A new live-action vision of Hellboy will be coming to our screens soon, a franchise reboot called Hellboy: The Crooked Man that has been directed by Crank‘s Brian Taylor from a screenplay by Chris Golden and Hellboy comic book creator Mike Mignola. We saw a new trailer for the film during the San Diego Comic-Con, and while we’re still waiting to hear of a release date, Taylor took a moment to tell the folks at GamesRadar+ that he approached this film the same way he would approach a Stephen King adaptation.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man will see Hellboy and a rookie BPRD agent stranded in 1950s rural Appalachia. There, they discover a small community haunted by witches, led by a local devil with a troubling connection to Hellboy’s past: the Crooked Man. In the comic, The Crooked Man was an eighteenth-century miser and war profiteer named Jeremiah Witkins who was hanged for his crimes yet returned from Hell as the region’s resident Devil. The film has been rated R for some violent content, language and nudity.
Hellboy is played this time around by Jack Kesy, who played Black Tom Cassidy in Deadpool 2. Kesy is joined in the cast by Jefferson White of Yellowstone as Tom Ferrell and Adeline Rudolph of the Netflix Resident Evil series as Bobbie Jo Song. According Hellboy.Fandom, Tom Ferrell is a character from the comic books who “was born around 1923 in the Appalachian mountains near the Hurricane (an area locals try to avoid) to a mother we know little of and his father, Charles E. Ferrel, who had a habit of drinking in the back woods. His early misadventures with witchcraft led to a self-imposed exodus.” Tales from the Collection adds that the story will introduce parapsychologist Bobbie Jo Song, who is tasked with delivering a spider to the BPRD but must seek Hellboy’s help when things go awry. Together, they travel to Appalachia to take on the Crooked Man, who has been sent back to Earth to collect souls for the devil.
Millennium Media producer Les Weldon told us this is “a true, dark, DARK, in the style of the comic book take on it. There’s no gloss that any of the other films had. There’s a methodical pace and a real creepiness to it.“
While talking to GamesRadar+, Taylor agreed, “It’s a horror story, it’s a horror film – it’s very simple. I took to this like, ‘This is an adaptation. I’m adapting the story the way I would adapt a Stephen King story, it’s all there in the texts. I’m just gonna execute it with as much love and care as we can.’ I think fans of the original comic book are gonna love this. I know already like there’s people online who’ve seen the teasers and things like that and they’re like, ‘This is the comic.’ That’s what we want.“
Are you looking forward to Hellboy: The Crooked Man? Are you glad to hear that Brian Taylor considers this to be a horror film, and that he took the “Stephen King adaptation” sort of approach? Let us know by leaving a comment below.