Fans of the Hellboy movies may find a different character than the one they’ve come to know on screen in the upcoming Hellboy: The Crooked Man, but comic book fans should feel right at home. Far from the high-stakes superhero action of the first two films directed by Guillermo del Toro, or Neil Marshall’s gritty 2019 reboot, The Crooked Man takes Hellboy back to his roots as a supernatural investigator. Set in Appalachia in the 1950s, the folk-horror-inspired story finds Hellboy teaming up with a cursed World War II veteran to save the soul of a young witch, and eventually an entire community, from a mountain-dwelling demon. Working alongside co-screenwriter Christopher Golden, who has written several Hellboy comics himself, Hellboy creator Mike Mignola finally got a chance to adapt the character for the screen as he’d always envisioned him.
In an interview with The A.V. Club, Mignola talked about the process of bringing this version of Hellboy to the screen for the first time, and how The Crooked Man will be different from the three previous films. “This is going to sound so much like movie hype, but I will say this time they got it right, at least from the creative perspective,” Mignola says of the new film. “I’ve never seen something that is that close to my work. I mean, with del Toro, at the beginning he said, ‘There are some things I don’t think will work as a film.’ And I said, ‘I did it my way, you do whatever you want.’ Because I always want to respect the filmmaker, whoever that is, and you don’t want a filmmaker trying to second guess material they don’t understand. So if that means they’re going to bring some of themselves to it, that’s fine. In a very real way, my version is the books.”
When it came time to develop The Crooked Man, Mignola wanted to move away from portraying Hellboy as a hero and toward the everyman he once was. “The superhero version isn’t in the comic,” he says. “It certainly isn’t in that comic. There’s a wonderful period before Hellboy finds out that he’s the Beast of the Apocalypse and things get too gigantic and epic. So, since we’re dealing with time before that, it’s much more cut-and-dried, simple. ‘I’m just a regular guy and I’m running into another regular guy and I’m sort of a demon and he’s sold his soul to a witch, but we’re just a couple of regular guys dealing with a worse than usual day.’”
This isn’t the first time Mignola has worked on a script for a Hellboy movie, but it is the first time he’ll be credited as a screenwriter for one. He wrote a first draft of a script for the most recent installment, 2019’s Hellboy, but the project was later handed over to Andrew Cosby, who ultimately received sole screenwriting credit. This time, Mignola was directly involved throughout the entire production. He worked closely with director Brian Taylor to bring The Crooked Man to life as faithfully as possible. “You can adapt the books in a lot of different ways. Everybody has their own personality to add to those books. I just think this time Brian and I meshed in a certain way, and apparently he didn’t come with his own agenda. In the past it’s either been del Toro or another screenwriter who’s done a sort of pick-and-choose of favorite characters, favorite scenes, and they’ve cobbled something together. And we just really just stuck as much as possible to The Crooked Man. And that made a huge difference, because we knew the beginning, middle, and end, what this story was.”
In fact, Mignola and Golden’s original script for The Crooked Man deviated even more from the comic story than the final version. For example, expecting negative feedback from the studio about the 1950s setting, they updated it to present day. It was Taylor who convinced them that it had to be a period piece, as it was in the comic. “Yeah, there was the anticipation of studio notes,” Mignola says. “And one of our first conversations [with Taylor] was him saying, ‘No, no, no. The original story takes place in the ’50s. Let’s take it back to the ’50s. The music of the ’50s will work. We’ll swap a scene that had an airplane for a train.’ And it gave it so much more personality that hopefully the comic had but we had taken out.”
Hellboy was supposed to reboot the franchise, bringing in David Harbour after his success in Stranger Things to replace Ron Perlman in the title role and taking full advantage of an R rating to make it darker and gorier. But its failure with fans and critics alike instead left the big red man’s future in Hollywood uncertain. The Crooked Man once again attempts to take Hellboy in a new direction, but this time it aligns more closely with his creator’s vision. “This was kind of always the way I thought a Hellboy story should be treated,” Mignola says. “It should be small. And if it went on for a million years then you’d build to a bigger and bigger movie. But my favorite Hellboy stories are these kind of small one-story-at-a-time adventure stories. So if we get to do more like this, that would be my choice, to do these standalone adventure stories.”
As for whether there will be more adaptations like this to come, Mignola is taking it one film at a time. “Yeah, I don’t believe we have an after-credit sequence that teases the next one [laughs]. Nothing like that.”
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