person doing the interaction, but you can’t do that, so you try to get it to the smallest possible footprint."

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Originally, they were going to use a real dog as a stand-in, but then Stranger Things 2 writer Kate Trefry volunteered to step in. "She’s really muscular, just the right size, and had the enthusiasm. So we put her in a black ninja suit and had her lay into Bob. We knew we had something when we saw Kate’s hands all full of blood, glistening in the light," Graff laughed.

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For the even more horrific overhead shot of Bob being eaten by the Demodogs, there weren't any stand-ins pretending to east Sean Astin. Instead, they used a couple of poles with tennis balls on the end to poke and prod the actor.

"We were basically pushing and shoving his body around so there’s some actual physicality to the way he’s being moved, rather than moving himself," Graff said. "There’s just a pole with a tennis ball on his belly shoving him around."

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So the next time you're watching Bob's horrific death scene, just think of Sean Astin being affectionately prodded in the gut by a tennis ball, and be (a little) comforted.

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via BuzzFeed/Travel

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